ETERNITY

Eternity is about a life of bad decisions leading to the crawl, scrape and claw out of the fiery pit of hell, through thousands of lives as maggot, worm, insect or bird. Unfortunately, there are many kinds of Helle, including the ones we often live on this earth. Helle is the many lives we live in illness, poverty, shame and even the sin of averageness. My protagonist is cursed with remembering all of his previous lives in damnation, and these lives are featured as vignettes and stories of life at any given level. All of these lives are lived at the will of the Fates.

This is a vignette of life in poverty. It is neither cheerful or happy. Enjoy!

My first live birth in poverty was difficult.  I was born in a dirt floor hut in Calcutta, India.  The operatory was a wooden pallet covered with a filthy sheet covering filthier rags.  I clearly recall trying to escape the womb, but a thick cord wrapped around my neck.  My infantile fingers would not move and work as I knew they should.  I was a newborn infant with the mind of a murderer who had lived ten million lives in Helle.  I remembered everything, and nothing.  I had full memory, but I would be unable to use it other than for observation.  My body was still that of a human baby. 

I could hear my mother screaming.  I could hear the chatter of the village women.  Outside the sounds of vehicles and violence.  All had permeated the womb for the last several weeks of my memory.

 I was being pushed from the womb headfirst. As I descended, the cord around my neck wrapped tighter and tighter, cutting off oxygen and strangling me.  Still, my mother pushed at the encouragement of the midwives.

 As my head cleared her opening, the shouts from the village woman became frantic.  I felt the cold steel of the blade slide between my neck and the cord, cutting me free. With a tremendous gasp for air, my little blue face let out a piercing wail.  A cheer went up from the women, then immediately died to a crying moan.  I felt a rag wiping the slime from my body.  It was dreadfully hot, but still I was swaddled in a coarse rag and lifted to my mother’s breast where I fed until I slept. I could feel her body pulsing with her sobs and grief. I knew something was wrong, but in my infantile self, I would need to wait to understand it.

 The realizations came slow.  When I gained my sight, I could see the fear and anguish on faces of women and children as they gazed upon my own visage.  I could see the anger in the men’s gaze.  I would learn later that these men were begging my mother to kill me.  That I was bringing bad luck and sickness to the village.

 In my mother’s eyes I saw only love and pity.  She who had nothing and now had a deformed bastard child.  I must be awful for her to have pity on me.

 Each day my mother swaddled me in the rag and wrapped me over her shoulder in a sling.  She walked miles to the dumps, which were mountains of trash from the outlaying cities.  From sunup to sundown, she picked over the trash eating clumps of dirty rice and discarded animal food.  She used a stick to clean the dried scraps in the bottom of tin cans and smoked the last remaining drag of lipstick-covered cigarette butts.  The great treasures were the last mouthful of beer or liquor in a bottle.

 Each day she filled a burlap sack with cans and bottles, which she pulled along the ground to the recycler. He would give her a few pennies.  If he could have his way with her, she earned a few pennies more. She would walk stiff legged and weeping the miles back to the shanty in the slum where she slept on the same blood-spattered rags I was born on.

 For a child borne to this poverty, there is no disposable diaper or sterile infant formula.  I drank from her teat and my excrement ran down her belly and leg.  She would use a page from a magazine to wipe it off and continue hunting for food and bottles.

 As were all children of the slums, I was born to sickness and malnourishment.  My meals were entirely dependent on my mother’s health.  Some days she produced no milk, and I would wail in hunger all day.  My cry’s blended with the cries of a million hungry babies.  A pleasure to Hel’s ears. A world away from the safe, clean homes of the city where maids cleaned the house and clothes daily.  Where cooks made sumptuous meals without regard to waste.  These were our benefactors as their waste was our only form of sustenance.

 Mother herself was little more than skin and bones.  Her belly protruding, her ribs like sticks.  Her arms and legs thin with bulbous joints.  Her teeth a row of black, jagged nubs.  She was sixteen years old and had been on her own for three years.  

 I was the first child of many who had lived, and I was this monster creation with a massive head and bulging eyes. My eyes leaked sap, a sticky tear that collected the dust of the streets.  My lips curled back with my saliva dripping down my chin.  Teeth and gums exposed in a frightful grimace.  The hair on my head was sparse and wiry. It grew in patches of white in a world where every hair was black.  I was the albino freak.  I was the child who would never feed myself, never walk or run.  I would never be able to speak, only grunt.  It was soul-crushing to have known what I was and not be able to control it.

 Mother became sick on the hottest day of August.  With unbearable heat and humidity, she shivered with chills.  The illness had spread through the shantytown like wildfire.  When she coughed, her frail body seemed to nearly break.  She spit her blood to the street as she walked the miles to the dump.  She staggered as if drunk and the people on the street gave her a wide berth.  Everyone knew she was ill, and no one would or could help.  They could only avoid her and hope the evil spirits possessing her and her child would leave them be.

 I was swaddled to my mother’s body as she deliriously licked the paper of a McDonalds wrapper, scraping off the crusty cheese leavings with her nubs of teeth. I was cradled to her chest as she consumed a third of a bottle of rice wine discarded after a festive party in the city.  I was pressed close to her, listening to her heart as it became fainter as she rested in the mountain of trash. I could feel the rise and fall of her chest become shallower.  I felt her body go limp as she helplessly rolled in the garbage, completely covering my body, forcing the air from my own lungs.

 My arms trapped, my cry’s unheard.  My mother died in the massive heap of trash, and I would starve to death under her body.  A slow, pitiful, painful death that lacked any dignity, grace or meaning, except to one young girl who called me daughter.