He Bought Me Then Broke Me

Not everyone accepts their fate as easily as I did.

From a very early age, I knew I was born to be sold into someone’s ownership.

I saw it happening to others all around me. My brothers and sisters, the others who lived nearby, on the lower levels.

Then one day it was my turn.

Still young, I had barely had a chance to live a few months there with my family before the man came and saw me.

His eyes showed his interest and he wet his lips, pulling me from my kin and inspecting me like I was already his possession. If my mother could have spoken, I’m sure she would have called out, screaming at him:

“Take your hands off my child, you beast of a man!”

But it was already too late.

He walked away with me in his arms and brought me to the woman who owned us all. She surveyed the man with a shrewd eye, judging his worth and denying his attempts to haggle for my life.

Regardless, the man knew what he wanted and walked out of the store with me as his new belonging. His new possession to show off to his friends.

Once he got me home, I realized he was not a kind man. Or a good man.

He ruined my face the first week, tossing a cup of coffee at me, “accidentally,” according to his words. Then, a few days later, he left me out in the sun, locking me outside the house in the backyard. I was so dehydrated by the time he finally came out to get me that I couldn’t say a word, not that I had said anything to him yet anyways. I chose to remain silent out of protest and anger.

Finally, the last straw happened yesterday when he wrecked my spine, the big imbecile! He mumbled something like an apology as if he hadn’t meant to do it, his hands too strong for their own good. But it didn’t help me.

Now I’m bent and broken, cracked and weathered from the sun, my jacket stained from the coffee he threw at me.

But eventually the monster was finally done with me.

He’s found some other fresh young thing to torture, now that he’s used me up.

The new purchase he’s brought home this time has a shiny red sticker on her jacket, reading 50% off.

She’s a hardcover, just like me. Except her jacket is new and shiny, unstained by coffee. Her pages aren’t dogeared like mine, her spine isn’t bent and broken.

His phone rings and he throws her unceremoniously onto the coach, where she lands splayed open with her pages bent and twisted.

“Psst, hey. Hey, you,” a voice says, and I realize it’s the abused new book.

“Yeah,” I call back, and read the cover, beneath the 50% off sticker.

The title reads: Gone Girl.

“What do you say we teach this sonofabitch a lesson?”