Petty Rage by Thandiwe Mpofu

Chapter 5

KIM

Past: Ten years ago

“You know, you look just like your whore of a mother.”

My stomach—which has been growling angrily for three days now—lurches as soon as the fat, disgusting man says the words that I’ve heard over and over since I was a little girl.

I notice the hungry gleam in his eyes as he looks at me. I stand shivering in the middle of the sorta-kinda living room, which is really where I sleep, making me the first point of contact to all sorts of vultures that come through the front door of the trailer as they make their way to the only ‘bedroom’ which was my mother’s work room.

“She’s not here,” I whisper.

“Oh, I know,” the man says with a leer on his red, dirty face, the wide gap between his dirty, chipped teeth showing. “She hasn’t been home for days, has she?”

I don’t say a word.

He knows Luci, my mother is on one of her disappearing stunts. He’s always watching, but lately, since my thirteenth birthday, I feel like he’s been watching me even more than before.

“Say, are you lonely?” he questions, stepping even closer. “You know you don’t have to stay in this hellhole all by yourself, you can come to the big house with me, Big Earl.”

Bile rises up my throat as I take a small, tiny, barely visible step back.

Big Earlis the fat, disgusting landlord of the St. Peter’s Trailer Park where my mother and I’ve been living for over a year now.

We’ve had to move all over the country. At first because of my mother but now, it’s all my fault.

I’ve had bad vibes about this place, the landlord and the people who live here since we arrived in the middle of the night. It was deadass winter, the snow sticking to the ground, but the chill from that night has nothing on what I’m feeling right now because this, Big Earl’s sudden appearance in the trailer when he knows my mother isn’t home, is definitely premeditated.

“It’s sponsored by a church, butterfly, so it’s charitable and full of people who want to do good,” mom said with her teeth chattering, but wouldn’t dare look me in the eye. “We’ll be safe here.”

She lied.

I’ve never been safe since we got here and she, well, she changed too.

That night was the last night she ever called me butterfly.

“I also just got two Big Macs and on a whim, I bought you a strawberry milkshake and some McNuggets,” Big Earl continues and right on cue, my stomach growls.

He laughs, thinking he’s definitely got the upper hand by dangling food in my face.

“I’m not hungry.”

“Oh, don’t say that,” he murmurs, stepping forward. “I know Luci doesn’t feed you and I know you’ve had to take extreme measures recently that got you into a bit of trouble.”

I grow still.

I know exactly what he’s talking about. Last week, the security guards at Dollar Tree caught me stealing cans of soup, packets of ramen noodles, toilet paper AND a whole assortment of pads and tampons.

I was terrified of the gooey, red substance leaking in between my legs, let alone the sudden bursts of pain that made me feel faint.

A quick Google search at the city library’s computer told me I was menstruating, but I had no one to help me.

I was hungry, bleeding and feeling faint, and just as I went to leave the store, trying to be discreet—it wasn’t my first time stealing food from a store—I tripped over my own feet; and just as you’d expect when all the negative, bad karma in the energy conspires against you at every turn, the old backpack flew open as everything spilled out on the floor.

“I can give you a nice, hot meal. You don’t have to steal,” Big Earl says, getting even closer.

Suddenly, shame blooms through my chest.

The first time Luci was gone and left me alone, I was five years old. There was no food in the house. The neighbors turned their noses upside down at me. They hated my mother and I because all the money their husbands made all somehow found its way into Luci’s pocket. Which then found its way to the nearest coke dealer and then the cycle repeated over and over again.

It’s the neighborhood kids who told me all this.

And it’s on their stupid faces that I perfected the art of punching suckers—which is something I think I have to do now. But unlike fighting kids that shout nasty words about my mother and me, I’d need to apply the trifecta I used on men like Big Earl when they cornered me like this, telling me that I look like my mother—which, according to my mother, is the reason we’ve been moving around a lot.

As if I’m the one who leaves my thirteen-year-old little girl alone in a place where the same men that treat her like an inflatable sex toy, have hungry, dangerous eyes when they look at me.

The key ring in his hand is jiggling. I guess that’s how he got in because I’m pretty sure I locked the door when I got back from the creek that’s a good thirty minutes away by foot. I spend all my time there. It makes the helplessness and fear subside.

“Thank you for the offer but I already ate.” I do my best to keep my voice strong, but the closer he gets, the bigger he becomes. “I think it’s time for you to leave.”

“Leave? But you and I are just about to get to know each other.”

I can see his excitement. I can almost anticipate what he’s about to do. My heart starts beating hard and fast. I take a few more steps back, my hand reaching for something, anything, that I can use as a weapon.

