"Have you come here to die?" The voice was a bare whisper against the enveloping dark. It sounded stark and cold, with nothing in offer linked to safety. Yet, it brought me comfort of great proportions.
♛ ♛ ♛
In the dark wintry recesses of Ba...
It had been raining and snowing hells murder all week. Winter in Baneberry Lane had always been the worst season of the year. The dark and cold seemed to bring out the worst in people, and when you lived on a street where only the wicked resided. You'd count your lucky pennies if you could be anywhere else during the damn winter.
This was all running through my head when I opened the small latched window beside my bed. If you could call it a bed, that is. All it was, was stitched cotton on a broken wood floor. Still, the only real bed we could afford went to Ma, she needed it more than I ever would.
The sun kissed my nose first. I nearly let out a hiss of discomfort. In all the time I lived in this sick street, the sun never showed itself during the Winter. Something was amiss. Trying to indulge in the little positiveness this brought, I let the warmth mixed with the cool air heat my skin, shutting my eyes closed. It almost felt like The Valley was giving me a glimmer of hope, this day would get me through the Winter.
I got up and dusted any debris that fell on my sheets from the rickety wooden top of our house. Stretching myself, I went to the slab of a mirror that I kept on top of a cabinet. My hair had been a mess from the bed and my eyes held dark circles that seemed to be a permanent asset.
I hated looking in the mirror. When I had been thirteen, I had enough of it. Enough of my long hair, my name, my chest, myself. Everything that felt like it belonged to someone else had been plastered on my life. So I broke the tall rectangular mirror and watched it shatter into different shards. Using one, I cut the ends of my long hair, and made it so it looked like what the cobbler's boy had it like. Using another, I cut out stretched fabric that I found beside a market. I used that fabric to bind my chest so that it lay flat against my clothes. The last shard was used to disrupt the one thing I could never hide, nor change. Just beside my cunt, I sliced the skin on my inner thighs and made sure all the blood dried before scratching it off.
One piece of the mirror was kept by my mother. She returned it to its place on top of the wooden cabinet and I used it now to remind myself that I was closer to being who I wanted to be everyday. Yet, people would always look at me the same. So, I soothed myself the same way I did all those years ago.
I move out of the room and into the small boxed kitchen we had. I heated some water on the metal stove my mother so deeply cherished and threw some tea leaves into a mug. Using a heavy cloth, I poured the hot water in and watched as the tea leaves morphed into an inkpot.
"The sun's up, Ma. You should get some light on yourself. It'll do ya good." I screamed from the kitchen. Putting the pot back down, I dusted my hands on my long grey shirt. My voice had always been rough. I made it rougher everyday but it didn't mean I couldn't feel the constant scratching against my throat.
I heard a light scatter of coughs come from her room and I closed my eyes at the sound. I needed to get her the proper medicine the physician had mentioned. Except, it was the dead of winter and there were no needed jobs for people my age that didn't involve offering up your fanny for sale. If it came to it, I would do anything for Ma, I was just hoping it would never have to.
When I walked into her room, it was almost like you could smell the infection in the air. She had a cloth in her hand that had specks of pink blood on it from her mouth. She was awake and looking out at the window beside her bed. We only got a small peak at the streets above us and an even smaller show of the sky. We couldn't afford rent after three years ago, but the landlord had died of cholera and no one ever came looking for the house that was below ground.
Ma turned her head toward me and smiled softly. I leant against the doorframe and watched as she tried sitting up on her bed. It took some effort and I stopped myself from helping to see how bad she was today. Turns out, worse than usual. I inched myself into the room and placed the mug beside her bed. Helping her sit upright, my head painted a picture of her bones beginning to rust from not leaving the house and her heart starting to slow from the underuse.
"You worry too much, my boy. Your eyes speak a different language that only mothers and lovers can understand," she whispered once I managed to get her against the bed frame.
She always called me her boy after I told her my heart was in a different place than my sex. She never once judged, punished or questioned me. Instead she told me that she felt like I was a boy when she carried me, and she had always chosen the name "Brinley" had I come out one.
People don't seem to understand that genitalia doesn't dictate your identity. It's hard to make people understand when for years, we have been told differently. But my mother understood. She is still, the only one.
"I'll make you some warm soup and then we can try and make you walk outside to the porch. It would be a waste to stay in bed when the sun wants to meet my Ma."
She laughed a hearty laugh and my heart felt like it was being crushed by my ribcage. I always thought that was a funny physics. The heart was such a powerful organ that it had to be caged. Do all powerful things end up in cages?
"You speak in such poetic verse for a southside boy, Brin. It would be hard to understand you to be anything but a lover," she didn't acknowledge her going out but I saw her small head nod and took that as defeat (or acceptance, depends whose side you're on)
"I'll go make some soup, Ma. Get you the morning paper. You just... focus on bettering."
I left the room and the coughs rejoined the silence in which it festered.
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