”There are different levels of pain; pain that allows bruises to the surface, giving you more moments to feel, there is also that pain that courses through your spin, making it even less for you to stay still but somehow you get through it..an ache a day, a will to live, and there is that pain, that crushes your heart making you wish you were dead, that pain is unbearable, like the love ripped from your chest, like one slammed to the walls of death, like one seeing your end and wishing to God you really were dead. There is that pain, unbearable, unmeasured pain..that pain. But somehow, you still survived it, barely, and soon..because you were able to walk through hell, you come out more scarred that anything else. Thus when faced with new pains you take it, you take all of it like it is nothing at the palm of your hands, for the numbness to feel had somehow crawled under your skin, making it thick..you don’t feel, not the highest, not even the littlest, you don’t feel..not yet..for there is a moment you wait for, when it comes..you want to feel it all, but for now..let the bouts of pain come…you are ready for it...”
******
-Stephanie Egberike ( Itchyfingers)
-Sept. 16th. Sunday 7:50 am, Nigeria, Africa
ROSE
****
CHAPTER TWO
*
She waited for it, and it did come, down on her back as the woman released her hand. The spikes hook on to her cloths, piercing her skin, drawing blood as she drags it away from her body.
She falls to her knees, she closes her eyes, she lets it simmer, as it courses through her veins, the pain, like claws chokes her, yet, yet…she braces herself and then she gets to her feet.
The woman who had flogged her with the spiked ropes stares at her ”It hurts doesn’t it?”
She doesn’t answer.
”What is your name?” The woman asks the girl again
Silence, instead she stares at her, saying nothing, absolutely nothing. She hadn’t spoken since that day, that day years ago, when they raped her mother before her eyes, when they pinned their five bodies to her and raped her, a little child, when they stabbed her father, crippled him even ..she hasn’t spoken, not even when they lifted her father and then flung him over the cliff.
She remembered that night, the shrill cries of her mother, the anguish from her father and then the shattering of his bones as he hits the rock and then the splash of the water as he hits rock bottom. She remembered staring at the cliff in the darkness as they held her over their shoulders.. She remembered their faces..each and everyone of them..especially the one with a scar under his eyes..the one who registered himself in her memory all this years, raping her for years and then giving her to men…yes, she remembered him well. She hadn’t said a word, not one, since that day when the pain felt like her death…
