For all the dark girls of Alagoas
For the only candle burning in the blackest night
Para las hijas de Juarez
For every women never loved
She's on her side, an arm draped over her, a man’s breath counting a soft metronome of wind in her hair. But she is not asleep. She watches the outline of distant trees shake wildly, all bathed in the pallor of a blue moon. She watches a cat stalk along the spine of a back fence. She watches, wishing to be any one of the things holding her attention: the tree, the cat, anything but the woman trapped under this amorphous mass of a man. She hates the fucking wind.
Jezebel was 9 years old when she first felt a man’s desire turn from flames to form inside of her. It was consensual, but only because “no” had never been an option available. At 13 she was shipped North and had already lost count of how many times she’d had to crawl through her own pupils to escape herself. Despite this, 19 years old now, she is not numb to romance. Everywhere she goes she gives her love to the kinds of things no one else bothers to notice. A piece of her heart nailed to the trunk of a pepper tree in Peru. A lock of her hair buried beneath an ant hill in Mazatlan. She had been beat for that, when her handlers had found her with a chunk of her bangs ripped out above her right eye. Sometimes the world gives back to her, like the scent of fertile soil she still sucks at when she chews on her own fingernails. She is beaten weekly for chipped fingernails.
The man behind her twitches in dreamtime, he a dog chasing exotic game, jarring her away from her own wanderings. He is fast asleep now, and without much thought as to what will come next she slips out from under him. A minute later she is on the roof, staring down at two stories of empty air. She cannot see the ground. She imagines jumping, falling forever through that hollow space, suspended, maybe riding a breeze into the kind of eternities she escapes to in the throws of bad sex. And good sex. Good sex is bad when it is unsolicited. She imagines the kind of freedom the wind enjoys, boundless and sweeping and always in motion somewhere. God, she hates the fucking wind.
Turning her head to the heavens, she spreads her arms eaglewing. The wind wraps cruel around a naked form. She is falling. She’s been falling for a decade now, almost exactly, and doesn’t think she’ll ever hit the ground. She doesn’t even know if she is falling towards the ground at this point. So she laughs, then brushes tears out of her eyes. She cries, and then swallows her joy whole, until it becomes the sort of sanctuary she can run to on the kind of night she knows all too well. It isn’t until her toes began to burn against the chill of an aluminum gutter that she becomes aware of how she must look to the sky above. Naked. Scarred. Frozen. Free.
Jezebel clicks the window shut with the delicate touch she’s been trained to perfect. She is shaking, the lashings of her actions still whipping against her. She does not want to die. It is a strange thing, her love for life when there is nothing left to love in her own. She considers taking a shower, but then considers the beating she’ll receive for the wasted water. No, for overstepping her boundaries. Climbing back into bed she folds a wide arm over her breast, nestles into an all too hairy stomach, and thinks of the wind in her hair. She hates the fucking wind.
The John is gone and the services paid for, but the girl is still asleep, dreaming off the events of the previous night. ¡Pinche puta! Still, standing in the doorway Santos has to admit she makes for an exceptionally beautiful whore. Despite, or perhaps in spite of everything they had put her through, she is still gorgeous, a beauty untouched beneath the layers of shit piled on top of her delicate frame. Slender shoulders. Inviting hips. Santos feels a familiar hunger twitch. He has been her handler now for a couple of years now, and enjoys her whenever he can find the time. With a predator’s gaze he traces the curve of her figure, his eyes speaking of terrible intentions, navigating the landscape of her, rolling hills in cotton bedspread, a landscape formed defiant.
“¡Despierta!”
“…”
Santos never repeats himself, and with one blow renders her leaves her cheek a week long blue, ripping her away from her only respite. Sleep. Safety. Suenos.
“Wake up! Levantate! We’re done here.”
She stirs, guided by the mechanics of memory. She gets dressed, and makes for the only door.
“Wait. Perdon mujer. We’re almost done here.” Santos unbuckles his belt, and Jezebel stares at the floor.
“No.” A whisper. Barely a breath.
“No? Como que no puta?”
“No. No mas para ti… No mas de ti.”
In one motion he rips his belt from his waist, and in one more he has her neck noosed in a loop of braided leather. She gasps for air, and receives nothing.
“Como que no puta?”
Jezebel’s world ripples in front of her, as though viewed through a paper-thin wall of water. She feels capillaries burst, her eyes gone red, and somewhere she hears voices singing. She is not yet ready to meet the source of song. A flailing foot catches the edge of the bed, and she launches the both of them into a polished oak dresser.
