Chapter Text
preface; (how not to hold a turtle)
Monika remembers being six at school, a class field trip to the aquarium.
It’s not surprising that she does, because it was probably the only nice thing that had happened that year. The aquarium had pond turtles and sea turtles and a turtle who was retired, said the guide with the bright blue aquarium shirt, and all the kids could gently touch.
Monika looked at the scars on its shell, ran small fingers over the raised, mangled bits, and didn’t wander away with the rest of the children when another guide started talking about clownfish.
Monika feels like a turtle with a broken shell. She doesn’t remember feeling like anything else, although she can faintly remember before she knew what to call her feeling - but no matter what, the feeling is there. Named or unnamed.
Naming it made it easier, though. It was nice to have a name for it. Monika would lay on her side in her shell, arms tucked around her face, knees tucked against her chest, and feel all her insides bleeding away out of her smashed, broken shell until she was empty and dry and dead and then everything was easy until tomorrow, because she was dead, and there’s nothing you can do to a dead thing that’s too mean or too bad. Some days she didn’t die at all, but all the cracks were still there, and drippy, and everything leaked out of Monika drip by drip by drip.
There’s probably better words for it, now that Monika is essentially finished with education and stealing her best friend’s guest bed, scientific words, psychological words that made apparent sense to more people than turtle shells - but it doesn’t matter because this doesn’t matter, because it can’t possibly matter or someone would have done something about it. Monika never tells anyone, anyway. None of her best friends, only friends, need to know about Monika arching her back under blankets, pulling them tight around her at eighteen-near-nineteen years old, squeezing her eyes shut and thinking about morbidity that would suit Yuri, wishing protection from a shattered, bloody, imaginary thing.
Monika was six at the aquarium, seeing baby turtles perched on bigger, intact shells - Monika was six at home, curled up under the bed and shaking and wondering what would have happened if her shell wasn’t broken.
The zoo was at seven, and animals worked their way into her inner lexicon, refused to leave as she grew taller and thinner and her shell was broken, always broken, and she supposed it didn’t matter (or at least she didn’t care). They never made it into her outer words, an easy task - puppets are dead things and Monika was very nearly always dead, so she could choose any words she liked. Smart words, proper words, flirty words, perfect words. Monika was twelve and a skeletal marionette and said everything right and was dead all the time. It was for the better that she was, because she remembers bleeding out from her shell, not sleeping, and thinking about the farm rooms at the zoo and the chicks and the mommy bird holding them under her wings, and trying to imagine a soft feathered mommy bird snuggling a broken turtle, too. Baby birds slept close to their mommy bird and woke up safe and not dead and Monika wishes.
Baby birds have shells for a very little bit, but they’re easy to smash and if you crack a baby bird’s shell, it’s dead forever, with no scars and no bumps. You smash it to death, then burn it, then eat it, and the mommy bird never knows where it went ever and never sees her baby bird again.
Monika tries to think and remember if her mother and father ate her.
Monika isn’t a baby bird, though - she’s a turtle, broken shell. Turtles’ eggs are soft and round, and she can envision sharp and manicured fingernails ripping one open and dropping out a baby turtle, weak and afraid and alone and confused, into a cold glass cage. She can envision how not to hold a turtle, can see the spiderweb cracks made by hard contact point with tile floor, can see crimson spots of blood dripping, dripping, and a disgusted noise in the back of her ears from the sight.
She can remember that shells can be fixed, that lots of special bandages and rest and care and love can make a shell bumpy, raised, and whole again;
But there isn’t much you can do, says the aquarium guide, for a turtle that’s already a skeleton.