The Heart of Revenge (3 page)

“Mommy mi tired, we can’t just go to church
go sit down for a little beside the fan?” I was sweaty. I wanted to
get some of the free artificial breeze blowing in my face. Breeze
off little. I put on my best sorry-for face as I spoke, “Mi want
take some of the cool breeze first.”

Like a loaf of bread in the oven, the sun was
baking my forehead. I wiped off some of the sweat and dust from my
face. Mommy looked at me for a few clock ticks. She didn’t reply.
She put the broken off heel in my handbag, took off both shoes and
was trying to stuff both of them down into my handbag. Mommy’s
parents were rich, according to her, she had it all. Since she met
Dad her life had made a drastic turn, and it was downhill from then
on. Now Mommy didn't even own a bag for herself, apart from a few
black bags at home that we called scandal bags and a few bags under
her stressed out eyes. On Sundays when she wore black or gray to
church she’d take my little gray handbag.

“Mommy pleaseee.” I whined in my squeaky,
thirteen year old voice. Mommy still didn’t answer as she finally
force-fit both shoes in, but had to keep the piece of heel in her
hand to make the shoes fit into the tiny bag.“Pleeease Mommy, the
sun is pelting mi.”

Mommy was fighting with the mouth of the
handbag, pulling the zippers close together so she could zip it
shut. Sister Wilkins pulled up at the sidewalk in her silver
Starlet. She rolled down her window and I felt the cool a/c breeze
escaping the car, her wrinkled hand adjusted her glasses above her
wide nose and her voice was shaky but polite,

“Good morning Sister Aubrea, you need a lift
dear?” Mommy immediately responded

“No.” Almost with a snap in her tone, “Mi
just turning to go back home for something now.”

“What?” Mrs. Wilkins squinted her eyes and
pushed up the broad rim of her matching white hat to see in Mommy’s
face as the bright sun hazed her vision.

“I left my phone at the yard and I’m getting
an important call today.” Mommy twanged and held the unclosed
handbag behind her.

“No problem deary, I’ll help you out man, I
can just take you quick and come back.”

Mommy stuttered,

“No... no... That’s alright, we taking a taxi
’cause I have to make a stop about some money business that haven’t
reached my U.S. account, you can just go on to church leave mi.”
Mrs. Wilkins looked down at Mommy’s feet - no shoes - no stockings
- no lotion - two dry poppy-poppy foot.

“Heh Heya! ... Ok Sister Aubrea, God bless
you dear.”

“What that mean Sister Wilkins?”

“Nothing, nothing.”

Mrs. Wilkins rolled up her window. The hot
pavement seemed as if it had silvery water in the far distance as
Mrs. Wilkins silver car drove down the road to church. As the car
got smaller and smaller in distance Mommy muttered to herself,

“All of you just love show-off your dirty
self, like people frighten for car and a/c and damn cellular
phone.” Her pride was bruised, maybe her grudge even ripened, she
puffed out a breath of I-can’t-stand-her.

Mommy was use to car, she had a car once
before I was born and Daddy set it on fire one day. She didn't have
any U.S. bank account, Mom didn’t have any taxi-fare and Mom didn’t
own a house phone much less a cellphone. She carried the handbag
back to the front of her and hackled the zip.

“Hold down the shoes make mi zip up the bag
Lee.”

Mommy’s dry lips needed some of the Vaseline.
My hand crammed down the shoes while Mommy angrily yanked at the
zip and dragged it up in frustration, bursting off the zipper-head
in her hand. She threw the zipper-head, the shoes heel and my one
deggeh deggeh handbag in the dirt, threw her hands in the air and
walked off saying,

“Mi fed up of this here life enuh! Mi fed up!
Mi fed up! Mi fed up!” Mommy wasn’t crying but her eyes were
watery. “Mi don’t know what to do again, God know.” Praying, she
turned her head to the sky and eye-water filled-up her eyes.

“God you see and know what mi going through,
help mi God, please... Help mi.” She shook her head as she spoke
and the tears thickened on her eyelashes. A feeling of giving up
burst inside her. She tried to hold back the eye-water.

“God take the case and give mi the pillow.”
She cried. A long tear slid down her disheartened face, the water
lengthening from her eye to her chin. Mommy didn’t look sad. She
looked suicidal.

