Headcheese by Jess Hagemann

Author:Jess Hagemann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cinestate
Published: 2018-12-14T05:00:00+00:00

63 from: Alvin Schwartz, In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories.

NATANJALI brings the blade to her chest unhesitatingly. “I’ll do it,” she says, pressing knife edge to flesh mound.

“No, daughter,” her father consoles her. “We will find the money. I could not let you destroy any precious thing, least of all the most precious thing.”

Natanjali looks at him with questions in her eyes and in her heart.

“You, pita.” V. shakes his head sadly. “Blood of my blood.”

He starts walking away, muttering in the old tongue: “So, so beautiful. So, so wrong.”

Natanjali lays the knife down with a sigh. Its carved bone handle, inlaid with emeralds, winks in the morning light. Another day, another dollar. Another din, another rupee. But they’ll never get the monkey that is Britain off India’s back. She’d bowed too easily under the weight of aristocracy. Natanjali fears that India could no longer straighten her shoulders if she tried. So she straightens her own shoulders, and goes to soothe the crying babe in the next room.

As she passes through the kitchen, Natanjali nods at her cousin. P. squats on the floor above a different blade, this one mounted to a wooden block. She is using it to painstakingly dice garlic, one clove at a time. The spicy smell is so strong that Natanjali’s eyes water, disguising any lingering angry tears. Twenty years Natanjali’s senior, cousin P.’s breasts have lost any firmness they might once have had. Her teats hang like drained and long-empty dugs, like the milking goat’s in the backyard after her fifth litter. Cartilage sucked down to a skin cask. While P. has nothing of which to be ashamed (her eldest son is now a doctor in America, where outdated structures like the caste system have no place), still Natanjali thinks that if a woman wants to cover her breasts like she covers her hair—a sign of respect to Shiva—then she ought to be able to dress in a way that also commands respect: that keeps her body holy and (wholly) hers. To be shared only with her husband. With their unweaned son. Rather than a display to be leered at, he had always made her feel like a work of art. A priceless creation to be pored over, appreciated, and worshipped in ecstatic detail. She wants to belong to her king; not to the king.

“Mohabbat,” Natanjali says to P. “Throw me that rag.”

P. pinches the corner of the kitchen towel that covers her lap. Natanjali pulls two pins from her hair and secures the towel so that it covers her breasts. Immediately she feels better. P. gives her a strange look but says nothing.

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