I begin to break my mother’s heart the day I leave Zimbabwe on an unseasonably cold August day, brown leaves raining down from the Msasa trees.
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The Manananggal crouches in my womb, counting my little eggs as if they were hers for breakfast.
She doesn’t like me and I don’t like her, but we are cursed to inhabit each other.
It is a bone-chilling Sunday morning and I am leaning against a granite counter, waiting for my soy milk flat white. The side of my hip digs into the cold stone as I survey the coffee shop. The barista draws a four-petal leaf on top of my warm drink.
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If I told my daughter this story, I would say don't ask why, or what if it had happened another way. I would say the way the story goes, there was a woman and there was a particular box and this particular box had a guy inside it; actually the box was a white cube van running down the middle of a busy sidewalk, full of women on a sunny afternoon.
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“Hard to separate the past from the present. This noose tells me we’re still dealing with the past.”
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Inhale. I take a deep breath in through my nostrils. The air travels through the cartilaginous rings of my trachea, divides at the bifurcation of the bronchi, rushes down smaller and smaller pathways. It expands my lungs, widening my ribcage, stretching my diaphragm, raising my collarbones. Seconds pass before I release the breath, letting it stream out slowly, whispering away to nothing. Exhale.
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In light of the recent Jian Ghomeshi sexual assault trial, Proving You Didn't Want It illustrates the Canadian Justice System's often absurd treatment of sexual violence cases.
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The street sparkled with ice and the remnants of midnight. Angela loved walking at night, especially in winter. The air so cold it singed the hair in her nostrils, the tree branches a broken calligraphy against the sky, the moon whitely grinning or opening its mouth wide to aaahhh, to sing. The silence of the empty empty streets.
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