Chapter 11: Attempt at a Description of Her in Prose

For a time it seemed like Dick was the only one in the world that Anika loved. Was this because he was the only one that could love her in return? For really, there was nobody else. All the way up through her teens she seemed to inspire immediate loathing in everyone she ever met: her sisters, her parents, her teachers, the other kids at school, their parents, the pastor and congregation of the Maranatha Christian Reformed Church they attended in Lethbridge.

I heard tell that once when she was in the first grade, and therefore naught but seven or eight years old, her teacher--Mrs. Stelpstra--had Anika come to the front of the class, turn, pull down her pants and receive four smacks of a long wooden ruler on her naked bottom. The infraction that prompted this? After being refused leave to go to the washroom, Anika had gone anyway, because she did not want to wet herself. You think this would have inspired a sense of solidarity in her classmates. Instead it set off a wave of snickering. Everyone there, perhaps even Anika herself, somehow thought the humiliation deserving.

Even as I write this, I can't help but feel the same way. The only thing I can say in my defense is you just had to have met her.

The main thing, I think, was that she seemed, well, perpetually dirty. It wasn't just that she didn't bathe regularly or that she wore the same clothes all the time or that, because of those two habits, the smell of the farm clung to her like an incubus. The dirtiness she exuded seemed to have its origin in her soul. It's a terrible thing to think and worse even to say, I know. But I could not shake the notion that if she wasn't the incarnation of a demon she was the reincarnation of a rat. For starters, it was a combination of her hair and skin. Her hair was dun-colored, dry and stringy, and kept perpetually short and straight. It looked as if she'd be bald by the time she turned thirty. As if this didn't set her off enough from her flaxen haired sisters and brother, she also didn't share their fair skin. Hers was a strange dusky shade that, again, gave one the impression of ground-in dirt.

In general, then, her difference from Dick and the rest of the family just could not not be noted. Like many others, no doubt, I wondered occasionally if she might not be the product of an unsanctified union. The only problem is that certain features of her face--her nose, her cheekbones, the set of her eyes--plainly bespoke that she was her father's daughter. No, as much as both parents would have it otherwise, she was theirs. And they held that against her too--for in her very being she seem to express some truth about them that they'd not have paraded so freely about.

Chapter 10: Retraction

I must apologize for the poem. I really don't know what possessed me to try to relate my first words about Anika in verse. I haven't hazarded poetry for years, and it shows. It's an example of the lowest kind of poetry--boring prose chopped up into "free" verse. Besides that, the thing fails to convey even a single image. I really feel awful. I can't fathom what possessed me. I have seen possessed humans before and never thought it could happen to me. But what's done is done. There is no taking it back. The only way forward is through a swamp of shame.