On the Savage Side

by Tiffany McDaniel

A daughter is a woman lost at sea. A mother is the one who saves her. But if she’s not there, the daughter will always be lost.”

“You never really think about how many bones you’ve got in your body. That is until one day you have to lay them out.

“There is nothing more human,” I said, “than that which will not go away. Than that which will stay.

If you look closely, some women always have the shadow of a man following them.”

Before, it had been an old woman’s home of doilies and ruffled lampshades that represented her delicate love of moths flying on the porch in the evenings and a sense of worshipping the slightest sign of a good day and night. Though the windows were still in the same place and the rooms had not changed their locations, Mamaw’s home of old-time florals had been transformed to a young woman’s house of clean, white cotton.

This made me think of when my grandparents house got sold after my Grandma died. We visited it after it was renovated and it was almost unrecognizable.

I waited for him to recognize my eyes, but he only stared at me in disgust, as if I could never have been a child who had better hopes for herself. Never been the little girl he had held in his arms and told everything would be okay.

“An anger floats in those bodies of the women,” I said. “The anger of a man. It’s what he gives them before he gives them to the water.”

And no matter how many times you try to break the world, she will never be yours. She will, until the end of time, belong to only herself. And for every snake you break, one of her sisters takes her place. Do you know anything about sisters, Highway Man? They are a whole hell of a lot stronger than any man, and they will outlive you.”

When I grabbed his gold chain necklace, he threw his fist back, knocking me in the face. I fell off him but kept hold of his necklace, breaking the latch. I laughed as the chain swung in my tight grip. “You fucking bitch.” He punched me again in the face. I laughed more, feeling the warm blood on my skin as I ripped strands of the hair from the chain, finally freeing them and releasing them into the wind. ”You won’t catch any more butterflies in your web, you son of a bitch.”

There are exceptional demons that wait for us all. An infinite pulse that insists we float down the river that has been made for our drowning. In shallow water, rocks mutilate our truths. In the deeper depths, it is our own dying that forms an opinion of us.

“Life comes with heavy silence at times, baby, and you might be tempted to shut your eyes and be invisible. But I want you to know that you always have a song. It’s inside you. You’re powerful, you’re smart, you’re creative, and no one can take those things from you.”

You have to have some of those moments where life tells you, it’s time to cry. Without those, what would fuel the poets?

“It’s a beautiful war, isn’t it?” He looked up at me. “What is?” I asked. “Life.”

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“What is a dream,” I said, “but something the women before us have made?”

Lives lost to addiction are not always because the victim was the addict. Sometimes you die because the person you love is one. In Daffy’s case, that was our mother.

“Only on the savage side,” I said. “But on the beautiful side, you pulled off each of his eight legs. Then you took him by the mouth and you screamed our names until they filled his throat and he choked to death on them. And you took his body and you turned it into sand and we let it fall between our fingers until not even a grain of him was left in this world.

She’ll say back in those days, she’d walk the streets, not to turn a trick but to laugh with her friends. She would kiss a boy, not for money but for heart’s instinct. She could walk outside at night, not in fear but in quiet awe of the stars above.

I won’t make excuses. I made the choice to take the needle, but I will say an addict was a child once, too.

Daffy and me used to think that everything in the world was made out of and from a woman. Now I think the universe must be, too, because I feel I am time and space itself. The stars, the planets, pooling in my collarbone until I am energy. Comets are cut by my body, and it is my hands you see when you lay your eyes upon galaxies through the lens of your telescopes set on the heavens. I am the known and the unknown.

Perhaps the only definite thing I can say is that even ghosts shiver in boundless space.