CHAPTER 19
THE CURATOR
Sal stroked my hair, and for a heartbeat I let myself believe I was safe.
I was baring my soul to him – laying it out raw, hoping he’d cradle it gently.
But the moment his fingers brushed through my hair, I was no longer down in the Rabbit Warren, I was back home.
Knees pressed into the shag pile carpet as my mother’s fingers yanked through the knots in my hair like punishment.
Her words etched into me like scars across my skin. ‘You think you’re special, don’t you?’ she hissed, tugging my braid so tight my scalp burned. ‘You look just like me. That’s your curse.’
I didn’t cry. I didn’t reply. I just stared at the floor, letting her bitterness braid itself into my hair.
She stopped braiding my hair soon after the tremors started.
Her hands just shook too much. So I braided hers instead, whispering the same lullaby she sang to me.
Pretending they didn’t sound like threats.
She begged me with her eyes; hollow, yellowed, pleading eyes to help her.
To end her. And I admit, during those moments, I did fantasise about crushing pills into her tea, or unplugging her oxygen machine while shouting “die mother-fucker”, but somehow it never ended that way.
I don’t really know what was wrong with her.
I imagine it was some degenerative disease or late-stage cancer.
I never asked. She lost control of her body, her dignity, and eventually her grip on reality.
And to be honest, by this stage, I didn’t really care.
She was always emotionally abusive. I’m sure she never saw me as a daughter, but as a mirror – and hated what she saw.
My youth, my beauty, they were both potential threats.
She told me I was too pretty to be smart. Too smart to be loved.
As her body failed, her bitterness calcified.
She lashed out with venom, blaming me for everything – her fading beauty, her husband’s wandering eye.
..to me, and the slow erosion of her dignity.
She would shriek at the top of her lungs for me to brush her hair, and then slap my hand away the moment I tried.
‘You’re doing it wrong,’ she spat. ‘You always do it wrong.’
Still, I clung to the fragments of tenderness, the rare flickers of warmth that once made her my mother. She was, for so long, my only source of love – though by the end, it tasted more like poison than comfort.
I knew the rhythm of her breathing. I could sense the pain cresting before it reached her like a storm I forecast before the rain dropped.
So when I said I miss her, I meant it. I miss the rare moments when her gaze softened, when she saw me not as a burden, but as myself.
When she did braid my hair with trembling hands, the strands slipped through her fingers like water.
I’d sit cross-legged on the floor, knees aching, pretending not to notice the way she looked at me – like I was the ghost of her youth, summoned to haunt her.
‘You look just like I did,’ she whispered again and again. ‘Before I got ruined.’ I never asked what ruined her. I didn’t need to. It was written in the way her hands trembled, in the silence that followed her screams, in the mirror she refused to look into. I knew.
She lashed out again, her fingers clawing at my wrist with what little strength she had left, fuelled by the last embers of her bitter rage. The oxygen hissed beside her bed... and it reminded me she was still alive, still suffering, still hating.
I looked at her – really looked. Her face had collapsed into itself, cheekbones jutting like broken shards of glass. She swung at me, missed, and then laughed – a sound so hollow it made my skin crawl.
So I reached for the pillow. Not in anger. Not even in fear. Just a quiet instinct, like tucking her into bed for the last time. I pressed it down gently. She didn’t fight. She didn’t flinch. She just stared, as if she’d been waiting for it.
I whispered, ‘I love you.’
She didn’t say it back.
And maybe that’s why I kill bad people. Not for justice, or redemption, but to exorcise myself.
Every time a man smiles like that, I see my father.
Every time a woman raises her hand, I see my mother.
I never believed I deserved peace. This is my penance.
Black isn’t mourning, it’s rot. It’s the colour of what’s left of me.
But if I can stop one scream – just one – if I can silence one bruise before it blooms, then maybe, just maybe, I’m not the monster I see in the mirror.