I told Aunt Eva about the sex. I told her everything. She was not surprised. We waited three days. We remained in the cottage. We stayed quiet. He remained imprisoned in the tree. The ink spirals on my face and arms became smudged like a child’s drawing. I was a messy picture book. Aunt Eva didn’t let my mother see me. She kept her away with pretty lies. She was too convincing. “So your Mother won’t worry,” she said and she was right, yes, she was right.
“I am frightened. What’s going to happen?”
Aunt Eva looked up, as though she was reading the marks on the ceiling, her eyes staring into something. She reminded me of a crocodile, glassy eyed, guarding the entrance to a pyramid marked with hieroglyphs. She had teeth. She replied, ‘He’s very angry. I don’t think that tree will hold him much longer.”
I was crying then. He would kill me, I knew it. And she put her arms around me, circled me with her hair which smelt of cinder and she whispered, “Do not be afraid.”
“Can you see into the future, can you see what will happen?”
“Only glimpses, Pomegranate. But I will fight for you. You have been unlucky. Your father sold you to a shit.” And we both laughed. For there was nothing else left to do but laugh. And she stroked my face with her cool hand.
“Have you ever been in love, Aunt Eva?”
“No,” she said. “But I was hurt once and I never let it happen again.”
“Tell me about it,” I asked. “If only so I can forget for a while.”
And she told me the story. She was seventeen and she had a secret. She had met a young aristocrat riding in the woods one day. She said his horse was as white as wedding dresses. She never knew his name. Sometimes she thought he never really existed, as though he were formed from her imagination, summoned on dandelion wishes: spongy fairy wings blown into the wind to stop her loneliness. He used to gallop around her, throw flowers in her hair and blow her kisses. He used to tell her he loved her, over and over. He used to play games with her, toy with her, stir her up. This happened for weeks and weeks.
One day Aunt Eva found him in the woods, playing games with another girl. And he saw Aunt Eva watching him. And he tried to smile. He tried so very hard but the look on her face was something he hadn’t seen before. It wasn’t anger or jealousy. It wasn’t sadness or heartbreak. For Aunt Eva was smiling. She was smiling the most terrible smile. Like a crocodile.
“He was a coward,” she said. “He was the most terrible coward.”
“What did you do?”
“I took my revenge,” she said quietly.
“How?”
Her words were so soft. Her teeth were so sharp. “I burnt his ancestral home to the ground. I killed his parents and his sister. I hunted him down, played games with him, toyed with him, butchered him and ate his heart.”
“Do you think that was perhaps an overreaction?” I said, stupefied.
“He cried at the end. He cried so much. The fucking coward.” She was deep in her memories. And then she looked sadly at me. “Pomegranate, listen to me. If a man hurts you – cut him down. If a man humiliates you – cut him down. If a man plays games with you – cut him down.”
“What are you going to do with my husband?”
There was a knocking at the door. Aunt Eva turned gently towards me, smiling. “Something worse.” She opened the door and my husband entered and sat himself once again at the kitchen table. I stayed where I was on the sofa.
“Let me tell you what is going to happen now, ladies,” he said with the utmost control, the teapot on the table exploding into pieces. “I am taking my ugly wife Pomegranate back to the Underworld where I will put her through a variety of experimental degradations. As for you,” he glanced at Aunt Eva, “I am going to have you put in a cage where I can watch you starve to death.”
“I would very much like to see you try, you little turd.”
He stood, screaming “I AM THE LORD OF THE UNDERWORLD AND YOU WILL DO WHAT I SAY OR I WILL TEAR YOU APART!”
The cottage shook, the walls shook, the windows exploded. Aunt Eva looked at me, “Run back to your mother, go now!”
And I ran out of the house. I could see her turn into fire. A burning goddess. A wall of flames. I ran down the path. I could see the cottage on fire, an inferno. The cottage was sinking into the earth, forming a crater as if a meteorite had struck.
I ran back to mother, who was baking bread. I had no idea what to say to her.
Mr Fingers and Aunt Eva
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