Arc 3: The Hunted and the Hunters
Chapter 16: Amid the Owl Light
“SHE’S a beautiful woman”—those were the first words everyone uttered whenever they spoke of Unen’s mother. Without exception.
Then, in ten out of ten cases, they would qualify it with a contradictory conjunction in their next breath. “But you know, even the prettiest person in the world is wasted if they’re like that.”
Unen never knew where she procured the expensive liquor from, but her mother drank often. And whenever she became drunk she would verbally assault Unen.
“I would’a never had’ta go through aaall thiz MISERY if I knew you’d turn out’ta be a girl. At least it would’a been a lil’ more useful t’have gone on duh run if ye were a boy. ’S all your fault tha’ I’m SOOO miserable, Unen.”
Then she’d rant in a drunken slur, “D’ya know ‘ow much I’ve sacrificed fer ya, Unen? D’ya know ‘ow insanely diffi-culd it is t’care for ya, Unen? I would’a lived uh life o’ff luxury if it hadn’ been fer ya, Unen.”
Unen wordlessly sat on the ground, her arms wrapped around her knees, and her face buried in them while her mother sliced her open over and over again with her sharpest dagger—her words. The wounds had already gone so deep that each thrust would sink in until the entire edge of the blade was lodged in her heart so all that remained outside was the hilt. But strangely enough, the intense pain that had driven her to tears at first gradually stopped mattering as time passed.
Her mother’s liquor would run out around then, and she would fly over to embrace her daughter while bawling. “I’m s’rry fer takin’ it out on ya. ’S’not tha’ I hate you. Y’think I’d raise sucha worth-l’ss child until now if I didn’ like th’m? Aaah, my adooorable chhhild. Don’ya go anee-where on me. Don’t leave me all alone.”
It was always very warm within her mother’s arms. Feeling the heat steadily return to her ice-cold hands and feet, Unen closed her eyes in a trance. All the while seeping blood from the deep lashes inflicted upon her heart by her very own mother.
From what she gathered, her mother had escaped from somewhere.
She once told Unen that someone had ordered her to kill the child inside her if it turned out to be a boy. A girl, they had said, could still serve some use in the future, but boys were bad. That they didn’t have the surplus for feeding ravenous boys who wouldn’t pull their own weight. Unen’s mother fled in desperation to save her child because of what they had said. Yet, what had that given her? The child she had birthed turned out to be a girl who only brought hair-pulling, finger-biting work and misery. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this.” Her mother would grimace, twisting her perfectly shaped lips.
“Sure, my work there wasn’t easy, but I never had a hard time getting by. I got to wear pretty clothes, put on makeup, and have lots of people fawn over me and pamper me. I must’ve been completely mad to have thrown all that away.”
“Then you should go back there right now,” Unen had spat once, unable to take it anymore.
It earned her a bloodcurdling expression and a slap so hard that it slammed her into the wall of their hut where she slid to the ground. Unen learned never to say that again.
By the time Unen had become self-aware, her father was already long gone. Her mother went around telling others her husband was a peddler, but everyone knew that it was merely a lie to keep up appearances in her husband’s perpetual absence.
Unen had once asked her mother, “What kind of man is my father?”
Her mother had answered with only two words, “Beats me.”
It wasn’t until Unen had been much older that she realized her mother hadn’t said that to avoid the question. It was then Unen came to fully understand why unfamiliar men started to take turns coming and leaving the small, rundown hut she shared with her mother; why her mother would always send her away, saying, “Play outside until I tell you to come back inside,” every time a man came by. Bleakly, Unen understood that poverty had dragged her mother back into the world she had barely escaped from alive.
✦ ✦ ✦
THE middle-aged woman from across the field beckoned to Unen in the early afternoon at the beginning of summer, right after she had passed her fifth birthday.
“Hey, you.”
Unen had been sent outside the hut before noon that day by her mother who had said as always, “Don’t come back home till I call for you,” so Unen was sitting on the riverbank, making boats out of tree leaves and floating them down the river.
“You’ve got too much time on your hands, don’t ya? Won’t’cha help an old lady draw water from the river?”
Unen timidly accepted the bucket the old woman held out to her.
“You see, my youngest child is on an errand to the next town, so I’m short a helper right now. Come on then, carry it.”
Unen did as she was told and carried the water-filled bucket with both hands. “This way,” the woman directed, walking in front of her while carrying another water bucket in both hands. Unen felt like her bucket held considerably less water than the woman’s, but said nothing as she followed her.