Lesson 11: Her Mother Taught her to Love Part 2
All Quotes used in this chapter are by Warsan Shire
"give your daughters difficult names, give your daughters names that command the full use of tongue. my name makes you want to tell me the truth. my name doesn't allow me to trust anyone that cannot pronounce it right."
Aged, wrinkled hands (calloused, not soft, not like a woman's hand should be) carefully overturned the smaller hand, soft hand, bared hand of a child. The elderly woman's curt fingernails lightly scraped against the vulnerable skin of the palm; lighter skin than the other side. The child squirmed. The grandmother ignored this, fingernails now tracing the young folds of the open palm, yet to be deepened by years and years.
"Love your dark skin, Esmeralda," Her grandmother stated, voice accented, voice aged, foreign, not like the many other voices Esmeralda was so used to hearing (but she loved it because of this, her grandmother's foreign voice, foreign tongue), "for it is your mother's skin. It is my skin, and my mother's before mine. Know," he grandmother said, looking up and meeting the bright, green (green, green, green) eyes of her granddaughter, "that it is beautiful."
The grandmother gently encased the younger's hands with her own; wrinkled skin pressed against new. Generation reaching for generation and melding skin. Her grandmother was darker, as was her mother. But Esmeralda didn't mind.
She was the darkest out of her brothers, and she liked it that way.
But, she was told she looked like her mother,
and she didn't know what to think about that.
"You find the black tube inside her beauty case where she keeps your father's old prison letters. You desperately want to look like her. You look nothing like your mother. You look everything like your mother. Film star beauty. How to wear your mother's lipstick. You go to the bathroom to apply your mother's lipstick. Somewhere no one can find you.
You must wear it like she wears disappointment on her face. Your mother is a woman and women like her cannot be contained. Mother dearest, let me inherit the earth. Teach me how to make him beg. Let me make up for the years he made you wait. Did he bend your reflection? Did he make you forget your own name? Did he convince you he was a god? Did you get on your knees daily? Do his eyes close like doors? Are you a slave to the back of his hand?
Am I talking about your husband or your father?"
Once, she had looked through her mother's things.
While her father was out, and her brothers in lessons (because girls didn't need to be taught the same things, her father told her, and she would spit on his shoe and he would hit her, back of hand to her cheek), she snuck into their room –
Or was it just his now that she was dead?
She snuck into their room and went to her vanity; top cleaned and dust resting. Unused for years. For as long as Esmeralda had been alive. Carefully, she opened the drawers.
She placed the rings on her own fingers, the rings too large of course, and her fingers too small. She noosed the necklaces around her throat. She pulled up a chair and leaned close to the mirror,
she imagined how her mother would put lipstick on, eyes narrowed, brows furrowed, concentrated and she leaned as close as she possibly could to her own reflection. Carefully, smearing the colored wax in a controlled line. One single swoop on the bottom, and carefully angling on top. Redefining and then sharpening her cupid's bow.
Esmeralda stared at her own reflection; her lips shakily outlined in alarming red, the wrong tone for her skin tone, one arch significantly larger than the other.
She looked nothing like her mother.
But she didn't think that she wanted to.
"It's not my responsibility to be beautiful. I'm not alive for that purpose. My existence is not about how desirable you find me."
She kissed her first girl when she was thirteen and was promptly hurt after; her eldest brother had grabbed her hair, taking a strong hold of her scalp, and threw her into the ground. The other girl screamed and ran, but Esmeralda was glad.
"The fuck do you think you're doing?" he hissed and kicked her roughly in the stomach. She doubled further and grabbed her knees, holding them to her tighter. "The fuck would happen if someone important saw you, fucking dyke!"
But someone important was always watching. Esmeralda knew this. But that was why she did it.
"Just don't fucking do it again," he snapped, spitting at her and turning (as his father taught him, to leave women weak, leave them bleeding, leave them dying).
(Leave them dead)
And as Esmeralda pushed herself up, she pulled her lower lip into her mouth and tasted blood,
and with a guttural shriek she ran at her brother and lunged.
"I find a girl the height of a small wail
living in our spare room. She looks the way I did when I was fifteen
full of pulp and pepper.
she spends all day up in the room
measuring her thighs.
Her body is one long sigh.
You notice her in the hallway.
Later that night while we lay beside one another
listening to her throw up in our bathroom,
you tell me you want to save her.
Of course you do;
This is what she does best:
makes you sick with the need to help."
