Perhaps that was because she couldnât imagine a thingânot a single thingâworth exposing herself for. Whatever she might ever have loved was taken before it even arrived. That is, until she crept up and saw those boys, who had the decency to bring with them a feeling that didnât make her want to scream.
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He sat in that dark shack for hours. He saw the darkness turn in upon itself, churn, and spasm. He watched it reach out for him, felt it first caress, then clutch and fondle him. When Essie finally returnedâeyes bruised, hair awry, limbs weary, bleeding, and missing somethingâhe wanted to handle her like he would a newborn. Instead he whispered to her viciously against his better judgment. He couldnât help it. She had become a looking glass for his incompetence and he had no courage to place the blame where it actually belonged.
She wasnât insulted, then, by their choice to leave her without witnesses. That would perhaps mean that her name would eventually be lost to time, and the girls who came up behind her wouldnât have her to show them exactly who came before. That was where the real shame found roots. She kept it, then, all of it, locked up in her head with the other things that squeezed themselves into that space without even the courtesy of a âHow you?
There was no scorn on his face; his lips, however, were bent in sorrow. But even when toubab smiled, they had a streak of despair at the edge of whatever joy they thought they had found. Not regret, no, not that. More like they were waiting for something that they knew was coming but wished it wasnâtâeven if they called it down themselves. Sarah didnât look at James, but she did make a face that arched her eyebrows and shifted her lips to the side. Curious things, these yovo. She meant toubab.
Whether men had seen battle or not, each of them, to one degree or another, came home from wherever it is men go to be with themselves or to do the things they would never admit to out loud, with the same intent to inflict whatever harms they endured from the world onto the women and children closest to them. Relation didnât matter. Mother, wife, sister, and daughter were all equally targeted for the same rage. Father, husband, brother, and son all had the same blank disregard in their eyesâthere, behind the glistening fury, was the thing that shook them so thoroughly that they felt the need to destroy anything and anyone who they believed could see it: nothing.
What pleasure? Samuel, in so many ways, was suspicious of it because he knew how easily it could be taken away. So if he refused to adore it, he wouldnât miss it when it was snatched from him.