Geometry of Shame
Copyright© 2025 by Danielle Stories
Chapter 2: Scissors and Silence
The moment Dad finished his glacial survey of my sisters and fixed that final, thin smile on me, a smile that felt less like approval and more like a cattle brand pressed into my skin, the room began to curdle. His exit was a study in condemnation: heavy, deliberate footfalls, the definitive click of the front door latch. He was going to stand vigil before his ruined Mustang, to commune with the ghost of his shattered masterpiece. I was left holding the searing imprint of his gaze, a designated survivor in a war I hadn’t fought, flush with a nauseating, unearned privilege.
Mom, a statue of compressed anguish, finally moved. Without a word, she walked out. The temperature seemed to plummet fifty degrees in her wake.
A strange, fragile normalcy, born purely of shock, descended. It was a lie, and I clung to it. Mechanically, I went back to eating. The Sugar Smacks were a sodden, tasteless mush in my mouth. Claire and Megan, moving like sleepwalkers, drifted to the refrigerator. Claire opened it, stared into the bright void, and closed it again. Megan reached for the bread, her hand trembling so badly the plastic bag rattled a frantic percussion. Ashley, sniffling, reached for a bowl to have what I was having, a pathetic pantomime of a regular morning. My own participation in this charade filled me with a creeping shame. I was eating. I was breathing. I was clothed. Each was an act of betrayal.
The door swung open, and Mom filled the frame. That look was on her face.
The world didn’t just pause; it shattered and re-formed into something obscene. The air itself seemed to ignite, the earlier heat now a physical, oppressive weight pressing the oxygen from my lungs. In her hand was an object of alien, brutal geometry: the heavy-duty rotary cutter from the cavern of her sewing basket. I knew it instantly, not by name, but by the primal, cellular flinch that electrified my sisters. Their faces drained to a sick, waxy translucence. Their terror was a contagion, and I caught it, my heart hammering a frantic protest against my ribs. My eyes traced its horrible anatomy: the cold, cylindrical handle, the single, viciously sharp circular blade lurking beneath its guard. A blade designed to annihilate layers, to part denim, leather, and fate like tissue paper.
Her fingers were clenched around it, tendons standing in stark relief, knuckles bone-white planets in a clenched, violent solar system.
A glacial front moved through the room, absolute and silent, extinguishing all warmth. The air turned to polar ice, each molecule a razor-sharp crystal that stabbed at my throat with every attempted breath. My spoon, forgotten, slipped from my numb fingers. It struck the rim of my bowl with a CLANG that wasn’t just loud; it was a seismic event, the final, foolish note of a world that had just ceased to be. The sound echoed my own internal collapse.
Mom’s eyes, usually the warm brown of weak tea, were flat and hard. She looked at Ashley, frozen with a bowl clutched to her chest like a shield. “Ashley,” Mom said, her voice calm, surgical. “You first. Stand up in the middle of the kitchen.”
Ashley made a small, animal sound. The bowl slipped, hit the linoleum, and shattered. The pieces were ignored.
“Megan, Claire.” Mom placed the cutter on the table. It landed with a soft, final click that sealed the room’s fate. “You will use this to remove the filthy evidence from last night. All of it.”
Her gaze swung to Ashley’s slept-in shorts and t-shirt. “Start with those. Reduce them to scraps. Not strips. Scraps. Unrecognizable.”
She let the command hang, then turned back to Megan and Claire. “Once Ashley is standing in nothing but the shame she earned, you will turn the cutter on each other. Then,” she continued, her eyes gliding between them, “Ashley will assist. You will leave nothing but a pile of fabric trash. A monument.”
The logic was as brutal as the act: enforced complicity. Each would be both executioner and victim. And I, I was to be the audience. My face burned with the preemptive shame of watching.
Claire’s face contorted. “Mom, you can’t.”
“I am,” Mom interrupted, her tone permitting no argument. “You can do it here, with a measure of privacy, or your father can do it on the front lawn. Choose.”
The fight left Claire in a visible slump. Megan, ever the pragmatist, even in hell, picked up the cutter. The blade wheel spun with a soft, deadly whirr. She looked at Ashley, whose tears were now a silent stream. “I’m sorry,” Megan whispered.
“Just do it,” Ashley choked out, closing her eyes.
The process was grotesque, slow-motion violence. Megan, with Claire numbly holding a section of Ashley’s shirt taut, guided the blade along the seam. The sound was all wrong, a crisp, slicing zzzip. The fabric fell away. Ashley flinched at every touch, every cool pass of the metal near her skin. I wanted to vomit. I wanted to scream. I did nothing but stare at my bowl, the patterns in the milk swirls a desperate anchor, my ears roaring with a humiliation that was not my own yet consumed me utterly. I was a coward, witnessing a massacre and worrying about my own clean hands.
They worked in a terrible, focused silence. Soon, Ashley stood in the center of the kitchen in nothing but plain white cotton panties, arms crossed tightly over her chest, shoulders hunched forward in a futile attempt to disappear.
“Those, too,” Mom said, her voice cracking just once on the syllable.
Ashley sobbed, a raw, ragged sound, but nodded. She looked at Megan with beseeching eyes. Megan, her own face a mask of shared horror, made quick, efficient cuts. The panties joined the pile. All of you pull off the shoes and socks, it’s trash.”
It was the final, devastating detail, the completeness of the stripping. Ashley, Megan, and Claire took off their sneakers, peeled their socks from their feet, leaving their feet bare on the cold linoleum. She stood there, fifteen years old, utterly exposed, trembling so violently her teeth chattered, and all I could do was divert my eyes. I know the sight was an assault. I dropped my eyes, but the image was scalded onto the back of my eyelids.
