Divine Reproof

By: RDV

Mother of three, wife of two, neither of whom went under legal marriage rites with her in tow. In public, one could’ve easily dropped her the name whore, which she was in some Middle East, war-torn country some lifetime ago. But time effaced everything, and fewer people had called her that at the passage of time. But not entirely, as the word goes. Somewhere in her heart, she held fast to that misnomer, deserved or not. Whore. Her face had started to want in some respects. Wrinkles had boarded on her skin pro bono. She saw herself less and less, like the fading ghost of her generation. And nothing she ever did then fled away from her head. Even the bearded, bath-deprived men she fucked for twenty dollars a night waxed alive in her memory, vivid, unchanging, constant. The bills they shoved at her were still in her pockets no matter how hard she pushed them away, in her mind.

It was then she heard her daughter’s scream. Supine on the sofa, she could ruminate upon no other but that forever-thrashing scream of her daughter. It was the second of the Tres Marias. Her screams shook up the neighborhood, tearing against the occupants’ senses, as they were reminded of a dog bite or something else more tragic. But then it was just the girl of the whore, Aila, who was born hysterical. The mother pulled herself up, walked in modest steps, knowing that nothing worse than an un-bleeding scratch went to torment the little girl. Her head raw and her migraine short of two minutes of nursing, she peered outside.

Her daughter Aila, was frolicking on the wet slippery floor of the garage. She was unharmed in one piece. None of the scream purported to give the scream justice, only discipline. Good deal of it. Approaching, ferocious, the mother yanked the girl, pretty hard, inside. Once again her scream encompassed anything else heard and the atmosphere, the whole of it, until no molecules remained untainted by her vocals. The whore fetched her whip. She could register the shrieks still, thin and high-pitched, as it gathered more and more volume. Ah, the scream that never failed to draw a scouting-for-rumors crowd of on-lookers. She wondered why even a mere repetition of flagging seemed to them a whole new world, these nosy neighbors. True enough, passersby started stationing themselves up front for a scoop or two. Just when will they ever get fed up with it?

She continued lashing at her daughter every which way, most of which she was careful to make painful. Rendered partly inactive, the girl’s legs glowed pink and striped. Her crying subdued albeit became more passionate, felt and punctuated by hiccups so pathetic to bear. The whore was never a goody-two-shoes mother, with anyone watching or no.

In time, she plunked herself down. It didn’t occur to her to be pitiful; she was too worn out. Rest had more often than not become a rare visitor of her diurnal agenda, sleep even less, that even her rising and revolting conscience hardly received any attention. The worst part of the night was when her uneducated mind was challenged by the daughters she lived for. It was when she would put them to bed with no bedtime story to shush them with. Her imagination wasn’t pretty much to speak of, and anything else was deficient. And with the youngest intermittently waking up for a bottle of milk and crying just made everything impossible. All of this was absurd, unheard of. Just like the life of milk and honey.

Just then, in the midst of these thoughts, she was clouded by a silence she’d never encountered before, nor thought she would. Aila had fallen headfirst into a deep slumber and won’t be rousing, for sure, after a great while had elapsed. Heaven be praised for that.

The whore let her ears catch the symphony of nothing, ingratiating herself with the imaginary buzz that came poking at her eardrums. The sound of silence, it was almost empowering.

In any event, work didn’t end here for her. Plenty of work and harvesting to do.

She stretched up her knees which were already made unaccustomed to laxity over the years, debilitating and brittle. The outside distraction had scattered by now and the vicinity cleared of scavenging gossips. All was silence still.

Domination.

She waded her way to the garage where playing buckets and plastic tubs sprawled all over, giving an air of a crashed and quickly abandoned backyard party. Uninteresting, the sight was. No wonder.

She was to undo the mess her daughter just completed, when surprise…the most unpleasant of its kind came bobbing its head in front of her.

Her third and youngest child lay lifeless in the kiddie pool. Face down, her back was blued all over from too much air and water fighting for turf inside her. How many minutes had passed then? 30, 40? So rest and thrashing came with this price.

The mother, in confusion, clutched both ears as if to protest what her surrounding so tactlessly presented to her. Her legs turned to jelly as she banged on the floor, her eyes watering for all the world would know, her throat jerking for the same reason one barfs out her recent meal at the sight of a road kill.

Alas, death came down, claimed its award and swooped off faster than one can tie his shoe laces.

Forgotten for a fleeting minute while whipping, the child, not but one and a half years of age, dead. Dead at the drop of the hat. Death curled inside the daughter that was now gone, gone forever. A spectacle enough to give any mother an incurable disorder. Or maybe there wasn’t need for it to begin with. Maybe it was because of that fiction why all these came to pass.

The answer remained hiding as the mother bent down the pool and spooned her bundle of joy, now misery, out of the ankle-deep water. Too bewildered to scream. Ugly, flabbergasted, wizened by stupidity. Her age swiftly floated past her.

Two houses away, a neighbor dialed a Child’s Protection Agency, complaining without cease of child abuse by corporal punishment, excess thereof, it was hastened to add.

The mother hadn’t yet thought of what to say. To those prying eyes, interrogating austere voices, to the father who never came back. Nor had she predicted what was set in store for her in there. Nor did she know anymore how to form a decision. Whose fault was it? Before, she was quick to transport blame; now, she was none of it. None of herself at all.

Not knowing what results to pray for, she released the child form her arms, picked the things up, gradually, as if it would help detain time, so the fullness of the shock wouldn’t come all at once. She brushed her arms of the lounging impurities put there by too much pain, chores, baby-sitting and by the automaton she made of herself. She looked around the day she thought she’d never see. The nightmare was no longer a storybook waiting to be opened. The nightmare came and went. Realizing thus, she went on with her business, working with what her inferior power could offer. All was meager after all, just like her hindsight.

Alas, that made the two of them dead, abducted to the other side.