“¡Chingada!” His grip on the belt loosens, and Jezebel falls to the floor. He watches her claw for the bedside, the table, anything to pull her up to her feet, and he laughs with all of his body. Then, he kicks her hard in the ribs.
“Adonde vas puta?” As she hugs the table, coughing out her air, Santos kicks her again in the lower back, the table splintering beneath. She will not scream, her pain echoing inside of her like the protests of the dead ringing silent through the hallowed halls of catacombs. Slivers of wood dig in under her nails, bury themselves deep in her palms and her knees. Santos’ taunts are distant, faint, somewhere beyond her body struggling for breath on the floor. Her blood beats rhythms of war in her ears; her world goes black with rapid percussion.
If there is a God inside of Jezebel it is not the word, and it never has been. In the coming week she will not speak once. No grunts of affirmation, not a single sound made in protest or denial. She becomes a stone struggling to relearn the life of an organism, and still, somewhere beyond the dim and the clutter, the smell and her hungers she is happy. Somehow she always has been. It is here, in that small inexhaustible flame that burns wherever she goes and no matter the rain, that whatever divinity Jezebel possesses finds its definition.
She is made to recover in the basement of an old storeroom. It is far from the first time she has been beat, and yet no beating has ever been the same for Jezebel. Even amidst the unfortunate monotony of her own life no two days, no two johns, and no two dreams have ever been the same. The specifics of a life she never chose haunt her, constantly, but no matter the weight of these details they nonetheless keep her from falling into the void of cycle and shame that the world expects of her. Somewhere, beyond the story, Jezebel loves the details.
Her handlers are amused by her silence at first. Defiance is always a tragic comedy to them. They laugh, then cook meals as extravagant as their experiences allow them in order to tempt her. Strange blends of Southwest meets Far East leftovers. Chow mein and tortillas. Frijoles y arroz blanco with reheated eggrolls. Jezebel’s stomach is shrinking, and all of it appears an immaculate deliverance for a body slowly starving to death. She remains silent. They do not feed her.
When her handlers find her, unresponsive, a curve bending up from the floor, they finally call in the doctor for help. Her wounds have festered. She has not eaten in 6 days.
The doctor is not a doctor. He is a man who feels for broken bones like a child might guess at their Christmas presents through the wrapping paper. He decides most of Jezebel’s wounds are not so serious, skin scraped bare from her hands and her legs, deep purple bruising on her neck and her back. One of her ribs is fractured, and so the doctor advises her to wear tighter shirts.
Before he leaves the doctor grabs her chin, hard, lifting her eyes to his own. His voice is as gentle as any she had ever heard. “Are you alright?”
No! Her eyes open to an unnatural size, her pupils as mouths both silent and screaming. No! NO! The doctor cannot understand what she is telling him, for nowhere in her eyes can he see tears. “Stupid girl.” Without another word he leaves her alone, clutching herself close for warmth.
Upstairs, she can hear the men talking about her, about how she will need to be forced to eat and given another week of rest before she will become profitable again. One of her handlers makes a bad joke about there being men who would prefer her more now that she has been roughed up, and the other makes a worse joke about selling her for reasons far worse than sex.
Minutes can last forever when we dream them. Jezebel has been dreaming for days now, the bricks of the storeroom wall giving way to familiar fields she has never before seen. She stands in the middle of a clearing, staring at the sky, and suddenly she begins to fall. She falls through dirt and rock and rivers that will never see the sun. She falls through liquid metal and fire to the womb of the earth. She falls for lifetimes, and pretty soon she is falling up, flying now, towards regions of the world that will forever remain foreign to her. As she breaks surface, she wakes up.
Jezebel once heard a John say that a person wakes up the day they would die with the profound feeling that their life is about to change. Through drunken slurs and bad Spanish she understood most of what the man had said, though none what he meant. She does know that this particular morning she has awoken to a sun like she has never before seen, ribbons of gold cutting still air to pieces. Somewhere in the way the light bends she sees change coming, and somewhere far less tangible she prays it is not visions of her death disguised.
For a moment she watches a bird perched atop a lone smoke stack. A pair of wings and a beak in the distance. She watches its song, muted through the hotel windows. To Jezebel it is clear, and sounds no less beautiful; she knows very well that a voice does not need to be heard in order to sing.
