Conveyor Belt of Trauma - Chapter 5: Asha's Beginnings
Conveyor Belt of Trauma -
Chapter 5: Asha's Beginnings
She curled up in a comma, quilt wrapped, back pressed to the cold wall so she could feel something real, something that proved she was still alive, still breathing. Yet wrapped like a baby in a mother’s womb she never truly had, something she would yet to realize.
“Why did they send me when I wanted the pain to stop?” she screamed silently to the heavens, pulling Zebra in closer, clutching the torn zebra whose stuffing bled out like her own childhood.
Doctors, tests, surgeries. Alone on a bed in a hospital or at home. In school, when she could attend, she felt alone. Secrets slamming the door shut. One time she took all the pills she had, thinking in her child’s mind it would make it all go away. Instead she just threw them up and cuddled Zebra harder.
“Why did they send me to my aunt, at least I think she was my aunt?” “I tried telling my secrets before, and they threw me out.”
When Asha got off the plane her aunt was waiting. “You can’t go to school, so you will need to work.”
The aunt told her bosses at the factory Asha was older than she was, and Asha worked with with men, standing on cold concrete, packaging car parts. She hurt. Her body screamed but her mind was numb. Nothing was making sense. This wasn’t what the priest spoke about in church, the nuns, none of those TV shows: Little House on the Prairie, the Waltons. None of them were like this. What is going on?
It all happened when she started to tell her secrets, after taking all those pills the doctors gave her and throwing them up. Mom had told little Asha never to repeat them: “It would kill your father.” And now Scarlet Mary told her it’s the only way to be free. She’s so confused.
Nothing seems real.
She only stayed for a short while. The aunt wasn’t prepared for a little girl with a Zebra-load of health conditions. She wasn’t sturdy stock and couldn’t keep up with the work, pay her own way. Somewhere along the way she walked away from her childhood; she was yanked, of course, by monsters.
And now she’s supposed to go to Lilith’s Garden and lay her secrets to rest so the roses may bloom. She pressed her spine deeper into that cold wall.
She looked to Kelly, her Siamese cat, chocolate brown with ancient blue eyes, the only creature who ever chose her.
“I’m scared.”
Kelly blinked once, slow and certain, then leapt to the broken basement window and waited.
Asha tucked Zebra under her arm, slipped the silver medal of the Virgin into his newly sewn belly, and followed the cat into the new-moon dark.
She's torn. Those secrets are woven into her body, her cells. She doesn't know where they begin and her soul ends.
This is where we begin.
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