by Sandra Lowen

Created on: January 10, 2010

Novel Excerpts: Domestic Violence

ON THE WALL

Chapter 2:

…It was over, at least for now.

Elsa climbed out from under the bed. Reflections from the red-and-blue lights, softened by the blowing Valencia lace curtain, chased each other across the wall: back and forth, back and forth. She ran to the window.

Papa was there, clad only in shorts and the undershirt so appropriately labeled a ‘wife-beater’. She didn’t know where the name came from, but her papa must have; he beat Mama enough. He was a huge hulk of a man with an overhanging brow Mama called ‘simian’. She called him ‘ape’ and a number of other monikers at the height of their arguments. He hated being called names, and he’d shoot out a hairy side of beef of an arm and catch her upside the head to prove it.

He didn’t look much like an ape right now. Three big cops had him bent over the squad car hood while they searched him for weapons and drugs that he didn’t have. She couldn’t hear his words, but she knew those cops’ ears were probably sweaty from the words he was no doubt spitting out at them. Every now and again one of them would shake a baton in his face and mouth words that, judging from his bright red face, he didn’t like, because he’d raise himself up off the hood and yell something back until one of the cops shoved him back down again.

The ambulance blazed away as the cops forced Papa, still struggling against them, into the back of the squad car. Then the squad car flashed off, leaving behind only the neighbors, some wrapped in their bedding, some garbed in multi-colored bathrobes, to point up at the apartment and gesture.

No one remembered her, Elsa thought. She would be on her own until one or the other of them turned up tomorrow or the next day, which was fine with her, since she was now old enough to fake being cared for well enough for Social Services not to notice. She wondered who would come home first: her mother, once her bruises and broken arm healed enough for her to get released, or her father, once her mother went straight to jail from the hospital and bailed him out…

Chapter 7

“…I swear, I didn’t see anything,” Elsa told the detective. He glared at her and put his pencil away.

 “You were in the house,” he said. She nodded. “And they were in the house,” he said. Again she bobbed her head in agreement.

 “And you’re

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