Silent Girl by Tricia Dower Read Free Book Online Page A

Lady. So tiny, a mosquito could carry her away. Well, maybe a big mosquito. Plenty a dem around.” The men laughed again. A few clapped. Matsi hugged herself, ashamed of her nakedness for the first time in a long while. When the bidding started, she tuned out the noise. Heard only her own short breaths.
    You’re better than drugs, said the man with the gun. Can be sold more than once if you keep yourself pretty. Stop licking your lips, making that ring round your rosy mouth.
    They sold her to new men who sold her to new men who sold her to house after house, each one farther away from LA, each one guarded by guns and slobbering dogs. You had to feel sorry for the dogs in that heat. Each house was the same until Maw-Maw’s, the same boring movie star stuff. After a while you want more to do, when there’s nothing to read, no one giving you homework. Maw-Maw’s was like skipping a grade, running to catch up on lessons you’d missed, especially the ones about go-go.
    The man who won her had rat-like eyes, sharp little teeth, and three tiny jewels in the lobe of one ear. She stood straight as a pole when he dropped his pants. Still as a stone when he circled her waist with his clammy hands and lifted her up as if they were doing Swan Lake. He lifted her high and sat on the chair, spread her legs with his knees and speared her. She was somewhere else at the time, afloat by the door, which as it turned out, was a much better place to watch that poodoo ballet. Not much to see, the swan only screaming, staining the dance floor with drops of red rain.
    T-Henry wrapped her in a sheet and carried her to the sleeping room where Maw-Maw waited. “Go back f’Rosie,” she said, taking Matsi from him. “Gonna be awrite, Cherie,” she said, easing Matsi onto a cot, kissing her forehead. She patted a warm, wet cloth between Matsi’s legs where pain rose and fell like an ocean wave. Matsi couldn’t stop her jaw from shaking. “Hush, Cherie,” Maw-Maw said. “Hush, dahlin.” Maw-Maw diapered her with a thick towel. Lifted and rocked her in her arms.
    T-Henry came back with the girl Maw-Maw called Mexicali Rosie. Laid her on the cot next to Matsi. Blood streaked the girl’s legs. Rosie cried like a little lamb. Maw-Maw lowered Matsi back onto the cot to tend to Rosie. She went back and forth between them – giving them sips of water, changing their diapers – for what felt like hours before the other girls came in. They stood silent around Rosie and Matsi until Maw-Maw said, “Time to make do-do.” Said it softly, sadly. The girls went to their cots.
    T-Henry’s voice floated in from the doorway. “Ready, Ma?”
    Maw-Maw slowly walked away, doused the light, and locked the door.
    Matsi rode her pain for hours, aware only of the occasional vibration of heavy trucks on the street, loudspeakers calling out words she couldn’t decipher. Rosie cried off and on. “Hush, Cherie,” Matsi would say, stretching her hand out to touch the girl’s cot. She slept for a while, waking to the smack of wind and rain against the room’s boarded up windows. She ached for food, almost frantic to hear the click of Maw-Maw’s key. Hunger became nausea as the pain returned.
    Rain pounded the roof and the walls. It shook the house. Close by, the sound of splashing water. The others must have heard it, too. They were talking excitedly, feeling their way around in the dark.
    A loud snap made one of the girls yelp. Matsi pushed herself onto her elbows and strained to see. A chunk of the roof had fallen through the ceiling and onto some cots. Water streamed in, filling the room faster than Matsi thought possible, lifting her cot off the floor, turning it into a raft that soon overturned. She tried to doggy paddle but the diaper dragged her down. She pulled it off and winced as cold water stung her wounded place. She bumped into Rosie who lay on the rising