She roughly pushed the smaller girl down, sending her tumbling down the two steps leading to the back entrance of the kitchen. Harsh green (vivid) eyes glared down, meeting wide and scared brown ones.
She tossed the already half eaten loaf of bread, stale and days old, onto the dirt next to the girl.
Esmeralda could count the girl's ribs easily, her midriff showing due to her scrap of shirt. Her pants were in no better shape, one leg torn just at mid thigh and the other only going a bit past the knee; no good for the upcoming season. The girl's face was dirty, her hands muddied and scraped, skin of her finger nails picked at. Her dark mop of hair an unkept mess, jaggedly cut.
But Esmeralda did not feel pity, for that faded at the back of her father's hand long ago.
(But she felt wrath, she felt fury, she felt flames white and hot, hearthed below her stomach; her strength was in her womanhood, where her late grandmother had taught her to keep it, to cherish it)
"You're fucking lucky I was the one who caught you," Esmeralda clipped, turning with one hand on the door. Ready to close, but leaving it open for now. "If it wasn't me, you'd be dead, bitch."
The girl simply stared at Esmeralda's figure, much healthier, voluptuous even, with prominent breasts and hips and an ass even at the young age of fifteen. And she the girl simply stared at Esmeralda, light filtering through the open door, and cascading, shadowing Esmeralda's features and making them holy.
"Don't fucking come back."
Ah, but Rashida was never good at keeping promises.
"We have the same lips,
she and I, the kind men think about when they are with their wives.
She is starving.
You look straight at me when she tells us
how her father likes to punch girls
in the face.
I can hear you in our spare room with her.
What is she hungry for?
What can you fill her up with?
What can you do, that you would not do for me?
I count my ribs before I go to sleep."
Mariana simply sighed when she walked into the back room, stopping to jut her hip and put fingers gently to her forehead in exasperation. Esmeralda simply remained, draped across the couch and fanning herself with the many paper bills she was holding.
"At least you could give me a heads up," Mariana said, tiredly accepting the situation and hardly elbowing Esmeralda's legs in order to give herself a seat on the couch, "or at least give me my due cut."
"I needed information," Esmeralda murmured, green eyes focused on the wall opposite of her. Thinking.
"And you couldn't find another way?" Mariana murmured, cigarette in her mouth and finger flicking the lighter. She offered Esmeralda the pack, but the younger woman didn't take it. Mariana's dark eyes narrowed.
"What are you planning…?" She asked, eyeing the other woman carefully. A pause, and then Esmeralda sneered.
"I fucking hate the way he looks at me," she snapped, hand closing and crinkling the bills. Her betrothed. Her promised. Her father's newest and final way to keep her on a leash. "Like a fucking piece of meat."
Mariana stayed quiet, already knowing this. Unsurprised.
"Men will be men," the older woman said calmly.
"Men should be fucking respectful," Esmeralda spat, sitting up abruptly, "or should at least treat us like humans for Christ's sake!"
Mariana calmly blew out a stream of smoke, watching loftily as it unfurled and dissipated into the air.
"There's no controlling that, 'hun," Mariana said finally, then repeated, "men will be men. And woman will be strong. Because we have to."
To live. To survive. To make new generations. To continue.
Esmeralda knew this. But it didn't equate to acceptance.
"And I have standards," Esmeralda said, rising and walking to leave without a goodbye. Mariana didn't turn to watch her leave; she had seen Esmeralda's back too many times to be concerned. She did however hum in amusement, dropping her cigarette and putting it out with her heel as she leaned over,
taking the money that Esmeralda had left for her.
"To my daughter I will say
'when the men come, set yourself on fire'."
"So what's your real name, huh?" she asked him, hand caressing his face, his arm slung around her waist, fingers daintily tracing a pattern on her back. Abyssal eyes slowing drifted from her lips to her eyes, green clashing with black. He smirked; a smooth, fluid and practiced movement.
His hand shifted, moving from her waist, under her arm and above the covers their naked and bared bodies were plastered again. His fingers went to the wild curls in her hair, stroking them and then intertwining.
"Why the curiosity?" he questioned, eyes drifting to her hair instead of her curious, but vivid, vibrant, always fiery gaze.
"Fuck that," she dismissed, her curiosity dropping and aggression replacing it, "this is the tenth time we've fucked," she told him, and then grew wiser, sultry, and moved towards him, pushing herself up and then placing her knees and arms on either side of him. Above him now, she continued, leaning closer until her bare breasts were resting on his chest and her lips at his ear, skin barely touching skin.