That Sunday evening Mommy cooked dinner. She
prepared dumplings with cooking oil and we poured cold water in
plastic cups to help wash down our Sunday dinner.

That was my last time ever eating poor
squalor for a Sunday’s dinner. God didn’t have much credit on his
phone to chit-chat with Mommy, but he still answered one of Mommy’s
prayer.

A week after that, Mommy began doing some
work with Mr. Micheal Douglas. She took money to deposit at the
bank for his hardware, supermarket, security company and
landscaping company, and she also ran other petty errands for his
businesses. Mommy was earning OK pay and told everyone she was Mr.
Micheal Douglas’s Personal Assistant, not his “Bearer”.

Though Mommy was earning some money it didn’t
come close to what she desperately needed. She needed money for the
huge doctor bill that she worried so much about. She was worrying
so much that the poor lady thinned down to skin and bones and her
eyeballs sank deep down into two holes. Mawga like brother dog. No
matter what she did she couldn’t come up with the money. It drove
her to make one of the most difficult decisions a mother could make
and it led to my wedding. This wedding day. I was fourteen when she
had to make the heart-wrenching decision. This is how it went
down.

by: Leelia Lexings

At fourteen years young, my flat chest was
rounding into breasts. Mommy thought it would be best if she
remained in the ghetto but moved me out the braka-tat-tat warzone.
She sent me to live on my own with my boyfriend uptown. Well
actually, he wasn’t my boyfriend yet, but Mommy knew what she had
to do from the get go.

Blue. Dark-blue it was on that bleaky morning
before I left. Mommy explained everything to me the best way she
knew how. Lassy barked ecstatically outside as Mr. Micheal Douglas’
Pajero pulled up at our zinc fence. He killed the purring engine
and left only one noise standing in the morning’s lightlessness,
Lassy’s meagre echoing bark.

Mommy stooped down before me, her hands busy
buttoning up my yellow blouse, it had frills running down both
sides of the buttons. The livingroom was not bright enough for me
to see her face clearly through the thick darkness of the wee
morning. The chokingly unbearable scent of the cheap red
carbolic-soap that bathed my skin smelled harshly acidic in my nose
and aggravated my allergies. I sneezed. It rushed my eyes into
squinting. I used both hands to cover my nose and mouth. Sneezed
again. Wiped. Sniffled.

Mommy spoke with a resentful cry in her
voice,

“Lee, what I’m asking you to do is for a good
cause, you hear mi? A good cause.” She used her shoulder to wipe
her running nose, then wiped mine. She sniffled but I didn’t think
it was from allergies. I think it was from how overwhelm her heart
was, the big cry inside there. Her voice became throaty. “You
understand mi honey?” Morning dryness in my eyes and inside my
mouth minty with the taste of Colgate - no tea this morning. I
nodded yes, though I didn’t quite understood why she was crying. We
were doing this for a good, things would be better. I was going to
miss my mother.

The sun was still dead, not yet risen and no
moon nor clouds were in the motionless sky, only the sorrowful
emptiness and Mom’s lonely voice shaking.

“Remember what the pastor said, you remember?
... Sometimes doing the good will hurt. It’s not an easy road, ok?”
She ran both hands down my blouse then lightly rested both palms on
my chest.

Mr. Douglas tried opening the our zinc gate.
The gate had black rubber hinges made from square cuts of car
tyres. The noisy rattling on the zinc gate was added to the sound
of Mom’s voice. The rubbery hinges gave the gate an automatic
slam-shut that sounded like God clapped his hands in the quiet. Mom
and I snapped our head around at the sound of the zinc slamming.
She knew he was coming. This was it. Her lips trembled and she
spoke faster,

“Look this way honey, others going to judge
you bad baby.” She placed one palm on my cheek turning me around,
“Look this way, look ... they’ll say bad things, but honey, they
don’t know, they don’t know, lord knows they don’t know." I
listened as my nose grabbed a lungful of the cool atmosphere, the
clean morning air tunnelled through my nose and into my mouth; it
tasted unpolluted and filled with nature’s fresh morning-dew, the
light smell of blossoms, rivers and the perfumy essence of flowers.
Mommy’s face looked like crucifixion.

