Swamp Murder

Swamp Murder. 5

"Life is hard?" I hissed, my voice shaking with anger. "You chose this life. Why do I have to pay for your mess? First, it was the loan shark, now you want me to sleep with someone to pay off your thirty-thousand-dollar debt?" I yelled, unable to control the fury building up inside me.

"It's just sex. It's not like he's making you do any hard job." My mother's tone was chillingly casual as if she were talking about an errand, not about selling her own child.

Her words hung in the air, raw and sharp, before my grandmother's hand sliced through it. The slap rang out like a gunshot, silencing everything in the small room. My mother staggered back, her hand pressed to her cheek, but her eyes didn't flinch. She stared at my grandmother with that same mocking smile, that careless look that made me hate her even more.

"How dare you treat him like that?" My grandmother's voice was a low, furious hiss. "You know what? I'm done with you and your reckless behavior. I don't want to see you in this house by the time I get back from the market."

"This mud shack? You call it a house?" My mother's laugh was hollow, echoing in the small space that felt so much smaller now. She looked around with disdain, and I felt the disgust crawling under my skin. I wanted to scream, but all I managed was a hoarse whisper that felt like poison on my tongue.

"I hate you," I spat, each word drenched in the bitterness that had built up over the years.

She only smiled a cold, cruel smile that barely reached her eyes. "The feeling is mutual."

A loud, impatient voice boomed from the doorway, interrupting the tense silence. "What's keeping you so long?" It was a thick, guttural voice I didn't recognize, one that sent chills down my spine.

My mother shrugged, barely acknowledging him. "I'll be out in a minute." She disappeared into her room, then reemerged with a small bag, slinging it over her shoulder without so much as a backward glance. She walked past me, past my grandmother, out the door, and just like that, she was gone.

I stumbled to the ground, the weight of everything crushing me all at once. Sobs ripped from my throat, raw and uncontrollable, and I wished, more than anything, that I could disappear, that something would just swallow me up and take me far away from this life.

My grandmother knelt beside me, her arms wrapping around me, her tears mingling with mine. "I'm sorry," she whispered over and over, her voice breaking. "I'm so sorry."

"It's not your fault, Grandma." My voice was a mere whisper, choked and hoarse. I wanted to comfort her, but I could barely keep myself together.

"If I hadn't told her..." she began, her words thick with regret. "If I hadn't told her your father was cheating, she would've stayed with him, and you wouldn't have had to go through any of this."

Her voice cracked as she cried, and I felt a pang of her pain. I knew she carried the weight of my mother's choices like her own burden. She had tried to protect me, but the world we lived in didn't offer much in the way of protection.

"We can't change the past, Grandma," I whispered, wiping her tears even as my own continued to fall. But inside, I knew the past was what had shaped me, and forged me into someone scarred and scared. And it terrified me to think about what it would make of me in the future.

My mother's abandonment left a gaping void, a scar that would never fully heal. And though my grandmother's arms tried to shield me, I understood, in that moment, that I was standing at the edge of a dark abyss. It would take every ounce of strength to pull myself up, to survive the mess she'd left behind.