By Anna Grace Awilli
My mother had the appearance of someone who might have made a freakish model in her younger days; the kind that wear the type of makeup and clothes that no one would ever wear off the runway. Now she looked frightful and awkward; the skin of her eyelids so loose it looked like it needed a belt to hold its folds together.
Not even her large eyes could look sharp enough to make up for the dryness in her spirit. They, her eyes, were soulless sojourners that sat awkwardly in her sockets which were as hollow as tubes; tubes that opened to her face on one end, and extended into the deep chasm of hard emptiness that was her soul, on the other. She was long dead even before she was clobbered to death in a scuffle with an unhappy client.
She and I, we worked back to back across a plywood board separating where I slept from where she slept. I was sixteen years old when I started to work alongside her. Before that, I had entertained the silly idea of studying to become a doctor but I promptly abandoned it and joined her in sleeping with them instead.
While she lived, I regarded my mother with a strange numbness of soul and with about as much interest as one would take in chewing a dry sponge. I neither loved nor hated her, I was just indifferent, having neither the time nor the convenience to indulge any passionate feelings about her or anything for that matter. It is not that I did not care, it is just that I could not afford to. In this desperate life of dog eat dog, where I have a life to live and survival to scrape from the bottom of the food chain, there was no time to cry.
My mother got nothing from life or hydroquinone but empty promises, pain and scarlet cheek bones. Both were corrosive and mercilessly deceptive, delivering only hell, which I reckon was the smell of our house. It smelled of desperation, bleaching creams and cheap lotions. Later, the smell of warm, raw blood that oozed from mother’s pulpy head was added to that smell, etching indelibly onto my memory as a representation for me of the poverty that I do not seem to be able to get out of.
I have since moved on and met with all sorts of men, the most interesting of whom is this particular man who likes to fling me across the floor of a hotel room to the other end of the wall. He is rich but vulgar, beastly and vain; he likes to claw my back with his dirty nails and make me do despicable things. Watching me in pain is an aphrodisiac for which he pays highly.
But now I am so disgusted with him, myself and life in general that I just want to just die. Or maybe I will kill him instead, take all his money and finally be free. Or I will kill his wife and his two young children and marry him, I do not know.
