Fall
Shilah started school at thirteen. Later than most. Mother had taught us from home for many years before her sight began to fail. Cataracts. And with her sight her patience.
I didn't go with him. We had done most things together until then. Mother said I couldn't because we were different. He was a boy and this I had begun to notice more and more.
It was his body, once childishly soft and then coltish was becoming hard, warm muscle. His face which was once mischievous took on a dangerous edge. His eyes were the colour of buttercups, a solid type of yellow that looked like hard discs in the sun. I loved his eyes.
I loved Shilah.
At first I resisted the feeling. The warm creature that curled in the pit of my stomach pulling taut when I glanced at him and noted the small things. A muscle in his jaw. The rough inside of his fingertips. The pulsing vein in his ankle. His skin was brown two shades darker than my own and during the moonlight hours we were like alabaster and shadow beneath its light.
I spent lonely days in the yard between textbooks and daydreaming thinking of my first friend. My only friend.
"Misae." A voice chirps from beyond the fence that separates the rectangle of freshly mown grass from our trailer. "Misae." I lift my eyes from the textbook to the sky. I do not recognise the voice. "Hi there pretty girl." My name the stranger's lips make me shudder.
I sit up slowly and a figure is silhouetted against the brightness of the summer sun. I do not recognise him.
"Sae, honey. Come inside now." My mother's voice is urgent, it's that tone that is not to be disobeyed so I go picking up my books and pencils.
"Hello Maiara." The voice drawls, losing the hint of softness when it had called my name. "Let her stay." I pause before the doors of the trailer and glance back over my shoulder.
"No."
My mother's hand is hard when it lands on my shoulder, fingertips digging into my skin.
"You knew this day would come, Mai."
"You son of a bitch." I had never heard my mother swear.
"She is not one of you."
"We don't know that."
"I think by now we all do."
"Sae, go inside." But I'm frozen beneath my mother's hand, rooted to the step, eyes fastened on the man's dark face. I can't distinguish his features because of the brightness of the light but I feel nothing but cold menace from his presence.
"You can chose, Mai." He said with a new hint of emotion in his voice, perhaps it is regret. "She can forfeit her life or she can forfeit any memory of this place and live out there. Like them."
"She's my daughter."
"You don't both have to suffer, Mai. I'll fight you if I have to."
I look up into my mother's eyes and her head slowly angles toward me, the milky pale circle of her cataracts are directed toward me but I don't know if she can see my face. I don't want to go anywhere. I don't want to die. She sees this last thought, I know she does, she sighs deeply and I know her decision has been made.
Ms S