The Price of Blind Trust and Cruel Coldness Chapter 10
The third year of his sentence, during outdoor exercise hours, several fellow inmates cornered Thomas inside the restroom.
Their grievance: his midnight screaming kept everyone awake.
They shoved him onto the damp tile floor. Fists rained down onto his back and ribs.
He curled up, shielding his head, blood pooling beneath his cheek.
It hurt, yet he did not fight back. A small part of him believed he deserved every blow.
For the first time, he understood a fraction of what Jennifer had endured.
Trapped in a narrow, pitch-black space. No one coming to save you. Nowhere to run.
He lay in a puddle of his own blood, his lips trembling. “Jennifer… I’m sorry.”
There was no reply.
Far away in a rural village, Antony had been sent to Thomas’s hometown, placed in the care of his hot-tempered paternal grandmother.
The nine-year-old boy wore ragged clothing, shoveling muck from the pig pen. Raw chilblains bloomed across his cheeks, and scars from farm work crisscrossed the backs of his hands.
His grandmother sat in the courtyard, hurling insults at him every few minutes. “You little curse! If your mother hadn’t existed, your father would never be in prison! Everything we owned is gone, and it’s all your fault, you and your mother!”
Antony didn’t talk back. He carried out his chores numbly.
At night, he hid inside the drafty woodshed. He pulled a faded photograph out from the inner pocket of his shirt.
A picture of me and him on his fifth birthday. I’d baked a lopsided, ugly cake for him. He’d smudged frosting all over my face. We had both laughed like fools.
Antony traced his mother’s face on the photo with dirt-streaked fingers. “Mom… Antony hurts so badly. Grandma hit me again today. She beat my legs with a broom. It hurt worse than when Dad hit me.”
He sniffled. “Mom spanked me once before. It was because I threw stones at the neighbor’s car, You only tapped my bottom twice… and then you started crying. You cried harder than I did.”
His lower lip trembled. Silent tears streamed down his cheeks and landed on the photograph. In the picture, his mother smiled gently at him.
“Mom, I know I was wrong. Come back and spank me again, okay? You can hit me as many times as you want. Just please come home.”
Wind whistled through the cracks in the door, sounding like an unheard sigh.
I lingered beyond the woodshed window, watching the gaunt child curl up clutching the photo.
Sorrow and emptiness blurred into one within me.
He was telling the truth. That single spanking was the only time I’d ever disciplined him. Afterward, I’d held him and cried for an entire hour.
But I would never have physical arms to embrace him again, not in this lifetime.
Many miles away, my mom dragged an old suitcase and stepped out through the gates of the nursing home.
The sunshine was warm, golden ginkgo leaves carpeted the road.
She loaded her luggage into a taxi and gave the driver an address. A distant city, where no one knew her.
Scenery rushed past the car windows. She glanced down at the red string bracelet wrapped around her wrist.
I’d woven it for her when I was little. My childish hands had been clumsy, using three clashing colors of thread. She had worn it for eighteen years and never once taken it off.
“Jennifer.” She whispered softly. “Mom’s moving somewhere new. I will keep living, for you.”
The taxi merged into the endless stream of traffic, growing smaller and smaller in the distance. I remained, weightless, watching the vehicle vanish at the end of the highway.
Wind scattered the ginkgo leaves, like countless golden butterflies drifting through my translucent fingertips.
There was nothing left in this world for me to cling to.
My mom was still alive. That was perhaps the last, only warm thing left.
Soft light began to dissolve what remained of me. My edges softened, fading like mist, lighter than air, like a feather lifted by the wind.
I took one final glance at the sky above, and closed my eyes.