The flight {open}

I stop at the tenth railing from the left of the parameter incarcerating Bryant’s matchstick factory, at the wrought iron gates, coal black and weather-beaten like ten long fingers tipped with pointed bistre nails. Curling my hands around a wrung, I press my cheeks into the railing and wait for the whistle to sound. Bryant’s matchstick factory is unremarkable, bulky and inelegant against the soft light filtering through the smog, with stiff square edges, ashy bricks and gaping bay windows like gap toothed smiles. Around the workman’s yard, dozens of felled trees lie sheltered beneath tarp; butchered and bastardized, this is their abattoir. I shouldn’t have come here.

The whistle is a shrill scream over the mechanical whirring, band saws and assembly lines of district nine and it is repeated through neighbouring factories like echoes or the song of mockingjays, over and over as shifts begin and end throughout the district. The gears and cogs are ever turning. As the factory doors open the workers footsteps are a drum keeping to a perfect rhythm. Some are talking, some pause to light cigarettes, some laugh loudly while others stay silent but for the beat of their footfalls against the concrete slab flooring- their uniforms are the cool white of mint cream, dulled under the smoggy sky as the sun begins it’s slow descent this evening, identical smocks and hats, rubber black gum boots- they are indistinguishable and I strain to pick her out of the crowd.

Like the inexplicable urge to hold your finger too close to an open flame, to toss your house keys into a lake and other acts of unmistakable self sabotage, today I was greeted by a most dangerous impulse. Perhaps my grandmother, liquored up and snoring in her battered arm chair was the final thread to tear, the last straw of a bad week filled with swirling guilt, annoyance, being beaten down by each insult and harsh word. This is the result; I have cracked like a glass pane into a thousand acerbic shards, and now, holding each broken piece of myself I have run crying to my mother. Well, I have run crying to watch her from afar at least.

There she is, in a mint cream coloured uniform like everyone else, her burnt sienna skin as flawless and radiant as ever against the dirty white smock, her hair is tied back beneath a midnight blue head scarf and the weight of her last child still lingers in her thighs, leaving her generously proportioned but not unpleasantly so. My mother was beautiful and you can still see the fading echoes of that. She isn’t smiling, and this pleases me, for some reason. Schadenfreude curls through me and mingles with my bitterness to form some kind of hateful cocktail in the conduits of my veins, I don’t want to see her happy not when she was the one who sold me to my grandmother, and I don’t care if she didn’t have a choice either- it was her choice to get herself knocked up as often as she did knowing full well that she couldn’t afford to keep us all. It is her fault I am here, unhappy with my face pressed to the gate of a factory. The work, I imagine is dull, the pay is meagre and with each day on the assembly lines I picture that a person feels their humanity ebb away, their soul turning into motor oil and gear chains but I would take that life in a heartbeat if it meant that I could get away from my grandmother. In her chair, her thin mouth open to reveal the tiny brown pebbles of her teeth it had occurred to me earlier how frail her body really was, how easy it would be to pick up a pillow and smother her, effectively freeing me. And that is about the time I left, I know, I know, I’m a hero for not doing it. Or, conversely, I’m a coward.

With a flicker of my nimble fingers, I roll a cigarette and place it between my lips, getting the matchbook out of my pocket, it was made here and I wonder if my mother’s hands touched the thin little match with its little red cap like a thin, auburn headed infant- this thought gives me pleasure to watch it burn. A woman next to her is saying something, but my mother is hardly listening, staring off to the distance. Tendrils of hate waft from me, the way that the smoke from my cigarette curls into the air. She turns, my heart seems to miss a beat, it stutters, stammers before flitting like butterfly wings in my chest. My mother’s mouth curves into a smile, dark deep eyes lighting up the way the stars must illuminate the sky and from between her lips I see the familiar outline of my name. She’s seen me. It is sickening how pleased she is to see that I am here.

I could run to her, weave through the other workers as though lost in a sea of mint cream cornstalks and find her. I could throw my arms around my mother, take her to a cafe and buy cheap synthetic cups of coffee on the meagre coins that I have swiped from my grandmother’s change purse. Under the glare of strip lights, above ragged linoleum we could laugh as she tells me stories from my child hood that are dim memories to me but that she can recall with ease, has been going over in the eight years since my departure, we can grow a little solemn or misty eyed as we recall my father, but find hope and comfort as she relays to me news of my siblings. I could curl my hands into the bristle of her ebony hair and slam her face into the table for leaving me with my grandmother, abandoning me to the wolves.

I could, I could and for a minute I think I am going to. Instead, I simple turn on my heels.

And now I’m running. The back alleys are narrow and fetid with old trash, rotten food, old diapers and steam rises from funnels like some otherworldly nightmare. My shoes are thinning at the sole, a little too small and borrowed from my grandmother, soon I become breathless from the heavy weight pressed upon my heart, but still I keep on running, not sure of what is ahead of me and not stopping to look either.I wonder, somehow, that if I keep running if I couldn’t simply take off from the ground, run right into the air and sprout soft, sparrow wings.