The child sleeps numbly, but she still rocks it randomly, its head rolling now and again out of the bowl of her arm and then attentively pulling itself back onto the pillow of its own chest. She brushes away flies from the child’s face, but lets them land on her own matted head covering, on her one bare shoulder, across the tent of her lap where her crossed legs form the stick struts that hold her dress flat across her.
Venders have pushed her down to this end of the market. They do not want her and her cup; her thin, elastic frame and her cup; her sack of bones child and her cup; they do not want her cup competing for the stray coins that might buy a bootlegged DVD or an imported all-the-way-from-China shirt or last night’s left over dough dollops that the baker thought better about just before he was to throw them out. She does best outside of the mixed grain bakery and the cluttered meat scraps places. The people who shop there are almost as close to the street as she, and they will find not much to give, but a little, and a little from enough people will make enough. At the high end of the market, where whole cuts of meat and pants with zippers and shoes with laces are bought, she is simply something to walk around, and the shopkeepers push her down the street, down the street, down the street until she is at this end of the market, one of a dozen women without means and without the fat to do well in prostitution. As the last man to have her said, if a man can feel the floor through her dark spot of a body as he works his anger against her pinned mystery, then it is time to give up the sex trade and go for her bucket of sympathy more directly. None of these women have the means to not be bowed under a man who could afford to pay. A man of just small means could feel the floor or the wall or the table top through any of them, senselessly blunting himself.
Some hold out their hands, kiss the dangling hands of strangers who drop coins, though sometimes what the strangers drop are only buttons, bottle caps, stones. She stays as still as she can, unless she is rocking the child, and has the begging cup that once was a can of something – those earlier wealthy contents now forgotten – situated prominently where the strangers will see it, will have to walk around it when they walk around her, and where the older children cannot reach to steal it without discovering her unsuspected quickness.
When the street is too noisy with wailing and calls of recognition and carts and arguments over the price of second hand barbed wire or fiftieth-hand virginity, she will reach unseen into her clothing and pinch through the thin cloth the baby’s leather behind to get him to wail, to fling an arm over his head and let fly just one scream. She has not done the math, but she thinks this pushes her away from the school of other begging women as she competes for the customers’ alms. The other women beg of the passers by, lean pathetically forward and babble about lost husbands or sons; but the child screams, as though an Almighty equal, at God; and some people listen close enough that they will toss one coin or two into her chiming metal cylindrical bank.
By the end of the day there is a film at the bottom of the nicked cup: eight or ten coins, a bottle cap, two buttons, a plug from something mechanical. She puts the money in a purse that hangs inside her dress between the dry of her breasts, and threads the cup onto a cord that has been unseen about her neck all day. She wakes the child, who seems no different awake than asleep, and begins the two mile walk to her village, where home is a corner of someone else’s one room utility, a family bounty with a rain moat dug around it and thatch that is mixed with tar paper and stolen canvas scraps.
When, brittle bone weary and numb to the ankles, she arrives, she gives the child to his mother and says this one will not do any longer. Tomorrow it will be someone’s girl, a girl child with a little more life left in her, a bit of animation. She gives the mother one of her coins and begins to stagger to the river where she will place her feet in the water and sit peering at them as the coolness begins to work its way slowly from the toes to the arches to the instep, and her heels sing to the mud like she and the river bed were sisters, or brothers, or united like a hungry, anciently snarling pack of jackals.
Ken Poyner has lately been seen in “Analog”, “Café Irreal”, “Cream City Review”, “Black Denim”, and many other wonderful places. His latest book of short fiction, “Constant Animals’, is available from his web, www.kpoyner.com, and from amazon.com. He is married to Karen Poyner, one of the world’s premier power lifters, and holder of more than a dozen current world power lifting records. They are the animal parents of four rescue cats and assorted self-satisfied fish.
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