𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘢𝘱𝘩𝘺𝘴𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘮𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘬𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳
Whether it manifested as a fleeting specter, casting its ephemeral shadow across the girl's dreams, awakening her on that least expected morning, remained forever veiled, destined to e...
-He has your father's genes, you could have foreseen the outcome!-Sofiya lectured Linda as she laid sick on her bed.-These degenerates a r e n' t your league. One would think any daughter of mine would be far too intelligent to be taken in by such Skid Row scums. And here you are!-She angrily set the turmeric milk glass on the bedside table, almost causing it to spill.
The bang of closing door followed and Linda winced, her head pounding. Her skin burned. She took a sip of remedy and there was a metal taste in her mouth.
She played with the Kershaw, spread out her hand on top of the slide, and jabbed the point past her fingers. Johnny johnny whoops! Johnny johnny johnny johnny. She liked it just as well when it stabbed her. She held her hand up and there was satisfaction at seeing blood, the way there was when people stared at her and looked away when she shot azure daggers back at them. They were thinking she was beautiful, but they were wrong. They didn't see everything ugly swarming beneath her clothes.
Later that night, she went out in the backyard, where the crickets harmonized in their nocturnal serenade, and the blacktop exuded warmth beneath her bare feet like a living creature. The crushed white gravel flowerbeds shimmered in the moonlight, their antiseptic expanse broken by vibrant red poinsettias and white dahlias. Few years ago, when visiting her father in America, she sent her mother a painting of the house surrounded by its sea of black asphalt and bordered by pristine white gravel. Her mother sent her a poem about the infant Achilles, whose mother had submerged him in black water to confer immortality. It didn't make Linda feel any better.
She sat on the redwood picnic table, absorbing the melodies emanating from the neighboring house through its closed shutters. Those shutters perpetually sealed, yet the strains of Miles Davis' saxophone managed to seep through the gaps between the wooden slats. She ran her fingertips over the dark carbon blade, imagining opening her wrists. If you did it in the bathtub, they said, you didn't even feel it. She wouldn't have hesitated, except for her mother. But equilibrium of her emotions teetered on a precarious scales, everything on one side while on the other this goddamn acceptance to UCLA, upcoming September fraught with anxiety. If she could turn back time she would have chosen any university but America. But she couldn't fight the blood that flowed in her; her mother's ice-cold and her father's fiery hot. Part of her was the ash girl, ashes filtering into her dreams, born to these Santa Anas, born to char.
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The next weekend, after dinner, she kicked back on the living room rug, using her X-acto to slice up old magazine covers into shadow puppets and sewing them onto bamboo skewers she'd saved from Anajak Thai. The puppets represented mythical beings – the Monkey King, the antlered man sacrificed for crop fertility, the wise centaur Chiron, cow-headed Isis, Medusa, the Minotaur, the White Crow Woman, and the Fox Mistress with her latest money-making scheme. Even figures like the sorrowful Daedalus and his feathered son.
