Page 128 of Their Property
That was the last real conversation I had with her.
Kyrie loweredthe papers to her lap and looked up at me. “It’s going to get worse from here, isn’t it?”
I nodded and pointed to the notepad where I wrote that she could stop reading.
“No, I’m okay. I think I just need to prepare myself.” She picked up the papers again and continued.
My motheractually tried to have a conversation with me that night. She’d probably noticed I had been in a better mood since meeting Charlie, but I was still angry at her for what she did. She kept trying to talk to me, but I didn’t want to engage. I kept ignoring her, and she kept getting in my face. I finally snapped and signed, ‘Leave me alone!’ without thinking.
She was like a statue, just staring at me before she started screaming, “Where did you learn that?! Who taught you that?”
I realized my mistake and refused to give up Charlie’s name, but it wasn’t hard to figure out. There were only two deaf people in the community—Charlie and the woman she learned from.
My mother was frantic, and her screaming had attracted attention. People came knocking, and she tried to force me to hide. But I was stronger than her at this point and almost as tall. I refused and resisted. I still didn’t fully understand, I was just sick of being hidden away like a shameful secret all the time. Charlie accepted me, so why couldn’t she?
The women on the other side of the door broke the lock with a small battering ram, and that was when all of our fates were decided. Mine. My mother’s. Charlie’s. One of the women was the one who helped my mother silence me. She looked just as shocked as everyone else.
They took us both, and that was when I learned the truth.
At twelve years old, I learned that this community was a cult that presented itself as a refuge for abused women and girls. Men were not only forbidden, they were kidnapped and murdered during ritualistic sacrifices. Any boys born from women in the cult were sacrificed as well.
Kyrie’s handsbegan to tremble as she read, and I held her arms to steady her. Her breath shook as well, but her eyes kept moving over the page.
My mother was givena sham of a trial. She begged for forgiveness with all her might, but I could tell immediately that their minds were made up. She laid out all her reasons for keeping me hidden, silencing me, and pointed fingers at her friend who helped. All of it just made her look guiltier in their eyes.
She was given a long, painful, dishonorable death. I won’t recount the details here, but it will haunt me forever. It happened because of me, and they kept me in a cramped dog kennel across the room to watch. I couldn’t do anything to stop it, not even yell, ‘stop’. Every time I tried to look away, someone jabbed me with a knife. I was bleeding from hundreds of cuts by the time it was over.
At some point during my mother’s torture, she revealed that someone had taught me sign language. A small group went off, I assume to look for Charlie. I don’t know if they ever found her, and I hope to all the gods they didn’t. They never brought anyone else back to that room while I was in there. While my mother died slowly.
Kyrie put the papers aside,gently folding them as she did. “I’m sorry. I don’t think I can read any more.”
She then turned to me, arms sliding over my shoulders and back. I let her pull me into an embrace, one that trembled from the shock of what she just learned, but she held fast to me like I was the only thing that mattered.
THIRTY-NINE
KYRIE
Ididn’t know how long Grudge and I held each other. Or whether it was truly him comforting me or the other way around.
The contents of that letter made me want to hug the little boy it depicted, the one who was scared and alone and had no one. It wasn’t as graphic as I initially feared, but my imagination and Grudge’s writing painted everything vividly in my head. It hung over me now like a dark cloud.
I couldn’t even imagine how Grudge felt, having lived that nightmare. Havingthatas his childhood. Fuck, I had no room to complain about my life and my father.
Grudge’s head rested halfway on my shoulder and the pillow behind us, my fingers running absently through his dark strands of hair. His arms looped around me, one hand resting on my thigh that he’d pulled over his hip. We were still completely nude from the shower, but sex couldn’t have been any farther from my mind.
He’d been calm at my side as I read the letter, while I had been in near tears the whole time. Every time I thought of something to ask him, or just pictured him in one of the horrible scenes he wrote about, I wanted to burst into tears again. All because he was a boy. I wanted to find this terrible cult and root them out like a disease.
“How did you get away?” I asked when I finally composed myself enough to speak. He probably wrote it in the last few paragraphs I didn’t read, but I couldn’t bring myself to touch those papers again.
“Mm.” He scratched his beard and made a gesture I didn’t understand.
“Lock-picking?” I guessed, making the correct sign for it.
“Mm-hm.” He reached for his notepad to explain in more detail.You won’t believe this, or actually, maybe you will.He chuckled lightly as he wrote.A raven flew to my cage and brought me strips of metal that were the perfect lock-picking tools.
“You’re kidding!” I laughed, relief washing over me from that small miracle in all his suffering. “Was it Munin?”
Don’t know. I never interacted with a raven again until I met T-Bone, years later.
