Free Man Curse by Raqiyah Mays Page B

together, I saw him smack her butt, grab a belt buckle hole, and pull her close to kiss.
    I ran upstairs to my bedroom, angry, bothered by questions racing through my brain. The first person I called was Meredith.
    â€œHe’s back.”
    â€œWhaaat?” She stretched out the word, enunciating the t . “Did he apologize?”
    â€œNot to me.”
    â€œDid your mother say anything about him coming over?”
    Silence.
    â€œAnd then they just started making out?”
    â€œ Yes .” This time I enunciated, stressing the s , full of surprise.
    â€œThat is gross,” Meredith said. “I’m sorry, girl . . .”
    I didn’t reply. Tears bubbled up, coating my pupils. Confusion glossed my eyes. Betrayal and bewilderment glazed my heart. How dare he act as if everything was okay? While he played house with his part-time wife, leaving broken promises on Lincoln Street. Like the one where he promised to take Lady and me to the park, leaving us to silently cry, staring out the bedroom window, waiting for his car to pull up. Like the lie he told Mom. Stealing her heart. Masking his matrimony. Taking advantage of a young single woman and her child. Larry was the Devil shaped with four legs and a horn between his eyes. He was one of those dog men I’d heard about in family discussions—high on promises, low on reliability, prone to letdowns, and scarce truth. Leading women to a shit-filled destiny: fallen, broken, begging in a dusty cloud of disappointment. His trickery was painful treachery.
    That night, after changing into a nightshirt and dozing off, I was suddenly awakened by the faint sound of a woman in pain. I’d always been a light sleeper, often waking to the faraway chirps of birds in trees from the neighbor’s lawn. The whimper came in steady intervals, making me sit up still, careful not to move, hoping to make out the sound. I looked at the clock, which read 2:00 a.m., and listened. Every thirty seconds, slight gasps of breath creeping up the steps, under the door, down my spine, curling into chilly goose bumps.
    Tiptoeing out my room, I felt the blue, body-length Mickey Mouse T-shirt I was wearing sweep the floor. I tried to squeeze through the crack of my bedroom door without fully opening it, causing the bolts to squeak.
    Someone might be hurting Mom.
    Thethought petrified me.
    Maybe she left the TV on.
    I tried to force myself into positive thinking as violent screenshots from horror films like Friday the Thirteenth and Psycho bounced blots of bloody scenes across my brain.
    I stood at the top of the stairs, listening for the moan again, on alert for that sound of illness and pain.Standing on my tiptoes, thinking it might make my footsteps lighter and quieter, I crept halfway down into chilly darkness. Refusing to turn the hallway light on, I strained to see through the living room blackness, managing to make out something that looked like two bodies. As my eyes focused, clearing up the postsleep daze, I knew exactly what I was seeing. The sight made me bite the right side of my mouth and fold up my lips in shock.
    There in the darkness of two in the morning, on the floor, next to the sofa, lying faceup on the beige rug, was my mother. She sat twitching and wincing, with nasty farts coming from her ass. She moaned intensely, wiggling, as she opened her legs wide for Larry, who was facedown, slurping out her vagina.
    I didn’t know what to do but sit on the steps and cry. Pulling at the soft rug comforting my shivers, quietly I wept, sniffing up snot rolling from my nostrils. I used the backs of my hands to wipe the tears, blurring the graphic triple-X scene. I don’t know why I didn’t run back to my room and lock the door. I just sat there, twelve years old, watching, bawling, and sniffing. My crying became noticeably louder, until I heard my mother call my name.
    â€œMeena,” she said through the dark, sitting up, arms crossed over her