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Little Shannon likes to cry

Opening her scabs to-night

Fall to pieces, back again

This is how her song be-gins...

And our scene opens with 12 year old girl.

Naked and shaking

in the basin of a bathtub with the shower turned on.

Tiny sobs that would cast shadow puppets on pink tiled walls

if only they had the strength to bear the burden of her escaping innocence,

She smells like

Texas Crude being poured over land mines by Iraqi children.

Trying to stomp out the flames, but

a bomb has just gone off in her guts. Her

eyes are still too frightened to shut

because she knows if she does, she'll see what she's become.

What he made her into.

Break the surface,

and she will cry the individual pieces of a thousand broken promises

and bleed the blood of a thousand broken hymens.

Push a little further,

and her childhood will be replaced with a laugh track from a sitcom

that nobody watches.

Push just a little further,

and her vocal chords will lose the ability to resonate the frequency

for God,

or Allah,

or Mommy...

Keep pushing

and Hiroshima has just reduced itself to a statistic in a history book,

easily broken down into figures and numbers of causalities

but what becomes lost...is her story.  It's

Whiskey bottles and sleeping pills. It's

hungry mouths and mortgage bills, It's

for every time that feels like the weight of the water against your face

is enough to collapse your bones into an ivory plaque cut into porcelain which reads,

"Here lies...nobody special"

Off in the distance,

an air raid siren hums its single note chorus

putting dents into halos

turning buildings to volcaones

flowing their lava through the streets of this city until they're knocking on her doorstep

Just one more bout like this,

and she'll open up.

Let it envelope her.

In perfect sulfuric midnight.

Keep pushing.

And she will cry ice cubes into plastic sippy cups

And bleed the alcohol necessary to fill the glass.

Keep pushing

Until her skin turns to razor wire

And her eyes swell up from the future fists

of the future boyfriends and husbands.

Keep Pushing.

Push until her tears turn to battery acid

And her blood turns to motor oil.

Keep pushing.

Push until the colors blur

Until the pages ignite

Until the maggots sprout wings and fly away

Push until you can't push any further.

Until her song is to be sung from the involuntary lips of steel guitar strings

and she cuts her way to freedom one razor blade at a time

but know that these scars you leave today will never completely heal.

They can just

Fade to Black.