Flash Fiction: "The Girl With the Green Velvet Ribbon"
By Chelsea E. Rotunno | "There’s been a story going on about me for many years ... my head falls off when the ribbon is untied. I need to explain something to you. It's not my fault."
"The Girl with the Green Velvet Ribbon"
Flash Fiction | 755 words | By Chelsea Rotunno
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I am the girl with the green ribbon. I have long brown hair, brown eyes, and a wide, sad smile. My friends call it the Joker smile. Like I’m smiling even when I’m not.
There’s been a story going on about me for many years. It’s a story about my green ribbon, and how my head falls off when the ribbon is untied. I need to explain something to you. It’s not my fault.
OK so I have two huge flaws. One, I never think anything is my fault. It’s not like I won’t admit it. It’s more like I’m oblivious. Two, I never think I deserve anything good. It’s trauma related. It’s my issues. My past. Where I come from. I’m scum.
But I’m not totally scum because I’m also very self-righteous. I try to do everything right. And then I scold people when they mess up, or when they have flaws that bother me. Or flaws that trigger my trauma.
I’m not a bad person. I just try too hard when I want to. And I don’t try at all when I don’t think I have to.
So let me tell you what happened.
I went in for a normal cleaning. My friend’s mom was a dental hygienist, and she was lovely. So happy. So friendly. She always cleaned my teeth—my decaying teeth. She cleaned them so well.
That day, she noticed something new had gone wrong on my gum line. “You have a bacteria hotel,” she said.
“Is that what that is?” I asked. I knew what she was talking about. My gums were receding, so much so that I could not keep it clean it anymore.
“That’s what I like to call it. It’s like a pocket for bacteria. It’s just gonna grow and grow in there.”
“What should I do?” I asked. Will it be like that — forever?”
“Yes, it will continue to grow. Sometimes a dentist can clean it out with this tool.” She held up the drill. “I could do it for you today. I’m not really supposed to . . . But I’ll do it just for you,” she said. “Because you have such a pretty smile.”
“Um, OK,” I said. “Thank you.”
As she came toward me with the drill she said, “I could lose my job for this. So don’t tell anyone.”
Don’t tell anyone? I thought as she placed the drill on the root. Her eyes smiled and squinted above her mask, and her gloves squeaked.
BUZZ. Clench. She lifted her hand. “Oh dear. There you go, dear. That should do it.”
“But, my . . . is it . . . OK?”
“Oh yes, it’s OK. It’s wonderful. It’s much better.”
She left.
When the dentist came into the room. Right away I asked him if it was OK.
“Does it look right? Did she do it right? She cleaned my tooth with the drill. But she had her hand on my neck . . . “
“Wait what?”
“I just want to make sure she did it right. The tooth with the bacteria hotel. This one. And is my neck OK? Is it supposed to be like this?”
He called her back in the room.
Tell her what you told me, the dentist said.
“The drill. The pocket. The secret I’m not supposed to tell or you will lose your job. That’s what I’m talking about. I just want to make sure I’m OK. Is everything OK?”
She did not speak. The dentist dismissed her.
I was worried but not too worried. She would never hurt me. Would she? It would be OK. Wouldn’t it?
That night, her daughter messaged me. “Traitor,” she wrote, before unfriending me.
What? What did I do?
Then I realized what had happened.
It isn’t my fault. It isn’t my fault.
She did this to herself.
That night, my neck began to sag, my head began to hang, sideways.
No one noticed it but me. I hid it well.
I found a way to hold my head up high. I found a green velvet ribbon, and I tied it around my neck. It hid the markings from what she did to me. It hid my mistake, her mistake, and the mistake of friendship. The mistake of having a pretty smile.
The thing is that I cannot go in to have it looked at or repaired. Because I deserve it. I deserve to have a severed head. I deserve to have everything held together by a thread. Me and my Joker smile. QUESTIONS:
Why do people who experience trauma feel like they have to hide it?
Why do we hide our scars and tell ourselves it’s our fault?
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Once upon a time I won a prize for a pumkin carving contest.
A decade ago.
