Content Warning: This essay contains depictions of and discusses the following sensitive topics: domestic violence, animal death.

I once rebelled against my mother, whispers mother. She didn’t want me to go out with my friends. So, I pushed her aside, she fell, and I left. That’s why God’s punishing me. Mother’s breathing ragged, she lays on her side on the futon as her broken rib scratches her lung with the slightest movement. I beg her to see a doctor, but she just wants a quiet lie down, embarrassed of having been kicked in the chest by the man she once thought she loved, whose mumbled curses are heard through the open window as he stands outside in front of the house, picking the pieces of the television he threw out of the second-floor balcony in a fit the night before. Too bad that it is unknown what the neighbors thought of the horrible crash in the dead of the night as nobody came to complain nor spare a rib. 

TV.

Glass cups.

Plates. 

Electric heaters.

Toys. 

Mikado sticks.

Ribs.

Faces. 

Hearts. 

Childhood. 

Dreams. 

He’s broken many things. 

Funny, how we turn on ourselves and rake our insides to find evil; a sin, a bad day, a moment of lacking judgement to justify the violence we endure. Is this why a beaten dog can’t help loving its master? Mother repeats to herself the story of her rebellion like a compulsive prayer breathed upon rosary beads. I remind myself of the time when I was seven, and one of the other kids stole three kittens, newly born, from under their mother. Two of the kittens, twins with blue eyes and dark fur, were handed to me, for I had the pockets of my white wool cardigan my estranged grandmother had knitted. The others played with the third, orange-white one, picked out of the three only because of its difference, as if it was a toy or something without a soul. Until they got bored, and left it trembling, meowing, out in the open. When it was time for lunch and all of us had to report home, they took the ones tucked in my warm pockets and closed them inside a make-do house of loose bricks, to be fed and taken care of whenever their young captors fancied. 

Sheltered. 

Caged. 

Comfortable.

Hungry. 

Safe.

Cold. 

Loved.

Hurt. 

They all died in the afternoon rain, a kid said to me the next day. 

His fist goes down on my mother. More times than I can count. He kicks her, pushes me away. Curses us. Red, ugly blossoms adorn the carpet. The mixed smell in the air terrorizes my stomach. 

Cigarette                                Alcoholic                                Metallic

                     smoke.                                    breath.                                  blood.

I scream at his face, to unravel my child body from the seams that hold so much hatred back. With each tear that compels me to grow up faster, I rebel against God, throwing my hands out and looking at the ceiling—too theatrically that even in that urgency, I can feel a touch of insincerity resembling an itchy pimple in my heart, as if I’m rehearsing a scene from a Greek play—

Why? What sin did we commit? 

Darker in the night, when everything eventually stops and falls into a deafening silence of grief, shellshocked, I look inward. 

Under the rain, three kittens look back.