Heaving.
Heaving.
Heaving and
tearing as her soul that had not yet escaped her, threatened to fly out. Her
breath thinned as she tried to push air out and gulp more in, but there was no
air in the bellows. Her stomach contracted, bulging and pulsing and trying to
expel the weight it had been carrying for months.
She shrieked
silently and sobbed violently and pushed. The bellows heaved in tandem with her
and their movement, which she’d grown accustomed to after months, sickened her
once more. Then suddenly, the weight, the child fell out of her. Slick, bloody
and shiny, the child wailed once and coughed immediately at the putrid air that
surrounded it. Yet that one cry had been enough.
Perhaps the
beasts above deck had heard it, for the door to the bellows opened and the
white-skinned animals descended. They inspected the dark beings
pressed together in the belly of their ship; the chains binding them began
rattle as the animals released body after body and left them prostrate on the
floor.
Her breath
continued to thin, and by the time the white beast pressed his hand to her
mouth it was too weak to be felt. She felt the chains loosen as he grabbed her
feet and pulled her away from the shelf. With a thud her body fell to the
floor, and he chained her ankle to a dead woman’s wrist while another beast started
pulling the bodies above deck.
As she was being
dragged, she caught a glimpse of her child encased in a white hand. The baby
had stopped crying soon after birth, as if she knew that there was no good air
to be had in the bellows. The beast that held her child was young – more so
than she who lay expiring at his feet– and soon he took to holding her child by
one ankle, not knowing how to hold such a delicate thing.
The young white
beast walked slowly beside her, as another of his kind dragged the chain of
dead and dying bodies. She felt the stairs digging into the small of her back
and the base of her neck. Hollow clunks rang in her skull, becoming duller as
her breath became weaker.
She counted
seven clunks before the sunlight pierced her half-open eyes, letting her know
that she’d arrived on deck. She tiredly watched the young beast beside her and
wondered why he examined her child with such bewilderment.
Looking feebly
at the dangling body of her child, she suddenly noticed it: there were stars
splashed across the darkness of the newborn’s body. It was as if the night sky,
which she herself had not seen for many months, had mistaken the child’s skin
for part of itself. She did not know how a child born in the heat of the
bellows could have ever touched the sparkling sky. In her tortured head she struggled
to recall when in her 11 months in the bellows she had come so close to the
burning stars.
Then, as she
felt a renewed pull on her shackled ankle she thought “Oh.”
The markings on
the weight that had fallen out of her were not stars. They were bloodstains.
The following is the introduction to Karintha; the first piece in the book CANE by Jean Toomer.
Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon,
O cant you see it, O cant you see it
Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon . . .
When the sun goes down.
Men had always wanted her, this Karintha, even as a child, Karintha carrying beauty, perfect as dusk when the sun goes down. Old men rode her hobby-horse upon their knees. Young men danced with her at frolics when they should have been dancing with their grown-up girls. God grant us youth, secretly prayed the old men. The young fellows counted the time to pass before she would be old enough to mate with them. This interest of the male, who wishes to ripen a growing thing too soon, could mean no good to her.
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