Mother Knows Best(book 1)

Entry 3

I write funny, read funny, I do a lot of things, funny, but I hope it bothers you not, I wish, from the bottom of my heart, that it helps you to fit into the shoes of my head, read my thoughts in my voice, and essentially, view me as me, not from a stranger view, or simply, out of place, no, as me.

I stay, hidden, writing and reading the previous words for some time. My mind wants to scratch at them, poke and peel off the improperness, that lay slumbering as barely healed scabs, but no matter how much I try to fix it, scratching it and peeling it and digging at it and chewing at it and simply trying to clean off its wrongness, I'm left with more commas and unending thoughts. Maybe, my life is just an unending thought. Maybe yours is.

I'm welcoming you into my, unpleasantly delivered unending thought.

I was born and raised in Norbury, where grieving never stops. And as a little kid, I saw it every day on the roads and in houses and during chore work. It sheltered on the absence of youth, beneath a rotting hat of a man who returned after the sun beat his back bent and darkened his face and calloused his hands. The same man whom the work of his fingers could produce no success.

In the swollen, brown eyes of an early sprung mother, who, hadn't known what motherhood was or even reached full womanhood, had to haul herself into the edges of the forest, where she birthed out a thing with thick gray furs and whiskers and soft paws. A child of a mister-no-good baker, a known married man of four, who can't keep his stale goods off the warm bums of young girls.

On the stockings of a church-hatted woman who, may the Lord be the judge of closed doors, got on her knees, painting them with carpet burns, as she gave the deacon a couple of sucks for a couple offerings to pay a meal for her children.

       It writhed between the burning stench that hung on the fading, trembling bones of murdered babies; those who were cursed with magic streaming in their veins, snippets of white strands and wings, or worse, animalistic features that damned them to death.

    Norbury was just simply a grieving town.
I was born sibling-less, not because I was truly an only child, but because the rest were the unfortunate magic borns, and thus, were sent by the river to die. And then there was me, left with two parents, grandparents, and a lot of aunts and uncles and cousins.

      My father, not that I've really met him, but from the broken pieces of what I've been told of him, is a good man. A good, working man whose breath was cut too short. Everyone knew him, yes, the typical everyone knows everyone, and at the faint sounds of his name, they force teardrops to be where there weren't any and they tell me snippets of him.

     The milk man, as he drools over my mother's tight stockinged legs, getting a bump in his pants, tells me how my father was a lucky man. An old charm who brought color to peoples cheeks and soiled panties, which, as a little kid, went over my head. The baker's wife, who cups a ring of her thick, shiny hair in her hand and bits her bottom lip, a spread of red against chubby cheeks, tells that he had a type of dessert that her tongue always wanted to taste.

A few miners with dirt-stained cheeks darkened faces and calloused hands, tell me that my father was an honest, hard worker. His fingers produced many fruits of successful work and thus, people loved him. That also meant that people hated him as well.

My father was murdered, on my birthday, when I freshly turned two years old. And the culprit, a wrinkly, paled woman who wanted a piece of my father and when he denied her, she went around saying he assaulted her. Although no one really believed her, it didn't matter, at least not to her husband, who took a knife and cut up my father to his satisfaction.

    And that was the end of him, Ronald Jay Ihejirika, my good o daddy.

My mother, whom everyone disliked, simply because she was my father's wife, wasn't the worst as they painted her as. She is pretty enough to hurt the hearts of men. With dark, smooth skin, and dark curls that stop at her chin and eyes as wide as dolls but nevertheless she was beautiful. And on her finger, she still had her wedding band, that rusted old thing that cut at her finger.

When my father died, my mother had to take up jobs, even those society has spat on.

In the fresh hours of the day, mother worked with old folks, with her stained nurse shoes and half torn stockings; and in the night, she walks up to the mansion on Thirteenth Street, got on her knees with her skirt widening, her soft skin pinched red as they kissed the ground harshly, giving only the best head that Mr. Perkins ever had in his life. Most nights, he allowed her to go home early, and in those nights, she spent laying on the couch and watching good times, her favorite show.

My last memory of her sprouts from age eight, she was on the couch as she had always been, watching good times with her stockinged feet rubbing each other like crickets, her eyes were shut and her chest was gently rising. Soft white, tangled curls laid upon dark ones. Mother was never old, she wasn't really stressed either, no, magic had just got to her.

First, white curls amongst black ones, next, wild eyes, then, she froze the heart and manhood of a man who tried to steal what rightfully belonged to hers. It wasn't long before the townsfolk was banging on our door, with pitchforks and lit torches and guns in their hands, and sent her away to kill her. And so it was the end of Ezinne Mauri Ihejirika.

And that left me with my father's parents.
Grandma Editha and granddaddy James. Along with a couple too many aunts, uncles, and cousins. All in a house that was more of a big apartment building as it had different sections for everyone in my family, so basically, another plot for a good times episode.

    It didn't bother me at first to have everyone being near, as we were often sardines in a pack, but as you know, all good things have to end.

      My granddaddy died as he tried to build a treehouse for me, though most of the details are blurred, part of me felt as though it was my fault. You know, if I hadn't asked for one, or constantly rang the idea in his ears, maybe he'd still be alive. That brought tension on grandma Editha's already old bones, but she never once broke. At least not in front of me as a kid.

But any-who, like good o Lady Bracknell, said, "To lose one parent, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness."
      So here's more of my unpleasantly delivered, careless unending thought.

-Lilura