Wash by Margaret Wrinkle Read Free Book Online Page A

running her fingers across all that was familiar, forgetting about the life up on the surface she’d left behind. Until that one crewman yanked her back with the grip of his pink chapped hands.
    Mena never meant to leave this life. She just lost track of time. From the very beginning, she had carried a strong sense that there was something waiting for her.
    And sure enough, once she got here, there he was. She bumped against him as they were being transferred from boat to pen, or from pen to pen, she was not sure which. Each of them trapped in their own slow jerking line while being marched in opposite directions. All hurry up and wait, with most everybody keeping their eyes down on the dirt or on the back of the neck in front of them.
    It was when their two lines pressed close together at the narrow part of the alleyway that they were pushed into one another, knocking shoulders. When the whole of both lines got hung up for a minute. Just for a minute. Enough time for them to step away from each other and look up.
    Her eyes move from his feet to his face. It is like she is seeing herself made into a man except bigger. After all that ripping and tearing and chaos, after this whole parade of people she does not know and has never seen before, here he is. Somebody who knows her and knows her parents too. Somebody who knows exactly where the path behind their village bends to meet the creek in the shade of that big mangrove.
    They can read their stories in each other’s face. She knows how he looked before he shot up, before his voice dropped and before his muscles began to lap over each other under his smooth skin. Before his family sent him inland to stay with relatives, trying to keep him safe. And he knows how she was set apart from the beginning.
    And now here they are, moving past each other in long crawling lines to pour into adjoining pens with the fence between them worn rickety and loose where it meets the brick at the back corner, and nobody paying any attention at night because there’s another wall circling the whole compound with broken glass jagged along the top.
    Wash
    My mamma was quiet but she had a pull to her. When I was little, her draw was real strong. Any gap between us was too much. She’d drag me to her till I was snugged right up against her, curled in the small of her back or the crook of her legs, and I didn’t fight it neither.
    But sometimes, her pull went to push and you couldn’t get a grip on her no way. She had roots grown so deep, she’d be here in body but gone someplace else in spirit. Once she started dipping down in her own well, she’d get so gone till all I could reach for was where she used to be.
    Guess we should have been glad she still had her inside place, but mostly what I felt was jealous and left behind. But she was right to keep it to herself. Wasn’t enough to go round anyway. At least let her have her peace instead of us fighting over it, tearing it to scraps and none of us having any.
    Course I didn’t have any of this figured out back then. All this I’ve come to since.
    There was no getting next to her when she got gone like that. And reaching for her just made her feel farther away. I remember sitting there, trying to hold myself steady till she came back close enough to where I could get at her. Just sitting there, rocking and telling myself everything I knew for sure.
    Times like that, I felt like I was drifting with no ground under my feet. Like something might snatch me right up and I’d be gone from this world. So when she did pull me close, I’d nestle in, feeling so far from those other times I’d just about forget, till I’d hear that one little tug in the back of my mind telling me watch out. Telling me pay attention.
    You see these women round here steady stitching all these little scraps together to make one big piece? That’s what I’d do inside my mind whenever my mamma let me lie close against her. I’d stitch myself right tight to her.
    And I