For the only candle burning in the blackest night
Para las hijas de Juarez
For every women never loved
She's on her side, an arm draped over her, a man’s breath counting a soft metronome of wind in her hair. But she is not asleep. She watches the outline of distant trees shake wildly, all bathed in the pallor of a blue moon. She watches a cat stalk along the spine of a back fence. She watches, wishing to be any one of the things holding her attention: the tree, the cat, anything but the woman trapped under this amorphous mass of a man. She hates the fucking wind.
Jezebel was 9 years old when she first felt a man’s desire turn from flames to form inside of her. It was consensual, but only because “no” had never been an option available. At 13 she was shipped North and had already lost count of how many times she’d had to crawl through her own pupils to escape herself. Despite this, 19 years old now, she is not numb to romance. Everywhere she goes she gives her love to the kinds of things no one else bothers to notice. A piece of her heart nailed to the trunk of a pepper tree in Peru. A lock of her hair buried beneath an ant hill in Mazatlan. She had been beat for that, when her handlers had found her with a chunk of her bangs ripped out above her right eye. Sometimes the world gives back to her, like the scent of fertile soil she still sucks at when she chews on her own fingernails. She is beaten weekly for chipped fingernails.
The man behind her twitches in dreamtime, he a dog chasing exotic game, jarring her away from her own wanderings. He is fast asleep now, and without much thought as to what will come next she slips out from under him. A minute later she is on the roof, staring down at two stories of empty air. She cannot see the ground. She imagines jumping, falling forever through that hollow space, suspended, maybe riding a breeze into the kind of eternities she escapes to in the throws of bad sex. And good sex. Good sex is bad when it is unsolicited. She imagines the kind of freedom the wind enjoys, boundless and sweeping and always in motion somewhere. God, she hates the fucking wind.
Turning her head to the heavens, she spreads her arms eaglewing. The wind wraps cruel around a naked form. She is falling. She’s been falling for a decade now, almost exactly, and doesn’t think she’ll ever hit the ground. She doesn’t even know if she is falling towards the ground at this point. So she laughs, then brushes tears out of her eyes. She cries, and then swallows her joy whole, until it becomes the sort of sanctuary she can run to on the kind of night she knows all too well. It isn’t until her toes began to burn against the chill of an aluminum gutter that she becomes aware of how she must look to the sky above. Naked. Scarred. Frozen. Free.
Jezebel clicks the window shut with the delicate touch she’s been trained to perfect. She is shaking, the lashings of her actions still whipping against her. She does not want to die. It is a strange thing, her love for life when there is nothing left to love in her own. She considers taking a shower, but then considers the beating she’ll receive for the wasted water. No, for overstepping her boundaries. Climbing back into bed she folds a wide arm over her breast, nestles into an all too hairy stomach, and thinks of the wind in her hair. She hates the fucking wind.
The John is gone and the services paid for, but the girl is still asleep, dreaming off the events of the previous night. ¡Pinche puta! Still, standing in the doorway Santos has to admit she makes for an exceptionally beautiful whore. Despite, or perhaps in spite of everything they had put her through, she is still gorgeous, a beauty untouched beneath the layers of shit piled on top of her delicate frame. Slender shoulders. Inviting hips. Santos feels a familiar hunger twitch. He has been her handler now for a couple of years now, and enjoys her whenever he can find the time. With a predator’s gaze he traces the curve of her figure, his eyes speaking of terrible intentions, navigating the landscape of her, rolling hills in cotton bedspread, a landscape formed defiant.
“¡Despierta!”
“…”
Santos never repeats himself, and with one blow renders her leaves her cheek a week long blue, ripping her away from her only respite. Sleep. Safety. Suenos.
“Wake up! Levantate! We’re done here.”
She stirs, guided by the mechanics of memory. She gets dressed, and makes for the only door.
“Wait. Perdon mujer. We’re almost done here.” Santos unbuckles his belt, and Jezebel stares at the floor.
“No.” A whisper. Barely a breath.
“No? Como que no puta?”
“No. No mas para ti… No mas de ti.”
In one motion he rips his belt from his waist, and in one more he has her neck noosed in a loop of braided leather. She gasps for air, and receives nothing.
“Como que no puta?”
Jezebel’s world ripples in front of her, as though viewed through a paper-thin wall of water. She feels capillaries burst, her eyes gone red, and somewhere she hears voices singing. She is not yet ready to meet the source of song. A flailing foot catches the edge of the bed, and she launches the both of them into a polished oak dresser.
