As Good as True by Cheryl Reid

Author:Cheryl Reid [Reid, Cheryl]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781503949546
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Published: 2018-02-01T05:00:00+00:00

Mama

Sophie’s small body emitted heat. If I moved, she inched over until we touched again. Marina had never cuddled so close. It had been a long time since I held one so dear, even longer since someone had held me. I was eight years old when Mama came to me on her last night. The nights after her death, I held my brother with the same closeness as Sophie and I shared now. I had clung to Gus, who was three years old and sound asleep, dumb to the fact that our mother was gone forever.

The last night, Mama came into the room I shared with Gus. She sought refuge in me as her pain mounted, knowing her labor had begun. She propped herself on pillows on my bed and told me story after story. She knew it could be her last chance.

I thought of Marina’s notion of me, and now Sophie’s, and how these next few days might be their last chance to know me. Sophie had heard from my lips, They think I killed him. If I stayed or if I left, there would be lies and truths and mixtures of both. What they would remember of me, I did not know.

I remembered my mother saying that night, “The babies are talking to us.” We knew she was having twins because a crease ran down the middle of her stomach like a cleft in a peach, with a baby on each side.

My ear was pressed against her belly. “What are they saying?” I asked.

“What do you hear?” Her fingers combed my hair, and her nails passed lightly over my scalp, sending goose bumps down my body.

I heard gurgles of gas, rumblings, not unlike what my own stomach said when I was hungry. “They say they are coming.”

Being the woman she was, from the place she came from, she took my words as a prophecy, and to ease her nerves she told a story I loved.

“Every year, an old Gypsy woman came to my village, pushing a cart with a diib , a wolf , tied to the wooden handle like a dog on a leash. She came in the spring, lit a fire, and kept camp on the outskirts of town. She stole from the village, but she was tolerated out of charity, for she had no family, and in our tradition, you must be generous to the needy or you bring shame on yourself and your family. This Gypsy, she doted on the wolf as if he were a lapdog, and for years, her arrival was believed a good omen, for if an old woman could tame a wolf, she could spread her charms over the soil and crops of the village.

“Our Gypsy looted from our gardens, from the market bins, the henhouses, and the butcher’s pile of bones. She took a bit from one household, and then another, so her pilfering did not upset one over the other. Still, the mothers of the village warned us to stay away, because Gypsies stole children and this Gypsy might give us to the wolf.

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