A Song to Drown Rivers

by Ann Liang

You should have done whatever you needed to get away from them. Because if your mother had lived and you died, she would spend the rest of her days in unimaginable pain, weeping until her voice went hoarse. She would drag herself around the house like someone had torn half her soul from her body. It is the cruelest fate for the gray-haired to bury the dark-haired.

How many women throughout history were blamed for the weaknesses of men? We made such convenient scapegoats. We were raised to be small, to be silent, to take whatever we were given and no more.