Prologue
It was always quiet when Joe wasn't there, but there was a deadness to the quiet today. Seventeen-year-old Sirena stood in the entrance holding the door to the trailer open behind her. He was often gone when she got home from Jefferson High she reassured herself, but she knew today was different. She sensed it this morning in his attitude and his blank face. In the fact that he didn’t get angry when she took too long in the bathroom. He wasn’t going to have to put up with her tardiness for much longer.
When her eyes had adjusted from the bright Florida sunlight, she walked into the hot, musty room. The door slammed with a tinny echo. Joe didn't like having the windows open; it brought in too much noise. Sirena slipped the straps of the backpack down her sleeveless arms and dropped the pack on the card table so that she could unzip it. Her long fingers immediately found the small plastic-wrapped body. A ragged fingernail split the bag open, giving her access to the hollowed out shell. Earlier in the day she had sliced the trunk open. The heart had still been beating, pulsing, with a liquid shine that felt smooth and wet. Quickly she had gutted the body, the idea that it could awaken frightening her. She had snipped the artery to the heart first then removed the other organs. The stomach had held an intact beetle-like insect which had recently been ingested.
Sirena squatted down on her long, tanned legs to dig out an old coffee can from under the sink. Once the can was nearly full with a mixture of water and bleach, she turned on one of the two burners and placed the can over the flame, adding to the heat in the small trailer.
Picking up the empty hulk, she used tweezers to flay more of the skin from the skeleton. At the sound of boiling water, she dropped the tweezers into the sink and gently placed the frog's skeleton into the water. Not much meat was left on the bones, but she needed to loosen the remnants. She pushed a strand of dishwater blonde hair out of her eyes. After lowering the flame, she leaned against the sink and watched the liquid do its job. It was important to remove the carcass before the connecting ligaments broke down. Mr. Meyer's assignment called for displaying and labeling an intact skeleton of a frog.
At the precise moment of readiness, she used an old pair of ice cube tongs to lift the skeleton out of the can. While switching off the gas, Sirena lowered the skeleton onto the paper towels already in the sink. Once the frog was stripped clean, revealing a white, smooth skeleton, she ceremoniously laid out what was left of her experimental frog inside a makeshift coffin--a cookie box.
Should I say a prayer? she wondered, but there were none that she could remember. Instead, she apologized to the dead creature and tucked the flap into the cookie box. Later she would seal the bones with clear nail polish.
Sirena saw Joe's dresser in her peripheral vision and couldn't stop herself from turning to look. Each drawer was open a crack. She hadn't expected it to be otherwise. Taking a step forward, she stopped, afraid to look inside the drawers, afraid of what she would not see. Joe and she had struggled to carry the beat-up maple dresser from the Salvation Army store to his rusted blue pickup, and when they got home, it almost didn't fit through the trailer door. But that had been at least a year ago after she had run away from home. A tear mingled with the sweat on her cheek, and she brushed both away impatiently.
Going back to mom and dad was impossible. Her mother was incapable of protecting Sirena from the black eyes and welts her father frequently administered. No. Joe had been her Christ, her savior. He had held her in bed, caressing and loving her sweaty body when the nightmares swept through the dark, hot nights. His anger had only recently surfaced when she had refused to make any more videos.
The cracked wooden handles bit into her fingers as she pulled the top drawer open. Empty. The second held only lint, several paper clips, and a dessicated roach. But the third contained her first video, the one that had proved to be popular in Joe's friend's catalog. Abandoned like she, it lay at a tilt until the drawer fell to the floor. The black plastic case bounced and seemed to center itself on the plywood.
A few minutes later Sirena watched her fifteen-year-old self on a thirteen-inch screen. An adult male with acne-scarred skin stripped her body. Perhaps it had not been in the same way she had butchered the frog, but he had killed her childhood. As her breasts were mauled and her orifices invaded, her soul bled.
With a background of grunts and moans, Sirena opened the cookie box. The frog was still with her. He couldn't leave or harm her. His bones were solid and strong. She would pass this term with the best grades ever. Joe couldn't support her. No. He had told her that she would have to kick in for the household expenses. That was why on the screen her eyes reflected fear and her face winced in pain.
"But you don't need to take anything from me." Her finger pad skimmed the surface of the skeleton. "You'll always be with me." She smiled. 
