Woodworm

by Layla Martínez

In this house you don’t inherit money or gold rings or monogrammed sheet sets; beds and bad blood are all the dead pass down. Rage and a place to lay your head, that’s the most you’ll be left around here.

people around here aren’t just vile, they’re cowards, and they won’t say anything to your face unless they’re in a group of four or five.

the saint can’t deal with every lowlife in this village. Which is why we have to do it ourselves.

I don’t care if people think I’m crazy or dumb but as for feeling sorry for me, no way, I draw the line. I didn’t do the things I did just to be pitied by that scum.

But this house is no refuge: it’s a trap. Nobody ever leaves it, and those who do always end up coming back.

We hate what reminds us of ourselves, you know, which is why plenty of mothers secretly hate their children and why here in this house we’ve ended up poisoning each other.

He decided to do what all men who hate themselves do: exploit the people beneath him.

I was a stupid girl once, too, but I was lucky enough not to meet a man like my father.

My father hadn’t given her that house, he’d condemned her to live in it. It had been built on the bodies of all those women and now my mother’s body kept it standing. Her pain and fear. It wasn’t a gift, it was a curse.

Sleep, little darling, sweet dreams lie ahead, your mother’s keeping watch from the foot of your bed. Hush, little darling, I’ll sing you to sleep, with the sun at your head and the moon at your feet.

When you’re on your own and poor you can’t afford to make the same mistake twice,

That’s what family is, a place to stay and food on the table and in return you’re cooped up with a bunch of living relatives and another bunch of dead ones. All families keep their dead under the mattress, my mother used to tell me, it’s just that we can see ours.

She didn’t have that gnawing restlessness, that woodworm my mother and I had, that bastard itch that won’t leave you in peace or let you leave others in peace either.

But my husband was too cowardly or too honorable, the two worst things a poor man can be.

The thing is, in this house the dead live for too long and the living not long enough. Those of us in between, like me and my daughter, do neither one thing nor the other. The house won’t let us die, and it sure as hell won’t let us live anywhere else.

Having money is always better. Money spreads everything with a nice layer of grease so that nothing squeaks and everything fits clickety-click into place, all the parts working like they’re meant to, not splitting or snapping or stalling or crashing.