"Besides," she murmured into his ear, so soft that even the empty room could not listen, "I want to call out your actual name, and I'm sure you want to hear me scream it."
A ghost of a smile appeared on his lips, then: hesitation. Esmeralda blinked and their positions were switched. The hitman was above her, in the place of power. But Esmeralda simply smirked and laid herself out before him, knowing that this man would do nothing but cherish her.
She was confident; but wasn't that what had drawn him to her?
But with his next words, her smirk dropped and her expression was kin to mild surprise.
"Esmeralda," he said, suddenly seriously, "if I do this… I'm serious about my relationships. You know this."
Her mouth parted slightly as she stared up at him and her hand reached out. Her dark skin stood out against his pale, and she traced her thumb under his abyssal (beautiful, beautiful) eyes and then trailed her fingers along his defined cheekbones, her thumb brushing again against his lips.
His hand gently caught and encased hers, but with enough lack to send a message:
she could leave anytime. They both knew this.
But she had something that she needed to finish (to escape).
(She had standards, after all)
"I love you," she stated suddenly, the words spurting out of her mouth, even surprising her. He blinked, amid curiosity, fascination with this woman, this fierce and fiery woman who had lured him and chased and had played this little game (and won and won and won), and was now sprawled out before him in worship (and he worshiped back).
And he leaned forward, pressing his lips softly to her ear and whispered the word she had asked to hear,
and they kissed.
"When We Last Saw Your Father
He was sitting in the hospital parking lot
in a borrowed car, counting the windows
of the building, guessing which one
was glowing with his mistake."
Esmeralda hesitated, and then put a gentle hand resting on her abdomen. She sat, legs folded on top of the old, worn table. A pregnancy test lay at her side, the dim moonlight filtering to the window of the rundown apartment (her current safe house, away from the men she both hated and loved), just enough light to distinguish as positive. Esmeralda looked down at her stomach, an unfamiliar feeling churning. Embers in her hearth gathered. And waited.
"You're my way out," she whispered to her stomach, expression blank and eyes brimming with unfamiliarity.
"You're my freedom."
"The nail technician pushed my cuticles back ... turns my hand over, stretches the skin on my palm and says, 'I see your daughters and their daughters.' That night in a dream, the first girl emerges from a slit in my stomach. The scar heals into a smile. The man I love pulls the stitches out with his fingernails. We leave black sutures curling on the side of the bath.
I wake as the second girl crawls headfirst up my throat, a flower blossoming out of the hole in my face."
She had her father's eyes,
and dark, black baby hairs scalped to her head. Darker skin than his, close to Esmeralda's, but lighter still.
She had her father's eyes. Abyssal and void. Recognizable.
Esmeralda held her daughter for the first time, born in a place that could barely be labeled as a hospital.
Ausiliatrice did not cry for very long,
(she had her father's eyes)
but Esmeralda did.
"I have my mother's mouth and my father's eyes; on my face they are still together."
AN:
So after reading "Teaching my Mother How to Give Birth" by Warsan Shire, I had to write this chapter. It comes at a good time too, between arcs. And Reborn will definitely be getting a chapter like this as well ;) Most likely after the next arc. I already had most of this written, and the poems just fit perfectly. And Shire's words just resonate so great with Esmeralda and Ausil. Like it's scary. So they did perfect framing this chapter about Esmeralda.
In other news, I started college and I love it. So a little busy, but having fun. I also ended Life as Cloud, because I didn't have motivation to finish that one, but rest assured, I have no plans of doing the same with this one or Suicide Kid. A lot of different factors just led up to that.
Let me know what you guys think of this chapter! I had a lot of fun writing it.
Review Response:
Guest (Chapter 10): Here's more! Thanks for the review
Arleria: Aw, thanks so much for thinking that this story is deliciously awesome! Thanks so much for the incredibly kind words and the review!
Note: Sorry if I didn't respond to your reviews, I think fanfiction is messing up on alerting me? I go by email when I respond, and I feel like it's been almost jagged or lagged in repsonse. So let me know if you feel like I haven't responded so I don't accidentally leave you out! I love talking to you guys, seriously
Quote 'Em:
Congrats to Ketsueko and KonekoNoRenkinjutsushi for guessing the Hamilton quote from last chapter.
This chapter's quote:
"I am the dragon breathing fire, beautiful man, I'm the lion."
-Evely
