Cammie Finch, RC junior
DESTINY’S
CHILD
I
saw her first through the fog that engulfed
the courthouse in one swift embrace. I
wondered if she would recognize me,
even though I knew she wouldn’t. My car’s
headlights were my shield, just as her teardrop
eyes were safetly locked, protecting her from
the truth. I guess I wouldn’t want to know me
either, all things considered.
Her hands were small and strong. She was
hunched over, as though she was carrying an
enormous load upon her back. I suppose, in a
way, she was. My eye focused on the wrinkle
carved over her left eyebrow. I couldn’t help
but think that I had put that age-mark there
by accident, like a sculptor whose hand slips
and leaves a line that was never meant to exist.
Her brow trembled. Don’t cry now, I encour-
aged silently from the warmth of my sedan. I
can’t handle crying. Not now. She pushed an
empty stroller, the ghost of her child playing
peekaboo under its hood. The stroller was
red, pierced with yellow stars and tagged with
rainbows here and there. The woman didn’t
seem to know the where of her destination.
She didn’t seem to have a choice in the mat-
ter. She was pulled by necessity, by the tug
of guilt that she was the one still alive. If she
stopped, she’d think and remember the hole I
had ripped in her family tree. Her footprints
dug deeper in the tread of yesterday’s walk-
to-forget. Smudges of dirt flicked up on to the
backs of her legs.
I circled around the block, so she wouldn’t
think I was following her. “There’s a parking
spot,” you pointed out. But I ignored you and
drove past the meter. I needed to see her one
last time before it was my time to serve. In a
moment of guilt-ridden masochism, I needed
to see the mother’s tar-streaked tears, stain-
ing her lily-blossom cheeks. The little girl’s
rattling laughter pounded in my head, stron-
ger than it had the night that I silenced her.
We had parked outside of a quaint little
house on a dark and quiet street. “Lovelock
Court. That sounds like a nice one,” you said.
While you and I had been dancing swirly tan-
goes on each other’s skin, car leather sticking
to our necks, she was stocking up on taffeta
make-believe and glass-slippered innocence.
Coming out of our dizzy haze, I blindly flexed
the pedal, and made contact with the runaway
princess, whose frog prince waited in front of
the car. She was a fly on my windshield, not
making a dent as she collapsed on the road.
And yet, I’ve never felt more weighed down.
When had the world around me become so
polarized? I had grown accustomed to the in-
betweens of this half-caff, capri length world.
Suddenly, decisions needed to be made. Either
we do or we don’t. We are or we aren’t. We live
or we die. Yet, what was a life in prison but
the slowest death known to man. The mother
understood this much, I knew. She died a bit
every day without her babe, while her tread-
marked memory lived on in her head.
Would you visit me? I wondered. We had
always said, that when the time was right, our
child was going to be beautiful. Nights staring
up at the ceiling imagining the chestnut hair,
the brown eyes with my long slender nose and
a bit of your freckles across the cheeks. She
would have been a flautist. He would have
been a doctor (a radiologist because he would
get squeamish at the sight of blood). But our
dreams were cracked like the pavement the
mother walks on, day after day. It’s hard to
fuck between metal bars, I wanted to say even
though I hate swearing in front of you. I knew
you would only understand if I was explicit.
But, she, the mother, and I, we were more
alike than she would ever know. Both shack-
led in an endless reverie of the path not taken.
You squeezed my hand and returned me to
the present. “It wasn’t your fault. You know
that.” I looked once at the court’s four Grecian
columns, looming ahead. My vision blurred
and combined them into one fat cement wall,
blocking my view. I turned to see my victim’s
victimized mother, taking the lonely path she
never saw coming. “But I blindsided her,” I
said. “I didn’t give her the chance to choose
a different way.” It’s not your fault, I thought,
hoping that in some magical way, my thoughts
could transmit through glass windows and
highly polluted urban smog. She was looking
for her prince. You can’t stop a love like that. I
took the key out of the ignition, wiped a black
fleck of mascara from the corner of my eye,
and prepared my retreat into destiny’s cold,
metal womb.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JAKE WELLINS
Wednesday, February 25, 2015 // The Statement
8B