Read Eve Out of Her Ruins for Free Online Page B

reflections.
    Seventeen years old and you think you know everything. Your face is stony and your hands are exhausted.

EVE
    When I walk under the mango trees, they wave to me like they know me. I think I look like lots of things—organic, or mineral, or strange and sloughed-off, but I don’t look like a woman. Only a reflection of a woman. Only an echo of a woman. Only the deformed idea of a woman.
    In windows, mirrors, eyes, there’s my face fleeing endlessly. I don’t want my soul trapped in any of those. I’ll be anything but a captured soul. But a bird with clipped wings. When I meet my own gaze, I’m chilled and frightened. I hate how much I’m hurting myself.
    Someday, tomorrow, later: nothing.
    At home, we dance around each other. We’re playing a game of avoiding the real questions. They see me and they don’t see me. A stench of lies hits me as I walk in the door.
    Every day I count my steps before coming back to my place. Or rather, their place, because it isn’t mine. I didn’t choose to live there. I didn’t choose anything at all, even being born. I would have liked an unknown place, with the sea lapping its borders, and a single shapeless filao tree stunted like an old man caught in the wind, and myself sitting under the tree, not doing or saying anything. Sometimes, I’d climb up the highest branches and look into the distance. Far off, there’d be nothing. Except for sea and more sea. The sea’s constant, whispering movement. The land would look like it was being rocked to sleep. A moon would slip away. I’d curl up at the bottom of the tree and fall asleep. Maybe I’d never wake up.
    There was no fairy at my crib. I think that when I opened my eyes I suddenly saw my whole life in front of me: a stone wall, bars over my eyes, a gag in my mouth, and metal in my heart. That face drove me to pronounce, when I opened my mouth, that vital word: no.
    Hide everything and walk on coals, show nothing of myself. I let them think I’m easy come, easy go. I let them think I’m nothing more than a body, this body that, when they pull off its clothes, makes them quiver.
    A body so fragile, so thin, so easily broken; a body to cherish and destroy; that’s what they try their best to do.
    Savita and I have fun dreaming up other selves, born in good places, into families where defeat can’t be read in palm lines or bent knees. We’d be doctors or lawyers and we’d care for and defend the weak and the poor. We wouldn’t leave anybody to fend for themselves. Those are the stupid dreams we invent for ourselves. But when they become doctors or lawyers, these other girls, do they forget their past? Do they refuse to open the doors they’ve barricaded?
    Savita tickles my toes. I lick the soles of her feet. We have the same skin, completely smooth, into which our hands disappear. The softest parts are the hollows of our backs and the insides of our thighs. When we rub these spots, time stops. I lay my head on her stomach and I hear the sounds of her organs. Something rumbling, some hunger, some urge, I don’t know, or maybe it’s just her intestines doing their work. We don’t really need to talk. We know how to listen to our silences.

SAVITA
    Eve’ssilence is the rumble deep within a volcano. It hurts me to see her so fragile when she thinks she’s so strong. When she’s serious, her face is like a child’s, shocked in a dream, her eyes filled with lights. Her laugh is so rare, but when it comes it’s like a hurricane. When I get close to Eve, she sweeps me off my feet.
    Before her, I looked at things from so far away that nothing touched me.
    I was going to leave that day. I was going to take a little bag and go straight out, walk without looking back. I’d had enough of my parents sniveling. Of all those responsibilities that fell on me as a result, helping my sister, setting a good example for