Chapter Four: “The Clod of Earth Longs for Snow” — Part One
The many-headed snake, for all its cruelty, had the cunning never to eat its own.
Except toward whichever snake failed to belong to the coil. There, no mercy at all. I never fit in.
It wasn’t a storm that passed and left calm behind it. That house carried violence inside its very ordinariness, folded into its quiet, everyday air. No warning signs, no rising wind, just pain sitting there as an extension of daily life, an attack indistinguishable from routine. I never understood what had set it off, only that I’d been cast out from the rest of the brood and made a target. What I pieced together later, vaguely, was that some dispute had broken out among the several men who might have been my father, and I’d absorbed the fallout of it. Whatever the reason, I was kicked by the father-candidate adults far more often than any of the others. The other children, once I’d been left half-breathless by that, would gather afterward like scavengers, treating me as something to poke at, a specimen. Mostly I’d already been drained of any strength to resist and simply endured it, dazed. They were experienced enough at playing with people not to break anything permanently, careful just enough to keep me from complete dysfunction.
Still, the injury I took at seven years old was, I think, close to fatal.
One of the father candidates, three or four, got carried away, and I took a blow to the torso that left me unable to breathe properly. Something in there had probably broken, because I couldn’t stand up afterward either. If Kara-nee-san hadn’t happened to pass by and, on a whim, picked me up and pushed me onto Shiho-nee-san to deal with, the fourteen-year-old me simply wouldn’t exist.
“Kai’s like me, doesn’t suit this house. Left alone too long right after birth, never adapted properly.”
That’s what Shiho-nee-san said, after giving me the barest minimum of treatment and laying me down in her own room. I wanted to ask how she herself had survived being left alone like that, but trying to speak just produced strangled, wasted breath, the pain interrupting everything.
“Not becoming one of this house’s people is a good thing. But if this house is the only place you can live, that’s hell.”
Shiho-nee-san kept her distance even then, treating it all like something that had nothing to do with her. And honestly, I probably meant nothing to her either way. But maybe that indifference was, in its own way, her virtue, a kindness with no ulterior motive precisely because she wasn’t invested. At least within that house, she was, by a wide margin, the closest thing to a good person. For what that’s worth.
But outside the house too, everyone who saw my injuries and bruises simply looked away, which taught me, eventually, that expecting help from anyone at all had been the mistake from the start. In that light, maybe Shiho-nee-san really was good. For what that’s worth.
“You don’t have to hold it in, you know. I won’t find your screaming amusing, and I won’t pity you either.”
She said that once, in the middle of the night, when I’d been gritting my teeth to keep the pain contained. If you cried out, it just gave them something to enjoy, invited worse, so staying silent had become second nature. But Shiho-nee-san never dismissed it when I broke. Though true to her word, no matter how much I groaned or wept in the futon beside hers, she slept on undisturbed, which struck me, in its own way, as impressive too. I understood, faintly, that I couldn’t fully trust her either, but that measured, moderate kindness turned out to be exactly the right distance to be saved by. Depending too much on someone’s momentary warmth would surely have led somewhere worse.
The pain, something like being ground down at the tip of every bone, never really faded. It took two weeks, maybe, before I could stand again. It never fully lifted, just burned quietly through me from the inside, cold sweat always beading at my forehead. Shiho-nee-san’s room carried the same heavy floral scent she did, and it dulled the edge of it slightly, but never solved anything underneath.
I wanted to die, imagining nothing but new injuries piling on top of the old ones forever. Dead, at least, whatever they did to the body wouldn’t hurt anymore. But what did dying actually mean? I couldn’t quite grasp the sense of it, sleep and waking with the waking part simply removed.
I kept wishing to die, blacking out from pain, and waking again to a body still screaming.
I couldn’t manage it, dying.
And then, eventually, when the pain finally lifted, when I woke and found my body free of it.
I burst out from under the futon, thrilled, thinking maybe I really had died. And what greeted me, full of energy, was the same Chitaira house, the same people, and one of the father candidates, four maybe, kicked me by way of greeting.
I understood then that as long as I lived in this house, I would never be free of the pain.
So I dragged my freshly-hurt body back and asked Shiho-nee-san.
“Teee…ch, me.”
I asked for an education, in whatever broken vocabulary I had. I still couldn’t speak properly back then. Whether she was really the right person to learn how to survive from, I couldn’t say, but there was no one else. Shiho-nee-san felt no sympathy for me, I’m sure, but she agreed, said “sure,” and taught me all sorts of things, everything necessary to keep from losing the shape of being human.
Thanks to her, I grew enough emotional footing to more or less manage through primary school.
In that sense, I suppose you could call Shiho-nee-san something like my mother.
By the time I finished primary school, Shiho-nee-san had taken up with a woman outside the house and disappeared from the Chitaira home entirely. She left me a contact number, but relying on her any further felt like a fast route to more pain, so I let that go, for the time being. In her place came Kara-nee-san.
It was, unexpectedly, Kara-nee-san who prepared my middle school uniform and school bag. When they arrived, all of it, I asked why she’d been so kind about it.
“You turned out surprisingly pretty growing up, so I’ll buy you the uniform, let me do it while you’re wearing it.”
A textbook Chitaira woman, who never bothered maintaining any humanity beyond her looks, said this with a mint-scented smile.
“Not really your type, Kara-nee-san…”
“Hmm…”
When I refused, she launched into something about checking the fit, forced the uniform onto me anyway, and came at me. Not a joke, she genuinely tried to pin me down. I fought her off, barely managed to get away, but the uniform, brand new, was already worn out by the end of it.
“Not bad, kid.”
The next time I saw her, she offered nothing but shameless praise, no trace of guilt.
A useful lesson, staying clear of anyone who approaches you wearing kindness as a mask.
Kara-nee-san, too, took up with a woman not long after and left the house, which quietly relieved me.
Even into middle school, as long as I stayed in the Chitaira house, the injuries kept accumulating. But by then, I’d already lost the wish to die. Hope had settled into my chest, love was churning there, a dream beckoning.
I’d found a good enough reason to keep living through days made entirely of pain.
And the reason for it was, absurdly, healthy. Love.
A standard-issue Chitaira woman’s desire, wanting, somehow, to hold onto the married woman I’d fallen for at first sight.