“My mother will be home any minute now.”

“I doubt it. Not after the way she left in a freaking limo with a big smile on her face.” A limo? “I’m sure she’s forgotten all about you by now.”

That’s been true for a while now, but that doesn’t mean I’ll show him that.

“Maybe you’re right, but still. I’ll let her know that you stopped by.”

Broke in is more like it, but I hold my tongue.

“Come now, sugar plum,” Big Earl says. “You know girls your age are already getting married and pleasing their husbands.”

“That’s illegal,” I hiss but he just laughs.

“Hmm, but you know, if I flash some bills in front of your mother, she’ll give you to me. But then again, you look just like your loose change mother.”

I shiver, terror making it difficult to keep breathing in and out without showing how shaken I am.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been told that I look like my mother.

I learned the meaning of the word ‘whore’ when I was around five or six. I’m aware of what sly men and mean women see when they look at me.

They say everything about me, from the shape of my nose, the way my lips purse in displeasure, the way I tilt my head back, it’s all just like Luci.

Some girls desperately want to look like the women who birthed them into this world. And why not? All life starts with a woman.

But I hate it.

I hate being compared or likened to my mother in any way. Partly because everyone who told me this either strolled out of her bedroom at odd hours of the night, reeking of cheap beer and drugs the police officer from our last town said I was too young to know anything about.

“Come on, I’m sure you’ve seen your mother at work,” he says, stepping closer. “You know what to do.”

I get the message loud and clear.

He—like every other man that comes here—wants me to behave like she does.

Loose, pliable with no self-respect in sight whatsoever.

Out of my mind and out of touch with reality like she always is.

But most of all, they want me to replicate the acts that my mother commits when they come to her at odd hours of the night.

It doesn’t matter that I am too young or that I am scared of their itchy, dirty fingers that reached for me where I lay on the sofa, trying to sleep on an empty stomach. All they see is my mother.

“Please, leave.”

“No, that’s not how you speak to the man who’s been providing a roof over your head for free these past three months.”

He steps closer. I step back.

See, by the time I was unlucky enough to get to my eighth birthday, I’d learned how to stab a man’s eyes with my tiny fingers.

At eight and a half, I knew how to effectively give them a swift and powerful knee to the groin right before bashing their big heads in with an old, but heavy frying pan that would knock them out if I swung the pan correctly.

It happened a few times, always at night, always when my mother was passed out and unable to tell them off.

It was the actual reason why we moved recently. I bashed a man’s head so hard, I heard he was in a coma for a few weeks.

I was twelve.

“You made a deal with my mother, not with me.”

“You’re damn right I made a deal with your mother. Now, it’s high time I get my due.”

He stares pointedly at me, with a hand rubbing between his legs.

Oh God.

“Are you going to give me my due?” our newish landlord leers at me, his fat, dirty body blocking the way to the door.

“What?” I croak.

“The rent,” the man says, getting comfortable by rocking on his feet. He looks at me like I’m helpless and he’s going to conquer me.

“I don’t have any money and mama is not here.”

“Stealing and lying. Kids these days. Well, like mother, like daughter I guess.”

In that moment, he launches at me.

Startled at his sudden and quick movements, I yelp and grab behind me for the pan, but my palms only grab air.

No!

“Come here, you little slut,” he leers. “I’ve been eyeing you for a while.”

I know. I’ve seen him watching me when I walk back home from school. I’ve felt his disgusting eyes on me; it makes my skin crawl but now…

“Come here!”

No, where is the pan?

His fingers grip my flimsy dress. The one I found in the lost and found bin at school, but I pull it back with all my strength, making him stumble.

“Oh, you want a play a game, huh?” the man laughs. “You think I don’t know that you want me too?”

“No! Don’t touch me!”

“Your mother likes this. I know you’ll like it too.”

Frantic and full of fear, I look around the living room for the pan, but I can’t see it. So, I revert to my usual but this time, I do it in reverse.

With all my weight, I turn and knee him in the groin, then when he doubles over in a shout, I stab his eyes with my fingers, pushing deeper until he screams like a little girl.

“Aahh!” His face is red with anger and maybe pain. “Fuck! You little bitch!”

He has one hand in between his legs and another over his eyes. I use that chance to run toward the small kitchenette.

Yes! The iron cast frying pan is there.

I immediately reach for the handle of the pan and just as I turn around to go back, I’m slammed into the shelf from behind.

Pain, sudden and intense blooms in my back but I don’t make a sound. No way I’ll go down now.

