seven || chiara amelia sephtis

Mama weaves stories in the air before me, an echo of the work she does on my hair, dipping her hand into the bowl of water beside her and tugging at the strands until another row sits carefully in line with the all the others, tight against my scalp. Her words are not quite as neat, despite their frequency, and I find myself tuning out her drone as she starts on another section. She talks about how god walks among men, a never-ending list of all the wrongs mankind has wrought written into his skin. I reach up idly to rub at the sore scalp, ignoring her chiding, and settle a little further into the side of the bed as mama's feet poke and prod me to sit up straighter.

Not a word passes her lips of Papa, despite the way the front door hangs unevenly on its hinges five days later. The garden out front remains ruined, flowers trampled flat under standard issue boots. I don't ask, my voice still caught in my throat and worn from screaming, purple-blossoms spread across high cheekbones. We couldn't get the blood out of the carpet in the hall, so I'd taken it outside and burned it last night after dark, breathing in smoke and pretending that fourteen years of memories suddenly put to a halt weren't what was stealing the air from my lungs.

As she continues her work in shaping me, preserving me, Mama loses me altogether. Her words are a well-practiced litany of retribution to come, in time, always in time. 

There is never any time. 

---

I watch as Mama's hand shakes as she's working, her needle hesitant to make another stitch before the tremor stops. It's just a moment, but she falters and frowns at the shirt she is mending for the man down the road, a rare moment of uncertainty in her sureness. Mama squeezes her hand tight and shakes it. She continues with her stitching until the shirt doesn't have a gaping hole through the back anymore, falling branch be damned.

"Why do you help him?" I ask. It is a curious thing, my mother's generosity. She speaks of the retribution to come, in time, in time, but mends the shirt of a Peacekeeper who just last week lashed a boy who stole firewood because his family was freezing. The Lamprey boy is laid up at home now, unable to work with the infection setting in on his back. Word is he'll die within the week, leaving his mother and sister alone. And now, who knows how long they'll last with the harsh winter that bears its teeth in the trees?

Mama hums, clove and pine serenity in the sound, all-encompassing and sinking me down into the carpet just like it did when I was little.

"My child, there is a higher law in this world than he who holds the whip."

A higher law, she says. I have repeated her prayers and praises with perpetually cracked lips, calloused bone-thin fingers folded, head bowed, sometimes lying prone on the floor. I have asked for forgiveness and begged for mercy when I have been deceitful, and cruel, and selfish. I have done everything she has asked of me, believed in everything she has asked of me, and yet...

She continues talking, but I tune her out as I continue to rub oil into my elbows, frowning at the cracked, ashy skin. This winter is unforgiving. A year on from Papa's arrest and we manage to make our ends meet by the skin of our teeth. I've stopped going to school. What point is there in learning there what I already know when the only way to keep food on the table is for me to start picking up the slack Papa left behind? My cuticles have drawn back, and my nails are chewed short, and the skin all around is cracked till bloody. Gloves or not, the paper mill strips you raw. It doesn't pay much, but it's enough for us to get by while Mama recovers from her cough. And so, we survive.

How am I to believe in a higher law than that which allows men like PK Garland to do as they please when the best we can hope to do is survive? There is no justice there. I want to believe in divine retribution, to believe like Mama that men, in time, will find their justice in the hands of an all-seeing god, but how am I to believe in a god who allows us to live in such fear? Who would allow this? Who would rightly allow this, divine retribution or no?

I go with Mama to deliver the shirt later that evening, but can't bring myself to look PK Gardland in the face. Men like him don't deserve the kindness this world gives them.

---

As always, I eye the comb on the stove warily, watching as the flame licks the metal. Mama continues humming, twisting sections of my hair up and clipping them in place. She leaves the bottom layer unclipped and carefully combed through. The Lamprey girl, Dinah, and her mother sit at the kitchen table across from me. Dinah's hair is pulled back into a haphazard ponytail, her black hair oily and limp.  I watch as she reaches up to rub at her face, her dull, brown skin sunken in under her eyes, and wonder how a bright young girl could become someone like this in just a year. Her mother looks twice as beaten down as she continues to shave away at what will become a wooden bowl in her hands.

I feel the heat of the comb before my mother has it near my hair, a small cloth wrapped around her hand so she won't be burned when she presses my hair between the comb and the cloth. My skin prickles and I have to a take a deep breath and remind myself to sit still as Mama hums in the silence that envelops all of us in the room. The Lampreys don't have enough for firewood this winter, so they've been staying with us some nights to stave off the cold. It doesn't make them any more talkative, practically living with us. I still know just as much about Dinah now as I did when her brother died.

As Mama sets the comb back on the fire to reheat, I slick oil across my fingers, and the bottom layer of my hair, and my elbows and cuticles and everything in between that has cracked and frayed. There is oil smudged across my forehead and over my lips. On my neck. The bumpy scar on my shoulder from an accident last winter in the mill. It is everywhere.

It isn't right.

Mama and Mrs. Lamprey talk of god and retribution at night by the fire, of how, in time, everything will be made right. The world beyond us will bring us the justice we know to be righteous, and there will be peace in our deaths. Mama says we should not pass judgement on those who do us wrong, and that we should forgive. Her god will judge and pass the sentence, but it is not on us to decide. Her words ring false in my ears.

There will be emptiness.

No righteous god could allow this world to exist as it does. The world as it is is all there is for us, and the justice in this world is man-made. No god is writing the sins of the world into his skin, passing judgement and keeping score. All I can do in this world to keep myself safe is pass judgement. Everyone, everyone in this world would leave me behind if it meant their survival, in the end. I will be the judge, and I will survive.

We say our prayers by the hearth when the sun goes down. Mama, and Mrs. Lamprey, and Dinah fold their fingers together and bow their heads.

I keep my eyes on the fire.