Patsy

by Nicole Y. Dennis-Benn

And while people would pardon convicts, drunks, and men who fuck goats, cows, dogs, and children, they are suspicious, almost terrified, of a woman without a family and no religion. Jesus is the only viable excuse a young woman can use to deny the penis.

Truth be told, she never loved her daughter like she’s supposed to, or like her daughter loves her.

It was as though the child

somehow knew, even before she had started to live, that she would have to soothe herself.

For the first time in her life, she feels somewhat hopeful—that all the loveliness and beauty of life is at arm’s reach.

Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all . . . Underneath the poem is the name Emily Dickinson. She commits the name and poem to memory.

A lifetime of love and friendship lost tonight in Cicely’s effort to defend the prison she has built for herself.

A liquid trail of disgust floods her chest. The unfairness of her life is the shock she has received upon discovering that a woman can break her heart more than any man—a woman to whom she gave everything and expected nothing in return.

It’s the nothing that gets her—the fact that she was content with the nothing.

Knowing that she is fully capable of feeling such visceral disgust for herself fills her with purpose, a drive to get on with it, gather the scattered pi...

Maybe that’s how it is—maybe life favors certain people and relegates the rest to living in their shadows.

We have neither di right nor permission to enjoy human things like Americans—vacation, rest, strolling in di park, di sunset. Who are we to do dat when we taking up space, taxes, an’ air, according to dem? Dey have all di power to punish us fah stealing from dem—fah daring to t’ink we can dream, much less love.”

Quietly she mourns, realizing that she must mutilate the very thing that sprang inside her, unearthing itself, reaching and reaching toward sunlight.

She considers adding an apology or something like: Sometimes when you love someone deeply, you sacrifice a lot for that person. It’s more selfish when you don’t consider what’s best for the person you love. One day you will understand. But Patsy thinks against this. She signs off with, Your mother, Patsy, with love.

There’s a difference between wanting to die and not wanting to live. She doubts she can explain this to anyone.

And just like that, Patsy let go. Her spirit gave way to the exhaustion she could no longer resist. It was better that way—better to exist numb, a mere husk that could float even on the most treacherous seas, than to feel pain.

The lifelong pain twists her into a fetal position on the floor until the sun slips from the sky and leaves it black. Worn, stripped, and hoarse, Patsy’s cries taper, and something else emerges: A voice. Barrington’s voice. “How is it fate if yuh have control ovah it?”