Instead, I grip the pan in a balanced way and with all my might, all my fear, all my anger, I start swinging.

I have no idea what I’m hitting.

I don’t hear the man’s screams.

I don’t feel the blood start to splatter.

I feel like my head’s underwater.

Wack! Wack! Wack!

I keep going, tears blurring my vision, putting as much strength in my now mechanical swings.

It’s only when I hear a shrill scream that I stop.

Looking up, I see my mother staring at me with horror filled in her eyes, a dainty palm covering her face.

She’s dressed to the nines in an elegant red dress with a thigh high slit. Her hair is styled in a fancy do and she has make-up on her face.

“Kimberly,” she gasps. In horror? In shock? In pride? I don’t know. She just gasps at me.

It’s the way she says it that makes me look down and that’s when I see it.

There’s blood at the back of the iron cast pot, on my dress, on my arms and all over the ugly floors of the trailer and the ugly, fat disgusting man is no longer moving, slumped in an awkward position between the counter and the floor.

Blank.

“What did you do?”

Part of the man’s head looks deformed and weird, with blood gushing out.

“Oh,” I murmur.

“Kimberly, sweetheart. What did you do?” my mother repeats.

I look up at my mother, then back down at the unmoving man.

“He said something.”

“What did he say?” she asks frantically, as flashes of red and blue appear from the distance, “What could he have possibly said that made you do this? This will get to your father.”

I look up at my mother. She doesn’t just look different by how she’s dressed, it’s the look on her face.

How can people say I look like her?

Maybe it’s the cascading dirty blonde hair that flows to the middle of my back like hers.

Or maybe it’s my ‘endless and toned’ long legs, or my plump lips that always seem like they’re puckered up for a kiss.

Or is it the uncanny look of brokenness we both share, showing through our slightly identical grey eyes framed by thick, naturally long lashes and perfectly shaped eyebrows?

My mother is a magnet to all kinds of wrong, bad and dangerous, and based on the unfortunate events of my life that have all culminated to this, so am I.

“Kimberly!” she shouts, snapping me out of my numbness—just barely.

Looking up at her, I frown.

I’m used to seeing her pale, with hollow eyes and a skinny frame. But right now, she looks… she looks….

“He said I look just like you.”

* * *

That night was pretty much the beginning of my hell.

I had no idea who called the cops or how much I noise was coming from our raggedy trailer but by the time I was led out by two grim faced cops—who so happened to be Big Earl’s friends—the entire St. Peter’s trailer park was outside and watching.

The fat, disgusting landlord was taken by three paramedics, and I was taken to the police station, barefoot and covered in blood.

They asked me what happened, but for some reason, I couldn’t speak.

All I noticed was how my mother didn’t bother showing up for me.

Three days later, I was charged, and in alarmingly short order, sent to court for my first hearing.

They told me the fat, disgusting landlord woke up and told the cops that I attacked him with no provocation whatsoever (emphasis on the whatsoever).

With that Texas gap in between his teeth, it’s a wonder he could even say the word.

He told them that my mother had told him that I was given the rent money to pass along to him which is why he had stopped by in the first place.

That was a lie. A lie my mother never refuted.

No one asked him why he dropped in at that late hour, apparently. It didn’t matter. I was the one at fault.

I guess that’s when something in me finally broke.

See, I’d known for a while that I wasn’t like other girls my age.

I didn’t feel the way they did but it was only a matter of time before the actual breaking started. I just didn’t know it then.

I mean, I was barely holding on as it was, having to fight for safety, for food and clothes. For school and a future. But the fact that my mother never defended me…

Anyway, apparently the rent money I was given, I used it all on drugs.

The last nail on my coffin.

So, between the underage drug abuse, the stealing and now, aggravated battery with a deadly weapon—yes, they classified the pan as a deadly weapon—I was going away for a pretty long time.

And my mother never showed her dainty, pretty face.

Through it all, I still didn’t say a word.

It’s as if my voice had been ripped out of me and I was nothing but a shell of a person.

In court, my state appointed lawyer didn’t bother asking me what happened.

He didn’t even mention the attempted rape or the fact that Big Earl had broken in while I was trying to fall asleep on an empty stomach.

I didn’t know how after all these years, I still hadn’t grown desensitized to the pain of starvation.

But I guess some forms of pain were meant to be consistent, incessant and unrelenting.

But it had nothing on what was to come. Only I didn’t realize that. Not until it was too late.

* * *

Eight and a half months later, I still hadn’t been given an actual sentencing hearing, but that didn’t matter at all.

