Tristessa's Story, Part 2

Be sure to look at Part 1, or, if you'd like to start with a mystery, read how Meli and Tristessa first meet in the "Twelve" series. -m.


Ravigie did her best to protect me from the neighborhood children, and it worked well for about three months. But nothing the old housekeeper could do would stand up against an entire village deciding to hate a young girl. I had dark eyes, yes, but to this superstitious clump of adobe huts and withered farmhands, they were the eyes of the devil.

It didn't help that the day before I arrived was the last day it ever rained.

You may laugh and say that is impossible, that surely in three months it rained at least once. I shall counter with the fact that the only reason children could no longer push me in the mud was that there was no mud to push me in.

The land was brown, dull, and fading under my very eyes. I tried to keep the flowers at the back of our hut alive, but without rain they had no will to live. Ravigie was growing thin and sallow. Fewer children ran and yelled and played in the rutted roads; they were all at home, sinking into a thirsty starvation. No one washed themselves. That would have been a foolish waste of water.

It was near the end of my third month staying with Ravigie -- I had had no word from or of my mother in all that time -- when the children came.

I was collecting eggs. Egg. There was only one that day, and I gently took it out from under the younger of our two remaining chickens. I was cradling it in my dirt-caked palms when something clunked on the wall of the coop. I heard snickers, then another clunk. Wary, I pushed my hair behind an ear and peaked around the corner of the doorless opening to the coop. A rock zipped past; I felt the air being pushed around it as it almost hit my cheek.

"Devil's child!" screamed one of the kids.

"Black eyes!" yelled another. I squinted out into the sun. The people in the city had said this about my mother, but it had been in reverent whispers. What black eyes she has, they had said behind their leather gloves and feather fans. Like an inky, starless sky.

Another clunk. I narrowed my eyes, took a breath, and stepped outside. I could not let them trap me in that coop. A small rock hit me in the neck, then got caught in my tangled hair before falling to the ground with a soft plop. One of the children laughed, but they swallowed their humor as soon as I looked over.

"Go away," I said. The menace in my voice surprised even me, and the boy closest to me, the tallest and cleanest, sneered.

"We live here. You go away," he said.

This was the first moment I had ever really felt angry. I say it like this because it really was years before I truly discovered what that emotion was. What it was that make all the muscles in my entire body tense. What it was that made that egg fly out of my grasp and land with a satisfying cracksplickysplat in the face of that boy.

The boy was screaming, the children were screaming, Ravigie came out, yelling. There was so much noise, so much going on at a frenzied pace, that I had to close my eyes. But when I closed them, it got worse. Almost like the noise was louder. I opened my eyes again and saw something flicker at the end of my vision. Turning, I saw a garden of eggs on the ground.

The noise stopped.

"Geh," said someone.

"Are those...eggs?" said Ravigie. Her voice was choked and she tried to make her way over to me. I backed away, holding my hands out as if to fend her off. A child exclaimed.

"They're gone!"

I whirled around in a tight circle, looking for the eggs. It was true; they were gone. Vanished like the rain. Like my mother.

Tristessa's Story, Part 1

My name is Tristessa Rincressa Potenta Dellatiere. There is a father somewhere in my past, but he was not there long enough to assist in naming me. My mother's name is Umi and when she disappeared I was sent to a farm. Whenever I tell my story, some kind-meaning stranger asks me where the farm was. I can never answer them. Perhaps it was in Italia, where I am told I was born. Or Espagna. I only know that one moment I was living between the still stone bodies of houses bordered by cobblestone streets, and the next I was at the farm, pulling myself up out of the mud.

Mud can be soothing if you approach it in the right way, but this mud had children all around it, and they were taunting me. "She has evil in her eyes!" they were yelling. One of them threw a stone and it hit me just above my eyebrow. I looked up, blinking blood out of my eyelashes. "They are even blacker than a pit!" I tried to speak, but something caught the words in my throat and strangled them into silence. "Dirty eyes!"

Just then a plump woman with a soiled apron attached to her dress came bustling out of a house behind me. She was not the farmwife, but a servant or housekeeper of sorts. "Stop! Stop this now! Shoo! Away!" She fluttered her apron at the children and they ran away, squealing like pigs. "Tessa?" she whispered then. It was the first time anyone had called me that, and I did not know at first that she was talking to me.


"Tessa? You are bleeding!" she said. I looked up at her with my one blood-free eye. Vomit rose in my throat and somehow I kept it back.


"I don't know you," I said. "Who are you?"


The woman looked very sad all at once, but soon her face was wiped clean and replaced with a solid half-smile. "I am Ravigie. I care for you."


My head rolled backwards and the bile rose again. "I'm going to throw up on you, Ravigie," I said, choking. She grabbed my arms carefully and pulled me up so I was kneeling.


"I'll hold your hair," Ravigie said. My hair was already caked with mud and she really didn't have to hold it back. My stomach heaved and my entire body shuddered as my stomach emptied itself of the little amount of food that I had actually eaten an hour before. Ravigie rubbed my back with her fingertips and whispered soft shushing noises while I heaved and hurled and expelled.


Ten minutes later I was laying on my back in the dirt, wiping my mouth with a wet bit of rag that Ravigie had brought out from the kitchen. She grabbed a shovel from the side of the house and turned over the mud and dirt so that my pile of waste was covered out of sight.


It was only then that I cried a little, and it was the last time I would ever let myself cry for real.

Short Story Contest

On Saturday night I sent in my 890 word entry to the Writers Weekly Short Story Contest. I have to wait 6 weeks to find out if I made it into any of the final rounds.

I wonder if I'm allowed to post what I wrote yet? Or is that jumping the gun?

The story is called "Remember". I don't actually say so but it takes place in Paris. Writing about cobblestoned streets made me want to go back. Maybe someday I will be rich and I will be able to do whatever I want without worrying about student loan payments (I have some lovely choice words for those $%!*# things).

Please stay tuned for further series. I've had some crazy dreams lately and you won't believe me when I say that I didn't actually make it all up.

-m