On the Savage Side

by Tiffany McDaniel

“But you like swimming?” Tam asked. Daffy raised her eyes. “It’s everything. I wanna swim until the end of time. And then I wanna know where the river goes after that. Wherever she goes, I’ll go with her. I have to, you know. See my blue eye.” She pointed to it. “I’ll always be part of the water.”

Who was the first idiot to say, ‘We are more than evolution. We are morals and ethics and creation. We are the feel, the made, the what that has come from the hip bones of a God above.’ Truth is, we’re all just pieces of shit the universe has born out of its ass. Now, that’s a philosophy I stand by.”

“Years from now,” she said, “an archaeologist like you, Arc, will dig my tooth up and I’ll matter because I’ll be from the past. They’ll wonder who I was and they’ll give me a better story than my truth.”

Water is nature’s mirror.

Sobriety is just a better hiding spot for the minutes of the day, the color of the sky, the answer to the question, Who am I?

“We’re doing okay, ain’t we? I mean, we’re doing pretty goddamn okay if you ask me. But you walk around here, tiptoeing, like you don’t deserve even an inch of the day to do anything nice with. You’re always just cleaning. You’re a shadow mopping the floor or washing the walls. At night, you’re just the shape of you sleeping in the chair because you don’t even think you deserve the bed. It’s like your face still hurts where Mom smacked it and called you worthless when we were six years old. I don’t wanna live with the window only half open, Arc. Only half of the sun. Only half of the moonlight. Only half of the breeze. I want the whole thing. I want a whole life.”

I envy the woman who is not tired. If such a woman exists.”

My God, there’s a hell of a lot that goes into making each one of us, huh?”

“They say women like us walk ourselves into our own deaths. I say they fucking chase us into it. But they don’t get all of us.”

“And when the world tried to break her,” she said, laying the feather down where the womb would be, “she gave birth to wings.”

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.

Life hurts. When you’re in front of the gun, it hurts a hell of a lot more. For some of us, to stand in front of the gun is less of a choice and more of the place we were delivered to here on the savage side.

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.

This is the journey I failed at in life. It is the journey I must continue in death. I suppose much will circle back around to my life. So what was my life? It was lived on the savage side, and it can be said that no heart is safe on the savage side. But I’d like to say something more. I’d like to say that on the savage side, there was love. Love for us, love from us, love between us. We mattered, but no one will much think of that before thinking we were just addicts and prostitutes and weak-minded women who are easily gotten rid of and even easier forgotten. I reckon you’ll forget us, too. But if by chance, you do remember us, we were daughters, sisters, and mothers. Remember us for that. Maybe then, on the old land once called Chala-ka-tha, we will have left the most amazing artifacts of ourselves behind.