I was booked, put in the system, and swiftly sent to the filthiest, most dangerous maximum security juvenile detention center while I awaited trial.

There was chatter that I might be tried as an adult. After all, apparently, my existence posed a great threat to the community.

And to my shame, I didn’t fight back.

Part of me was hoping my mother would turn up and save the day, but the rest of me just wished I’d known who my father was. Maybe he would come and get me out of this shithole but I didn’t know him and it never happened.

That was the time I lost my voice.

They called me a mute hussy and all sorts of unoriginal names you could think of when you’ve nothing to do but rile up other juveniles from equally fucked up backgrounds you were shacked up with in a facility where kids were treated like trash.

But that wasn’t hell. No. Not yet.

* * *

It starts out as any other illusion. A barely believable scene straight out of the twilight zone.

“Hey, mute bitch!” one of the guards, Olga, who hated me for what I did to her first cousin that she sometimes sleeps with to feel about herself calls. “Pack all your nothings.”

I stare at her, seeing the displeasure written all over her face. “You’re getting out,” she says, looking annoyed.

“Out?” I croak out my first word since that horrible night eight months ago

She rears back but catches herself in the last second.

“Ah! So, you can actually speak? What a waste,” she leers, then opens the door to my room. “Get your ass up and leave!”

Olga has never physically harmed me, none of the guards in here ever have. It’s always the other juveniles who tried picking fights and until recently, I didn’t know they were sent by the guards to teach me a lesson.

I should’ve known then that something was seriously wrong.

I should’ve pieced it together that the sudden ‘dismissal of your shitty case’ was not protocol.

Only I didn’t care. I’m out!

I ignore the fact that good things never happen to me and that happiness is a deceptive mirage that conceals the horrors that lie in wait for me.

And why would I think of that when there’s a nice, fancy BMW with a grim-faced driver waiting for me when I walk out of the detention center?

“Kimberly Allory?” a man dressed in a black suit and tie questions.

Nodding mutely, I watch as he opens the door for me and waits for me to get in. With wooden legs, I walk over, not really grasping the situation until I’ve climbed in.

In quick order, the driver gets in and then suddenly, the car doors are locked.

“Uh, excuse me,” I start, my voice sounding strange to my own ears. “Who are you?”

He doesn’t respond.

“Where are you taking me?”

Silence.

Dread seeps into my bones then, but it’s a little too late.

I reach for the door handle but even then, I already know it won’t open.

He drives fast and by the time we arrive at an unknown location, I’m hysterical, kicking and screaming, banging my fist on the window, trying to break it, but all I manage to do is break is my own sanity.

Two other men, dressed the same as the driver, open the back door, then proceed to pick me up like I weigh nothing at all.

I try fighting but they easily restrain me.

I scream, but they don’t bother trying to stop me.

With tear filled eyes, I look up at the huge mansion in front of me. It’s beautiful but something about it makes me feel cold and even more aggravated.

Run!

But I can’t.

“He’s waiting in the dungeon,” a new, harsh voice speaks from somewhere. “Take her to him.”

Him? Who is him?

I’m frantic, my heart pounding so hard, I feel like I’m going to pass out any second now.

“Let me go!” I scream, but all they do is tighten their hold on me.

They walk with purpose down the hall, ignoring my screams and cries.

I even beg, but it doesn’t work. Not on these men.

They carry me in short order up the stairs and into a dimly lit foyer.

We go past that and into a hallway. From here, I can hear music playing and people laughing. I perch up, listening intently.

Is there a party?

I know that shouldn’t be my concern right now, but by the time we go down a flight of stairs, then another, I’m breathless and scared to death.

We enter a room with a metal door painted black and that’s when I notice the man who sits in the middle of the room, with a lone light dramatically shining atop his head.

He’s the him. I just know it.

And I know one other thing too.

I should run.

“Ah, Kimberly,” the man starts.

Something in me churns. I swear I can hear loud sirens of danger in my head. As I stare wide-eyed and scared to death,

Looking around, I don’t see anything at all, but I know we’re not alone.

“It’s so good to finally meet my daughter.”

Everything in me screeches to a halt, but the bad accident is unavoidable.

His daughter?

Is this man… is he… my father?

It’s then that he shifts, and I finally get a good look at his face.

I gasp out loud and step back, but the men holding me pull me back toward him.

The man is dressed in a nice three-piece suit. A picture of my mother the last time I saw her flashes in my head. She was also dressed to the nines.

Whenever she dressed like that, got her hair done like that and managed to spend more than a few seconds taking care of herself, she always said she was going to see him.

