Picture Story- Draft 1

I can read, yet illiteracy fills my life. Reading is what gave me joy and happiness. This everyday ability changed my life. It gave me hope in a time of fear. It gave me fear. A knock on our door in the Paris slums didn’t bring me out of my absorption in my new book. My siblings can’t read, I was the only one that bothered to pay attention in school. I only went to school for three years, since I was not the eldest child and a girl. Yet, I was the only one of my six siblings that enjoyed school. For my birthday each year, my siblings saved their measly salaries that they earned working at the hardware store and went to the bookstore. They picked out a book in which they liked the picture on the cover. An odd assortment of novels have flowed through our small cardboard box home as a result. Nevertheless, I have devoured each one. My mother yelled from outside “ELIZA, GET YOUR SKINNY REAR OUT HERE, NOW!”
Still stuck in gracefully strung words, I dawdled out to the front. A tall, well dressed man stood amidst broken beer battles and my dwarfish mother in her worn light pink floral night dress. A beer battle identical to the product of the pieces on the ground was in my mother’s hand, nearly drained. The visitor’s appearance is not what made him stick out, it was his smell. He smelled of premium liquor, a smell I would grow to hate, while everything else reeked of cheap gas station beer. My mother finished off her beer with unusual vigor. Lacking her normal lethargic, slurred speech, she proudly announced that I was getting married to the sticking-out-like-a-sore-thumb man. I didn’t learn his name until our wedding night two weeks later.
Jack Lire was a prominent socialite who attended party after party, drank drink after drink, schmoozing with different important people, one after another. All of his money had come from inheritance after his father died. His father, Bartholomew Lire, had founded an electrical company. Being a smart business man with a lot of luck, he sold the business right before it crashed, and ran off with the money. One year later, he was found dead, a bullet through his heart. Jack got the money and the story never hit the news stands. Now, feeling like Eliza Doolittle, I thrown from the slums to the famous Parisian lifestyle. My family made off with a little money, which went towards beer for all, not just my mother.
Jack didn’t just smell like liquor the day he came to claim me. He smelled like liquor every hour of everyday. Anger was the married companion to Jack’s drunken behavior. Alcohol and abuse were nothing new the elite class of Parisians. The people in Jack’s circle claimed to have never seen Jack without a mistress. He had been married five times as well as different dates to each party, sometimes more than one in a night. Each wife had come to a mysterious fate. Their deaths never made it to the newspapers stands. Jack’s friends convince themselves that the five victims left Jack because of his drinking. Everyone knew that women were never given that opportunity in the late 19th century. I looked at pictures that lined the house. Different women, different hair colors, different eye colors, all had the same desolate expression in their eyes. Stricken with fear, I retreated to my bed chamber, which was the size of my gloriously small home in the slums which I missed dearly now, to live in a fictional story. Minutes later, Jack pushed through the door. His eyes were bloodshot, veins protruding from his forehead and balding head. “You can read?” he cried, words tinted with alcohol. Shaking under the comforter, I felt cemented to the bed. A chair hit the wall. The pieces lay on the floor, like the pieces to a child’s jigsaw. For fear I might end up like the chair and the previous five wives I simply nodded. As if an ice storm had come, the raging mania that had caused Jack to succumb to violence diminished. Suddenly serene, he sat down on the bed next to me. “Will you read to me?” he asked so quietly I wasn’t sure if I had understood him. “I do not think you will like my book. It’s Little Women.” “Read anyway.” I feared another outburst, so I flipped the tired pages back to the beginning and read the story of the four sisters.
I would like to think that reading was the answer to everybody’s problems, just as it had been for me. Alcohol and violence still lingered in the mansion. The couple never left, but gradually became less and less intrusive. We still went to parties constantly, but they too became less of shock than the first few. Yet, I always felt out of place, even at the mansion. I never called it home and still occasionally yearned for the slums and my family, who I hadn’t seen in years. The books were the only semblance I had of my previous life. Whenever Jack would get the protruding veins and bloodshot eyes, I would quickly retreat to the comforters like a mouse and place a book at the foot of the bed. As a one person war slowly demolished everything in the house, the only peace treaty was fiction.