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The Farewell Shourya Agarwal
“I am in blood stepped in so far, that should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go over” Macbeth, William Shakespeare. Icy cold-water soaks through the petticoat. With each step, it seeps deeper and deeper into her crevices. Fills up the lacerated thighs and the cratered vagina to finally puddle into her enormous belly-button. The needles creep up slowly, spikes gnawing into her skin— until she is completely drenched by this sharp pang of freedom. Just below her swollen breasts, two brown moons shine. Two hungry mouths to feed, four twilit eyes to coddle. Months of traveling have tattered the strands of her bodice and they no longer wait for her approval to feed. Just suckling at the diaphanous cloth drains milk into the ravenous lake. Filtered through the last speckles of the plantation dirt, life dribbles into their mouths as she wades across the water. Twenty yards. Fifteen. A small raft hovers about in the middle of nowhere. Ten paces to safety. In eight, the flogging would end. In six, she will be free from the chains. It feels too unreal— dawn not breathing back to her in cattle dung. She clambers onto the raft and breathes a sigh of relief. Quickly, she unbandages her breast-wrapping to release the children into freedom. One of them comes off loose and crashes down on the wooden board like a fisherman’s catch. Eyes staring into the milky way as if consuming the sky. Too fraught to close themselves, they are transfixed in a vacant stare while the clumps of stars glide away from the barge. The hungrier one keeps biting at the dried teat and she waddles over to the stargazer. With her huge palms, she erases the sky’s reflection from the eyes. Putting the children together on the raft, she looks back across the lake. Near the pine trees with branches whiplashing in the wind. Beyond the rock outcrops on the bruised bedrock. Flocks of morning birds whistle through the air. Just like Massa used to when he had trouble sleeping. Years of memory thaw over the frigid lake. The thick clot burdens the barge, almost sinking it deep into the water. She’s too afraid