“You see, doing the good sometimes is doing
the lesser evil. And it hurts, every strand of my hair and every
muscle in my body pains me.” The tears came in two streams down her
face. Lassy barked as Mr. Douglas stepped on to our raw-concrete
doorstep. She pulled me into her bosom and wrapped her hands around
my head, rocking with me and protecting me.

“Listen Lee and never forget.” Both her open
palms clasped my cheeks and she firmed her eyes into mine. “No
matter what others say, never let it stop you from doing the good,
no matter how difficult the good is. Pride is as invisible as the
words of gossip and it will hurt you deep.” Her palms pressingly
shook my cheeks with passion, “But only when
YOU
let them
hurt you Lee ...” Her heart hoped that I understood at only
fourteen. My slender fingers squeezed on my gray handbag.

She was counselling herself too as she sent
off her girl child. Her eyes penetrated deep beyond my child’s eyes
and her words aimed at the goodness of my soul. “But only when you
let them WIN Lee ... Only when you let them WIN! O.K? You
understand mi. Right?” Mommy quieted. The morning became a
listening silence. I answered,

“Yes Mommy.”

A chilly wind blew through the window, swayed
Mom’s black slip, and all her tears broke loose from her eyes. My
small hands brushed away her tears. I would not let her down.

The heavy scent of Mr. Douglas’ cologne
climbed through the faulty joinings of our board house, spread into
the livingroom, and forced itself up my irritated nose. There was a
knock-knock at the door and a husky voice in a formal tone
called,

“Mrs. Lexings... Mrs. Lexings.”

Knock! Knock! Knock!

“Mrs. Lexings!”

Mommy waited forty days and forty nights
before she answered low, with a cry in her voice,

“Coming.”

She kissed my forehead, ran one hand down my
blouse one last time, breathing out forcibly, and then stood to her
feet. Beside her small feet were all my packed belongings, in three
black scandal bags.

Less than an hour later, emergency. Asthma.
Mom was rushing with Pinky to the hospital, with the only money she
had left. The dinner money.

I took my eyes off the bathroom door. Nathan
hoisted back my gown over my bent ass.

by: Leelia Lexings

I can’t afford anyone hearing us, I quietly
yelp to him,

“Take your time with it babes ... It’s not
running away.”

Wincing my face in an ugly plea, eyes rolls
to the sky but pussy wet and drooling with delight, almost
dripping. He slows down, driving his cock into me from behind with
slow thrusts, with nursing care, then shoves his gigantic penis the
furthest I’ve ever felt a fucking cock in my life. I flash-dash my
hand over my mouth, gagging myself, squirm. I want to yell at the
top of my voice but I can’t, my family is in the livingroom. I’m
through fucking; his cock is cervical-cancer big. I can’t take it
anymore. I stand up straight so his cock would slip out my cunt,
but the head of it is still in me. I yawp out desperately

"Oh my Godmother! Please stop Nathan,
PLEEAASSEE.”

He didn't even open his eyes to look into my
pleading face. I put my hand behind me, flagging it frantically for
him to stop. Useless. I want to curl up in a corner on the floor
like a mosquito destroyer, grab my belly and cry.

“Nathan! You hate mi!” And finally he
stops.

The short-man wraps his arms around my wire
waist, drags me to the other side of the bathroom and forces my
back down, bending me over the face-basin, the pink of my pussy
exposed to him. I stare in the mirror at him standing behind me as
he slings the hampering camera off his shoulders and rests it on
the face-basin. Grabs my two ass cheeks. Squeezes, then spreads
them apart. He kisses one of my ass cheeks, suckingly. Moaning as
he sucks it. Bites. Sucks hard, devouring it with wild kisses, all
over my round little romp. My eyes roll over as his big warm mouth
caresses and tongues my quivering ass, sending a titillating
pleasure erupting through my entire body, up my spine and curling
my toes senselessly. I bite my lips from the sweet heavenly
pleasures, his oral softness on my sensitive zone, my nerves swells
so huge as his soft wet tongue pulls on the flesh of my ass and
licks the round creasing underside, long licks, slow licks. He
sloppily dines lower, his wet tongue licking against the lowest tip
of my pussy cheeks from behind. I shut my eyes and gape my mouth
wide open as I feel the play of his sharp teeth on my sacred flesh,
making naughty hungry sex bites, while his naked tongue
passionately stimulates the skin of my tender flesh underneath
me.