Dirt

I was broken.

Your cold, hungry, dirty and waiting for death. You can feel the stench of the man next to you against your skin and you've given up wiping it away. The air is thick with the smell of burning flesh and you can't feel your hands, but you know your chained. Drifting from moment to moment your holding beauty and then groping for nothing, air. Torture ruined me, confessing broke my pact with god and burning, burning should be heaven.

My mother was sin made flesh, the neighbors would tell you different beccause their blind and ignorant. She beat us, my sister and I for being useless girls and not boys she could send to work, plane useless girls made to marry and be a different kind of slave, bed, home, burden. The boys she never had were never blamed and my father was kind. He made us wood carvings and taught us to ride horses untill my mother sold one and forbid us from the other. She made cakes and pies for market and sold them, the left overs she gave to the church to feed the poor, but only after filling the preists belly as he filled her with our youngest sister. Beating us raw sometimes I'd hold my sister beneath me untill my mother tired herself out and cried, huddled on the floor, with me and my sister burried in eachothers arms.

Life had killed her before her body had quit and I knew it. When she was younger her father had sold her to her uncle and he gave her as a gift of practice to his nephews. Using their auntie as a toy didn't flinch their morals, their parents were already disowned and she was nobody. She slept in the tool shed and only had the luxury of sheets when one of the boys was six inches or eight inside of her, crying the entire time. I hated it when she told me the story, because she haden't shared it with me she had scorned me with it. Yelling that I should be grateful that I wasn't my cousins w***e and that I would never know the angry hands of a man, but that was why my father was kind. He loved us so much, enough even to take my twelve year old sister behind closed doors. The day I walked in on them was the first day he broke my flesh, he never even used a whip, I don't remember hurting, only screaming. My mother drunk in the kitchen "shut-up", I closed my eyes, and took my beating. The flesh hung from my backside, resembling the hinges on the doors of our picture perfect home, our happy, one dimensional existance. I turned to God, or in any other sense, my God. Someone I knew was listening because he was inside of me, fighting off the demons of my youth and the demons of my mothers youth and the love my father shared with my little sisters.

I wanted to be brave enough, strong enough, bold enough to hold my head up high in public, build a sense of community, to hold a false sense of security and maybe, if I could hold back my willingness to run, fall in love. School was out of the question, my akward body and long dark hair, meant that courting for marriage was out of the question and for what other reason did a women attend school? And even if I was half decent in my looks, I had no dowry to take to a husband, not that I was waiting for someone to take care of me, no, not at all. I wanted freedom a chance to run from my life, you see, I had become so cynical in my nature, that yes, I would let my loving father penetrate my sister while I lived in another land of the earth. After all, should I not live a life I was given but never meant to live, because a male chauvanistic God permissed my family, to be as they are. I would run in spite of him, I had decided. I was ill. I was burdened, I was the daughter Lucifer intended for me to be, or so I was told. They Christened me, Child.

I met my salvation in the winter, the cold dead thing that creeps up on the beauties of summer to smite the richness of the earth and it's creatures, humanity so to say. I had become beautiful, but to old to be in school, and not chaste enough for the nunnery, not because I was unfortunate like my sisters, but because I had taken a liking to exchanging the purse between my legs for food, money and quickly remedied parasites. The parasite every thirty year old has encountered and had removed from her in an act to preserve her propriety, a lame nearly putrid existance swimming about in slime and tissue, feeding, as though it has a purpose. A child, an infantile existance that I shared my name with, sometimes I think I killed them all to rid me of myself. But as it goes, I remain, Child. Lucifer's pride and joy, the women in the woods, who according to the giggling children of the day drug her belly across the darkened soil because she had forgotten how to walk. I fell in love that winter, he was brilliant and eager, I could tell beccause we talked books rather than exchange c**t for coin. He left with sweet words and kissed nothing more than my forehead, I wasn't a w***e that night, I was a women, a girl, a child; I was innocence and love.

Reviews

[Coyote Poetry]

This is amazing story. You describe each scene with detail and sadness. The woman in this story had terrible lives. Ending was hopeful. You wrote a powerful story. No excuse for any woman to have this kind of life. You are a excellent writer.
Coyote