North: A Short Story
This darkness like a cloud of cold air leaves a chill in the depths of her heart. It is a darkness that stretches deep into the night, runs…
This darkness like a cloud of cold air leaves a chill in the depths of her heart. It is a darkness that stretches deep into the night, runs along the railroad tracks until the tracks disappear and there’s nothing.
The tracks offered her direction, running like a line on a map, connecting destinations across great distances, a grand grid of possibilities.
This is where the story begins, so long after its start, following a line into the night, away from the past, into a future that has to be better.
This is where she was headed, into the night, away from the heat of tight quarters, away from the shelter and the smell of mildew and sweat and decay.
This was her life, moving, always moving, always seeking a place better, safer than the place before. She fled her village in the deepest dark of night, during a lull in the fighting, escaping on the back of a flatbed truck heading north. She rode with the chickens, sitting between cages, wrapped in an old wool shawl the driver gave her, a shawl that smelled of chicken shit and feed and a hundred other odors, each more pungent and horrible than the next. A shawl whose once bright colors reminded her of the night of the fever that burned out her heart, that washed the wonder from her eyes, that left her with an emptiness as cavernous as the night was dark. Fever burning in the village, like a punishment from the heavens or maybe hell, the priest telling her to pray and repent, the doctor rushing from house to house, her baby son covered in cold, damp cloths that offered him little relief, wrapped in a shawl of many colors to keep away the chills.
She rode through the night passing villages and vast open spaces, riding north across the horizon. The driver stopped at his small farm where his wife fed her tortillas and thick strong coffee and she slept a dreamless sleep that gave her the distance she needed to keep herself in motion.
Her story is motion, continuous, ceaseless, a creeping forward toward something unknown but desired. Her story is the long journey north on foot at night, setting off from the farm with tortillas and a small amount of beans wrapped in a cloth and a small jug of water, making her way in the shadows, sleeping in roadside ditches when the sun was high, hiding from the patrols and bandits until she reached the river, crossing with dozens of others who paid with all the coin in their pockets for this chance, this passage to that mythical place, into the dark Texas night. She crossed in silence, wary eyes fixed on the darkness and the rocking of the raft, ears tuned to the rush and slap of water, entering the Texas town, wandering its streets, seeking solace.
She ended her quest in a shelter at the edge of the city where old men with whiskey breath pawed her like she was their nourishment, a ripe melon at a roadside fruit stand, their old craggy fingers running hideously up her belly, rough and dangerous fingertips tracing the caesarian scar, her last and only link to the young boy lost to fever what now seemed so long ago, clawing her small, firm breasts, pinching them, squeezing them as if they were testing their ripeness. The men swam in her youth, entering it, drank it in, recycled it in their minds to fuel them through one more spent and dying day.
She stayed there a week, frozen in indecision, unable to move, unable to fight, each unwanted advance further draining her of power, sucking her dry, leaving her limp and beaten and emotionless until that night she woke to see those feral eyes staring at her, yellow, veiny, poisonous and powerful, eyes of a ferret, eyes that seared into her a fear so deep she could feel herself for the first time in a long time awakened, the burn lifting her to action, to reaction, to reclaim herself, her need to live.
The next day she stole a knife from the kitchen of the shelter, wrapped it in newspaper and hid it behind a radiator so she could retrieve it later. That night she lied in wait, burning with a hate so heavy it made it hard to breath, her heart racing, her hands shaking. She was alive for the first time in a long, long time.
She liked there for what seemed like hours, waiting for those eyes, those randy fingertips, the smell of cheap liquor, the knife tucked beneath her mattress on the cot. She exploded into violence, pressing all her strength into the knife blade as she plunged it into the animal, pulling back and lunging again, repeatedly, all the hatred and rage, the fear and self-loathing, emptying into the old man’s bleeding form.
She fled the shelter into the night, down empty streets to the place where the world begins again, to the dark edge of night, where the street lights end and the city disappears, where the grid of connections are like the lines on a map, reaching northward, toward the possible.
Originally published in Middlesex: A Literary Journal.
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