PART 2 BEGINS: a short story, "The devil works hard, motherhood works harder"
Our mother's story continues...
PART 2 BEGINS
The gun is strapped to her chest. My hands are up, “Please. Wait. I can explain.”
The stranger’s scream curdles the wavy, wet air, and the bush erupts again to rapturous sound. The stranger’s face is crushed between the force of her hands. Her face fares far better than the splattered men on the ground.
“Please. Plea– I beg you. Stay. Wait I-“, hand forward, step forward once.
The stranger, two steps back.
Do not pass Go.
How was she going to reach her?
She had to she had to I have to.
They’re running now as we speak, dodging reaching branches. The bush is not pleased.
“Pleeeeease!” She cries out a prayer.
“NoooOOOO!” Comes the reply.
What does this mother know of guns and running targets? She was going to get caught. The gun was— the gun was loud enough on its own. She couldn’t risk a screaming target, too. No more strangers would take her side. They would— they would— NO.
The mother carves out her own future.
Prey and predator approach a one lane highway. It is just visible beyond the concluding tree line.
A gust of wind harries them forward, and our mother shivers amongst the leaves, as the stranger breaks through the line. One shot. One chance. It must be now, so she stops with the leaves and the wind.
Her bullet is her child, she will not be wasteful.
She must.
She does. The stranger’s body falls.
But it cannot stay there.
So the mother walks forward, where there are no whistling leaves for cover. There is just the animosity of the open.
She arrives. But the body is not yet just a body.
She sighs. There is not enough breath in the present for lamentation. She imagines she’ll scream about it, later, in a memory her daughter might call “insanity.”
She will have to go on and, then, keep carving.
But there are bigger devils afoot.
There… Just there, on the not so distant highway. Is a man. In a car. With a phone.
He is the devil, and I will cast this devil out once and for all even if I must walk this highway till the beginning of time.
He is also dark, like her.
She must. She will.
And, then, the driver chucks the phone out the open window. The phone slips and slides, turning this way and that, down-down-down the grey-green grass towards our mother’s feet and the soon-to-be body’s head.
“I SEE NOTHING, DEVIL LADY,” he cries out.
Huh. Maybe she is. Even Lilith was a mother. That is comforting representation. She snatches up the phone and drags the body back-back-back to the leaves, where she will hold her daughter tight and pray tomorrow will hold them together.
She is tired, and she mutters as sweat pours from her sheared hairline.
“I might like to be born a devil lady. I doubt they work harder than mothers.”
The wind whistles home, sweet home.
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