Twenty The Child
Twenty
The Child
By my next birthday, something new was happening to my body.
I decided I no longer disliked the boobs—that’s what he called them—I grew. My wide hips and long legs no longer made me mad. I noticed how other girls looked, and I decided I liked my look. I was no longer “the child” or an “it,” and I knew it.
No matter what he called me, I was a girl, a young woman.
This made me very happy. At least for a while. I don’t know when my real birthday is, but he chose one for me. May fifth. On May fifth of that year, I was fourteen, he told me.
We had started a different method for getting money.
I was still very good at pickpocketing. But it was harder to get close to the unsuspecting old ladies and the distracted mothers.
I had to work harder to grab a few bucks here and there.
We never took credit cards. Too much risk of getting caught, he claimed, with all the authority of a man who had mooched off others his whole life.
A lot of stores have cameras now, he told me.
They could look back and see who used the credit card.
So we stuck with cash rather than take the risk.
The new method of making money involved me pretending to be one of those girls who haunted the street corners.
It was easy, really. All I had to do was flirt with the guy and lure him into the alley where he was waiting.
Sometimes I worried about how hard he hit the guys, but none of them died as far as I know.
We didn’t have to worry about any one of them looking for us because we always went to another part of town or even to a nearby town. Never shit where you eat, he said.
One of the things I hated most about the changes to my body was when the blood came between my thighs. The first time, I thought I was dying. About the time I started to get used to it, it stopped. I was really, really glad.
I hoped it never came back. I didn’t tell him this. I didn’t like talking about it.
Then I started to get sick. I felt really bad all the time. If I ate, I puked it up. And I was so tired. He eyed me suspiciously, but he didn’t say why. I begged him to take me to the doctor, but he refused. He said I would live as if he knew all things.
Pretty soon the sickness passed and I felt better.
Not tired anymore. We kept running the scam on the guys who wanted to buy me for a few hours of disgusting pleasure.
Until my belly started to swell like I had swallowed a ball or something.
That was when things went to hell for me.
He screamed and ranted and kicked at me.
I cried and cried, begged him to tell me what was wrong.
Finally, he said I was pregnant. I was having a baby.
But I shouldn’t be pregnant since I didn’t have a husband or a boyfriend.
All I had was him. Then I realized he was the one who got me that way.
I had no idea how those things worked.
I stared at my belly. I had a baby growing inside me?
He started to cuss and scream about the time he got drunk and forgot to use a condom.
I didn’t completely understand, but I eventually figured out it had something to do with the stuff that came out of him when he was grunting and rutting into me.
The angrier he got, the more terrified I became.
What were we going to do? How did I get it out?
What did we do with it? At first he wouldn’t answer me.
He just stared at me as if I was a pile of dog shit in his path.
Then he told me he was going to fix it. Over the next few days, he forced me to drink nasty black medicine.
When the only thing that accomplished was to make me shit myself to death, he punched me in the belly and beat me up worse than he ever had before.
That didn’t work, either.
My belly just kept growing.
Then he told me we would wait until it was ready to come out and take care of it then. The way he said this made me worry, but I had no clue what I could do about it. He made all the decisions. I just did what I was told.
This was my life, my normal.
The first time I felt it moving around inside me, I screamed.
I was like, what the hell is that? I was afraid to ask him about it, so I just waited and finally figured out it was the baby.
For some reason, it made me happy. Really happy.
I had never had any toys except for that ratty old bear.
Now I was going to have a baby of my very own.
I could play with it and take care of it.
It would look at me the way I looked at him. We would be a family.
Except that isn’t what happened.
When the labor pains began, I thought I was dying for sure.
I screamed and cried and screamed some more.
He went and got this old woman who lived down the block.
She claimed she had brought dozens of babies into the world.
The pain went on for hours. It felt as if my body had a mind of its own and was going to pop open any second.
The pressure. The need to push. I couldn’t stop it.
I had no control. I thought I was going to split in half for sure. All I could do was keep screaming.
Late that night, it finally happened. The woman used her hands and fingers to help the baby come out.
She said I was real lucky that she was able to help the baby come out without a lot of tearing and extra bleeding.
I was still hurting like hell, but mostly I just wanted to hold my baby.
It was a boy. She cut the cord with scissors, then clamped it with a clothespin.
She cleaned him up, wrapped him in a towel, and handed him to me.
He was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
No other baby had ever been as beautiful as him. And he was mine.
She told me to let him suck at my breast. It hurt like hell, but I did it. Later I fell asleep. When I woke up, the old woman was gone and so was my baby.
I stare at the disgusting shell of a man collapsed into a heap in the corner.
Even as he sleeps, his chest rises and falls with the rattle of the dying.
The wound on his arm is infected. Yellow pus leaks from it.
I am certain it hurts like a son of a bitch.
I stand, walk over to him, and kick him in the arm, ensuring the toe of my boot goes into the wound.
He awakens instantly, howls and writhes in pain.
I smile and wonder how much longer his black heart can hold out. Long enough to keep the misery going for a day or two more, I suspect. Long enough for me to block out the memories of what he did to me with the howls of his agony. I squat down and watch as he shudders and quakes and cries.
When he has calmed himself and the pain has subsided to a tolerable level, I’ll kick him again.
Oh, what fun we’re going to have. I find it so amusing how his carefully laid plan to get back at me has backfired on him.