“¡Chingada!” His grip on the belt loosens, and Jezebel falls to the floor. He watches her claw for the bedside, the table, anything to pull her up to her feet, and he laughs with all of his body. Then, he kicks her hard in the ribs.
“Adonde vas puta?” As she hugs the table, coughing out her air, Santos kicks her again in the lower back, the table splintering beneath. She will not scream, her pain echoing inside of her like the protests of the dead ringing silent through the hallowed halls of catacombs. Slivers of wood dig in under her nails, bury themselves deep in her palms and her knees. Santos’ taunts are distant, faint, somewhere beyond her body struggling for breath on the floor. Her blood beats rhythms of war in her ears; her world goes black with rapid percussion.
If there is a God inside of Jezebel it is not the word, and it never has been. In the coming week she will not speak once. No grunts of affirmation, not a single sound made in protest or denial. She becomes a stone struggling to relearn the life of an organism, and still, somewhere beyond the dim and the clutter, the smell and her hungers she is happy. Somehow she always has been. It is here, in that small inexhaustible flame that burns wherever she goes and no matter the rain, that whatever divinity Jezebel possesses finds its definition.
She is made to recover in the basement of an old storeroom. It is far from the first time she has been beat, and yet no beating has ever been the same for Jezebel. Even amidst the unfortunate monotony of her own life no two days, no two johns, and no two dreams have ever been the same. The specifics of a life she never chose haunt her, constantly, but no matter the weight of these details they nonetheless keep her from falling into the void of cycle and shame that the world expects of her. Somewhere, beyond the story, Jezebel loves the details.
Her handlers are amused by her silence at first. Defiance is always a tragic comedy to them. They laugh, then cook meals as extravagant as their experiences allow them in order to tempt her. Strange blends of Southwest meets Far East leftovers. Chow mein and tortillas. Frijoles y arroz blanco with reheated eggrolls. Jezebel’s stomach is shrinking, and all of it appears an immaculate deliverance for a body slowly starving to death. She remains silent. They do not feed her.
When her handlers find her, unresponsive, a curve bending up from the floor, they finally call in the doctor for help. Her wounds have festered. She has not eaten in 6 days.
The doctor is not a doctor. He is a man who feels for broken bones like a child might guess at their Christmas presents through the wrapping paper. He decides most of Jezebel’s wounds are not so serious, skin scraped bare from her hands and her legs, deep purple bruising on her neck and her back. One of her ribs is fractured, and so the doctor advises her to wear tighter shirts.
Before he leaves the doctor grabs her chin, hard, lifting her eyes to his own. His voice is as gentle as any she had ever heard. “Are you alright?”
No! Her eyes open to an unnatural size, her pupils as mouths both silent and screaming. No! NO! The doctor cannot understand what she is telling him, for nowhere in her eyes can he see tears. “Stupid girl.” Without another word he leaves her alone, clutching herself close for warmth.
Upstairs, she can hear the men talking about her, about how she will need to be forced to eat and given another week of rest before she will become profitable again. One of her handlers makes a bad joke about there being men who would prefer her more now that she has been roughed up, and the other makes a worse joke about selling her for reasons far worse than sex.
Minutes can last forever when we dream them. Jezebel has been dreaming for days now, the bricks of the storeroom wall giving way to familiar fields she has never before seen. She stands in the middle of a clearing, staring at the sky, and suddenly she begins to fall. She falls through dirt and rock and rivers that will never see the sun. She falls through liquid metal and fire to the womb of the earth. She falls for lifetimes, and pretty soon she is falling up, flying now, towards regions of the world that will forever remain foreign to her. As she breaks surface, she wakes up.
Jezebel once heard a John say that a person wakes up the day they would die with the profound feeling that their life is about to change. Through drunken slurs and bad Spanish she understood most of what the man had said, though none what he meant. She does know that this particular morning she has awoken to a sun like she has never before seen, ribbons of gold cutting still air to pieces. Somewhere in the way the light bends she sees change coming, and somewhere far less tangible she prays it is not visions of her death disguised.
For a moment she watches a bird perched atop a lone smoke stack. A pair of wings and a beak in the distance. She watches its song, muted through the hotel windows. To Jezebel it is clear, and sounds no less beautiful; she knows very well that a voice does not need to be heard in order to sing.