Everything Good Will Come. Sefi Atta
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Название: Everything Good Will Come
Автор: Sefi Atta
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Зарубежная классика
isbn: 9781623710163
isbn:
I had no idea what part of the city we were in.
My mother’s priest was quiet as she explained what had happened. He had the same expression I remembered, his nose turned up as though he was sniffing something bad. She was to give me holy water to drink, since my father would not allow me to stay for cleansing. Then he produced a bottle of it, green and slimy. I recognized the spirogyra I’d seen in biology classes. I had to drink the water in the churchyard, and make myself sick afterward. None of it was to remain in me. Outside my mother handed the bottle to me. I gagged on every drop.
“Stick your finger down your throat,” she said, when I finished.
Two attempts brought the entire contents of my stomach onto the ground, but I continued to retch. My eyes filled with tears. Some of the water had come through my nose.
“Good,” my mother said.
I thought of stamping on her feet, squeezing her hand to regain my sense of balance.
“You should never have followed that girl,” she said. “Look at me. If anything had happened to you, what would I have done? Look at me.”
My gaze slipped from hers.
“The bottle,” she said. “Give me the bottle, Enitan.”
I handed it to her. It could have been a baton. My mother was hollow, I thought. There was nothing in her. Like a drum, she could seize my heart beat, but that was all. I would not say another word to her, only when I had to, and even then I would speak without feeling: “Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Good night.”
We arrived home and I walked to the back yard, by the fence where the scarlet hibiscus grew. Sheri had gotten pregnant from the rape. Didn’t a womb know which baby to reject? And now that the baby had been forced out, how did it look? The color of the hibiscus? I placed one by my ear and listened.
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