Food for the Poisoned Child
Remembering a town in America.
Author’s note: This time, I’m taking you to a small town in America with some horror. My writing has centered on places I’ve lived in and feelings tied to them, and you might suspect that the child’s memories are real.
Consider marching this Saturday! I’ll be with the lawyers in NYC. Stay safe.
Photo by Rob Griffin on Unsplash
She was five when she was conscious enough to see it happen. To note the glares. To watch her same-age blonde cousins receive more love. More grace. To know that her great grandmother hated her.
She was seven when she learned her first racial slur. Starved of love and confused why the whole town was cold. Did no one know warmth here. Were they all zombies with no beating hearts. Why the mean faces. What had she done.
She was nine, the only brown girl in a sea of pale, made to play the villain in a school play. They pulled her out of a shiny sterile bathroom to dry her tears and learn her role. Dressed in devil black she held her shattered dignity like entrails from a gut wound, and chased the innocent porcelain girls all playing pink princess.
Time passed marked by these slices to skin, and eventually she was grown. From her castle on a hill built with her raw, red hands, she watched them drown in their misery. Scared and blaming all but their own choices. Muslims. Chinese. Immigrants. Poor, brown children. She gave them the same love they gave her: a diseased pile of decaying carcass wrapped in tolerance and sealed with contempt. The same zombie food they once shoved down the child’s unprotected throat.
This woman attends high tea in her gilded parlor. She sips a light brew and nibbles food prepared for her with warmth, studying an inner child who comes out poisoned and feral during these innocent moments. The child is hungry, but not for biscuits, and wails until the woman tells a soothing story: she and the child are sitting together, side by side, turning meat over flames that relieve the child’s cold, ground stiff hands, and at the end of their skewers are the rotted pieces of zombie great grandmother dripping over hellfire. Only then is the child laid back to rest.
Damn, more of this! I really like the use of zombies as a metaphor of othering, like people are just playing a roll in a culture that isn't inviting. Great stuff!
Also, great line! Love a little alliteration:
porcelain girls all playing pink princess.
Girl, I had all the feels while reading this in the best way! As always, you are AMAZING!!!