Godshot

by Chelsea Bieker

Like Quince at the Pac N’ Save, who never came to church on Sundays and we all tried to save her but she stuck her middle finger in our faces. She had taken to wearing a pentagram necklace and black lipstick for theatrics but I didn’t sense any true evil coming from her, just stupidity, which could be worked with.

“It hurts.” “Get used to it,” she said. “Women have a long history of suffering.”

“You’re back from the shadow of your whore mother’s sin!”

BYEEEEE LMAO

Where did women go when this happened?

“I’ll let you in on a secret,” Daisy said. “You’re going to be really pretty someday, and she can’t stand it. Don’t you have any intuition, kid, or do you just believe what people tell you about your own self?”

“Your mother’s got that emptiness inside her and she’s gonna fill it with something. Drink, church, men. Always switching seats on the Titanic.”

“People underestimate young girls but they never should,”

“Whatever’s happened to you can either make you beautiful, or it will ruin you forever. You decide.” I pulled my hand back. “I’m not beautiful.” “I don’t mean beautiful like you’re thinking. I mean beautiful. I mean, deep and changed. Affected. Wise. When you see a woman like that, you know. She’s beautiful because of her undoing. Beautiful because she rebirthed herself from ashes.”

And I knew people on the outside of the church wouldn’t understand how I could stay instead of leave, withstand instead of run. I would say those people have never been under the hand of a bad thing so bad it can start to seem good.

I wished God would tell me what to do himself, not through the mouth of a man.

I needed her body next to mine to remind me of my own. I don’t know why I loved her the way I did, in this aching way that could not be explained, other than she was my mother. There was no reason beyond that.

They talked about men like they were dumb dogs that needed to be herded around but were still big and strong so you had to be careful with them.

The prospect of another life was mysterious and blank. Who knew what horrors would fill it, but I knew they would be different horrors, and somehow that sounded like a risk I could be stupid enough to take.

But that was the way with boys. Always getting things that made them better—pants with pockets, tools for building—while girls received adornments, things to make us appear better to others.

“Sometimes I don’t know why we care about them at all after the things they do to us. There must be something to this mother-daughter thing. Some kind of binding spell.”

How could I be better than her when I was from her?

I would never have a mother, I finally knew. Yet somehow I would have to be one.

I did not know why this design was so violent. Why each woman had to be ripped apart to bring forth another.

I wanted unconditional love from my mother, and I was not going to have that. But somehow I held unconditional love for her. Perhaps giving it away could be its own reward.

I don’t tell her I’ll always crave her embrace. I’ll always wish she was with me, hand through my hair at night, voice vibrating through the same rooms. But I’m old enough to know it was never really her I wanted. It was the eternal mother. The mother I had dreamed up. The mother I was never meant to have. The mother, instead, I was meant to be.