Then Mom looked at me, and my body turned to liquid shame.
“Sam,” she said. “Get a trash bag from under the kitchen sink. Get down on the floor at her feet and gather the scraps.” She paused, letting the command curdle in the frigid air. “While you’re at it, begin getting used to seeing your sisters that way. Do not look away, look at their bodies.”
The order was a bolt of lightning through my core. I was to be the custodian of their humiliation, the garbage man of their dignity. My compliance would be the final seal on their degradation. But a deeper, more private horror unfolded within me: a terrifying, shameful flicker of relief that it was they on the floor, and not me. The guilt for that relief was instant and corrosive.
But Mom wasn’t finished. “Sam, before you do that,” she amended, her gaze distant. “Go up to my room. On the dresser in Claire’s room. There’s a box of OB tampons. Bring it down. Ashley is on her period.”
The addition of this specific, biological reality was a masterstroke of horrific intimacy. It wasn’t just clothing she was stripping; it was every last veil of privacy, every boundary of bodily autonomy. My task was now an errand of profound violation, as I couldn’t even look at my sisters while hearing them crying and weeping. I moved up the stairs, my legs foreign, leaden appendages. To fetch the box was to participate in the unveiling, to make myself an instrument of this monstrous exposure.
I returned, the small rectangular box a weight of pure shame in my hand. The silence from the kitchen was now the thick, charged silence of an ongoing atrocity. Megan and Claire had swapped places. Claire, now shirtless and pale, was cutting Megan’s jeans. Ashley, naked, as looking away from what I wasn’t supposed to see, was mechanically cutting the sleeves from Claire’s shirt. A mound of colorful fabric scraps, the dismembered skins of their former selves, grew on the floor.
All three of my sisters were in various states of undress, a jigsaw puzzle of vulnerability laid bare for my unwilling eyes. I held out the box. Mom took it without looking. “Thank you, Sam. Now get the bag.”
I stumbled to the sink, pulled out a large black plastic bag. The crinkling sound was obscenely loud in the hushed room. I got down on my knees, avoiding their eyes, focusing on the linoleum as my hand gathered a handful of soft, sliced cloth still warm from their skin and shoved it into the black mouth. My cheeks were on fire. My ears roared with a blood-shame so profound I felt dizzy. I was, as instructed, getting used to it. And the part of me that could get used to it filled me with self-loathing.
“Enough,” Mom said. The cutting had stopped. Claire’s simple white bra was the last flag of normalcy. Mom held out the open box. “Ashley. Now.”
Ashley looked at it as if it were a live snake. She shook her head, frantic.
“Push that tampon in,” Mom instructed, her tone clinical. “You don’t have the luxury of privacy. This is part of the lesson. Manage it.”
“Megan,” Mom continued. “Use a scrap. Clean up the blood.” She pointed at a small, dark smear on Ashley’s inner thigh.
The command was so barbarically intimate it stole the air from the room. Megan flinched as if struck. Then, moving like an automaton, she bent, snatched a flannel scrap from the pile, a piece of her own pajama shirt, and dabbed at the smear, her face averted in an agony of shared disgrace.
“Claire,” Mom said. “Show her how.”
Claire’s jaw tightened into a stone line. She took the box, pulled out a tampon, and stepped toward Ashley, who shrank back. “Look at me, Ash,” Claire said, her voice low and surprisingly steady, a lifeline in the abyss. “Just look at me. Don’t think about anything else.” She guided Ashley’s fumbling hand. “Find the place and push.”
Ashley was crying in silent, body-wracking shudders. The process was quick, a matter of terrible seconds. When it was done, she let out a choked gasp that seemed to come from the center of the earth.
Mom nodded, a curt, awful gesture. “Good. Now finish.”
Megan picked up the cutter. The zip of the blade severing the back strap of Claire’s bra was the loudest sound in the world. It fell. The final cuts were swift, impersonal. Their remaining undergarments, then their socks, joined the pile.
I was still on my knees. The scrap Megan had used, a small, stained square of blue flannel, lay separately. Mom’s eyes fell on it, then on me.
“Sam. Everything.”
Swallowing a gorge of bile, I pinched the stained fabric between my thumb and forefinger, my skin crawling, and stuffed it deep into the bag with the rest of the ruins. The geometry was complete. Three points of raw, exposed humanity. I was the fourth point, the clothed witness, the kneeling accomplice, holding the proof of their annihilation in a crinkling black sack.
“Take it out to the trash bin. Now.”
Grateful for any escape, I scrambled up, clutching the heavy, shameful sack to my chest. I fled into the Michigan summer, the shocking heat of a world impossibly normal. I threw the bag into the bin. It landed with a final, hollow thump. I stood, gulping air that felt clean but couldn’t cleanse me. The horror was inside the house. And I had to go back in. My feet were blocks of cement. To return was to re-enter the shame, to willingly step back into my role as the sanctioned observer. Taking a shuddering breath that did nothing to steady me, I turned from the sane, sunlit world and stepped back into the ice.
The familiar hum of the refrigerator was absent, swallowed by a profound, heavy quiet. The air was now scented with tears, sharp sweat, and the lingering ozone of trauma.
My sisters had dispersed to the edges of the room. Ashley was pressed against the fridge, arms wrapped tight as if holding her very self together. Megan faced the window, her back a rigid, tense landscape. Claire stood by the table, hand on a chair back, chin lifted in brittle defiance. Three statues of pale, exposed flesh in our everyday kitchen.
“Sam,” Mom’s voice came from the sink. She was rinsing the cutter, the water a mundane obscenity. “Are you still hungry? Your sisters are making breakfast.”
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