And that night, as Nadia laboriously pushed her sofa up against the bolted door, a young woman, residing on the outskirts of a depleting ghetto, with skin resembling the hue of a bottomless sea, was doing the same. The young woman with hair tightly packed into a burning bush had been born into a certain kind of wilderness that came with being nameless. Her mother, who had been just a girl when she was born, believed that the only way to protect the child, that would become a woman before her body could tell was to raise her as an unclaimed entity. Stripped of her humanity, her essence, she could be free. For men only rob things that belong somewhere, and this young nameless woman belonged nowhere.
From within the darkness, cradled deeply in its endless vacuum, her husband laid, the fragility of an abuser’s body expressed poignantly through his rage. One might of felt the crack of his bones and the splitting of his soul, had his bellows not been so strident, so deafening as the thrashing of his limbs, as if he were only a baby unprepared and unwanting of the world before him, suggested a struggle against the migration. Had there been light, one may have caught sight of his fists, spoiled by a violent, violet discoloring, the way they struck at the darkness, seething with an apoplectic surge, and perhaps the spirit of the door sensed his resistance, the assault pronounced through his wrath, for the erasure, the severing, and cleansing that was to be this man’s initiation began to morph into a grueling and terrorizing spiral into the peaks of nothingness. His body becoming misplaced or perhaps forgotten indefinitely in the blackness.
As Pacific’s current continued thrashing atop her sea, the woman began to feel an apocalyptic sense of urgency. The first layer of skin binding each finger tip began to split as she, flesh deep into the needles cradling the couch’s internal organs, barricaded herself from the door. Whether it occurred in her head or in that moment she had been unsure, but she felt a belabor from the other side, from within the blackness, a bone-chilling gale seeping from the void as if she were peering into his eyes once more, and it had only taken a moment, a split-second for her to choose, because her mother had been wrong, because men seemed to find bleak bodies alluring, she, his most deprived captive. it had only taken a moment for her to push, for she was now a mother herself, with a daughter who would not be a ghost in the orbs of a man’s world.
She stood before the attic doorway, stitches torn from her belly, moments shy of collapsing, the blood felt fresh, the taste of exhaust and survival innate to womanhood, dripping like rain, smothering the cracks between layers of foundations and recounted footsteps, her lips swelling into strangled caterpillars, she shoved the pull of the door way’s depth down her throat. She thought she might have seen his shadow buried in the vastness, cradled deeply within a directionless existence, or perhaps her eyes, bulged outward like an insect emerging from its cocoon, and their gaze, she could no longer trust, and each wound scattered across her body itched for salvation, they wept for her, the taste of sweat rising from her upper lip, reciting hushed hymns of her mother’s lullabies as they kissed her neck and forgave her for still loving him, she allowed for her body to grieve, slumped against the edge of the door and continuing to gaze into it’s blackness, her heart no longer racing, instead beating slowly and smoothly like the crescents of a calm ocean wave.
And with this final moment of goodbye passing, she closed the door.
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