“Who are you going to see, mama?”.

“The devil.”

“Dressed like a princess?”

“Sometimes, you need to dress the part and act the part, when you enter hell.”

I gasp out loud again.

Is this man, who claims to be my father, could he be the devil?

Bile rises my throats. Fear takes root in the pit of my stomach because this man, he is the devil. I sense it.

He has an ugly, protruding scar from just above his left eye to his chin.

It’s as if someone took a sword or something and angrily slashed it along the length of his face.

“Surprise!” the man says, chuckling like a villain. “But unfortunately for you, you’re not here under some bullshit fairytale circumstances. This isn’t a sweet reunion.”

I open my mouth, but no words come out.

“I brought you here because I have one question for you and one question only,” the man says, watching me with a smile on his face that makes my skin crawl. “Where is your pregnant mother?”

My eyes open wide with shock. “My mother?” I croak. “She’s pregnant?”

“Don’t act stupid!” he barks, and I jump. “And don’t you dare lie.”

“I…” I stutter. “I don’t know where she is.”

The man looks at me, tilting his head to the left.

“You don’t know?”

I shake my head, fear starting to rise in me like never done before.

“What day is it today?” the man asks, the ugly scar on his face protruding angrily.

“Friday, the 13^th of July,” one of the men responds in a mechanical voice that is not human at all. Which, I failed to realize was another red flag.

“Friday, the 13^th,” the man hums. “This will be the day you will never ever fucking forget after I’m done with you. So, I’ll give you one more chance to tell me the truth, you little piece of scum.” He leans forward, staring me down. If eyes could glow with evil… “Where is your mother?”

I don’t say a word.

Honestly because I have no idea where Luci is, but my silence is the wrong response, because as I’ll learn now and later on, silence is the worst answer.

As if it’s happening in slow motion, the men holding me step away from me.

But before I can even breathe, before I can sense the danger or anticipate that I’ve stepped into the seventh circle hell, I hear the sound of a whip, slicing the air and then…

“Ah!” I scream and I go down, fire licking across my back.

Someone just whipped me.

Jesus Christ!

“Oh and remove that shirt she’s wearing then hold her down.”

The dirty white tee is shredded off my back. I’m kicked to the stony floor onto my hands and knees.

When I glance up at him, with my racing heart and burning back, I see him crossing his legs and lighting up a cigarette.

“We need answers. Daughter or not. Right Monty?”

“Right, Larry,” a drunk man jeers from somewhere in the dim room. “The stupidity, the foolishness and the devil should be beaten out of children.”

“Right you are!”

“But I think I’m going to try whipping!”

“Good idea, Monty! Our deal will move forward better.”

“Yes. So, is this the one?”

“Well… this one has a little rebellious spirit in her. Besides, I have another one.”

“Splendid,” the drunk man says cheerfully. “Please, gentlemen. Go ahead.”

And just when I thought the whipping was a one-time thing, I hear the cracking of the whip just before it strikes my bare back.

I scream.

Two, three, ten, fifteen lashes reign down on my back in quick succession. I cry and scream and thrash, begging them to stop. I can feel my heart about to give. I think I’m not breathing at all.

My back is one fire as they keep going.

“I think I want to try that as well,” I hear the drunk man say sloppily. “Let me have a go.”

There’s no protest, no hesitation. I’m held down as the drunk man starts whipping my back.

He misses a lot, but for every lash he misses, he whips me with an uncontrollable rage that makes me bang my head against the stone floor as he curses at me.

“No, please!” I cry, my voice broken and small. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be bad.”

But that doesn’t matter.

Time expands and loses meaning.

I start making up lies about where my mother could be.

I beg for forgiveness for stealing food at the local store.

I tell them that I was sorry for what I did to Big Earl.

I apologize for my existence.

But it doesn’t matter.

And as I fade out in and of consciousness on that floor, my cries and screams ignored by a drunk, inhumane man named Monty who’s voice I’ll never forget, and a father who wasn’t a father but was actually, the devil, I swore to myself.

I’ll never beg anyone for anything in my life ever again.

“I’m done. For now!”

“Good. Now, shall we go back out there and toast to the prosperity of the Blues through our partnership?”

“Fuck yes!”

“Then it’s settled,” the man who claims to be my father says. “Oh, and gentlemen, put her in the dungeon. She’ll come in handy soon.”

Broken, bloody and no longer coherent at all, I feel a part of me floating away.

It didn’t take long to realize that my mother’s butterfly now had broken wings… and it was all because of her and the man she loved.