A Woman’s Glory
- Aug 18, 2021
- 4 min read
by Jasmine Sawers
Nimble up the ladder of her hair she pulls him in lit by the scent of the setting sun, blood rollicking like the threat of a summer storm churning over the trees. Blood up, low animal scent of him strong at the juncture of his neck, bearing her down into her featherbed where his skin blazing on hers (no one’s ever touched her but Mother, no one’s ever seen her but Mother, when she first heard his voice she thought it new birdsong, when she first saw his form she thought it that of a woman, and what a comely woman, too, to set her skin tightening over all her parched flesh like a blossom sapped of its nectar, but with a low voice that quivered the clenched bud of her fundament, he told her what a man was, showed her what a man was, taught her what a man was) pitches her into a frenzy, sends her hair cascading over and around him, clasping him to her body as tight as her elbows around his shoulders, tight as her hands clutching his back, tight as her legs slung trembling over his hips, her hair long as her tower is tall, long as her life amid all this sky and stone. Her hair locks him against her and draws him inside (she had been so long alone in her tower, so long alone in the mirror, so long alone in her body; now she knows what solitude is and when he leaves once more with a promise to return ghosting over the seam of her lips, she will weep for all the knowing), the yearning root of him plunging into her rain-fresh earth, the smell of dogwoods blooming in the springtime rising humid between the knot of their bodies. Bound beneath the canopy of all her heavy hair, in the shelter of their togetherness, she is growing.
The mirror reveals her pendulous and luscious by autumn, hips shifting hot where the burgeoning bowl of all her abundance sits heavy in the hollow of her trunk, exactly where she is molten as a greedy candle, exactly where she waits for him day after day, each dress slick and ruined for want of him, destroyed by the needing and the missing when his visits wane and Mother’s wax. Mother’s voice is grackle-sharp and scrapes against her ears, echoes between the walls of her tower who did you spread your legs for fool girl who stripped you of your virtue little cuckoo who stole my treasure from me you mudslug you gnat’s ass you horsefly bite? The hair has grown so heavy she has no strength left to throw it over the hook, no will to brace herself against stone to bear the weight of a mother, the weight of all the days she’s spent watching the squirrels and the badgers and the cardinals live happy under cloud and sun, the weight of all the nights she’s sat astride her lover’s proud oak as he murmurs promises into her skin, as he declares devotion to the seed he planted inside her, as he slides big hands over the great rolling hills of her body and wriggles the slim branches of his fingers into all her hidden emptinesses where it will never be enough, where she will always throb with hunger, where she cannot abide the howl of her solitude.
Rose bushes spring up at the foot of her tower more thorn than bloom. This is how Mother has her way at last, the neat ring of flowers watered by the blood of a steadfast man, the tears of a pinioned girl, and Mother’s own piss and shit and spittle as day after day she shouts to be allowed inside until she is hoarse and gnarled and heaving for breath. And then there are two girls in the tower, both wailing for grief and pain and cold and the sharp sharp world, and the first names the second Redbud for the riot of pink amid the green and brown of the forest, for the slick of her father’s seeking lips and flickering tongue, for the splash of meat and viscera that followed her whole and cramping out of her mother’s body. When she suckles at the offered breast from within a bed of golden hair, that mother becomes the river from which all life swells, the soft working mouth on her teats drawing out a torturous pleasure: the shock of touch after so much cold, the memory of strong hands sinking reverent into her hair, the tilt of his eyes, the quirk in his brow she can divine in her daughter even now as the blanket of snow grows crisp and brittle, half-melted and wan with the promise of spring, with the promise of time’s steady heartbeat, with Redbud quick to crawl, to slap her hands on the mirror, to look beyond her window with one finger outstretched at each passing nightingale, each woodpecker, each sparrowhawk and circling vulture.
She sets Redbud on their featherbed the day she speaks her first word—robin—and shields her as she drives her fist into the mirror, blasting it into a thousand shards of refracted light. She strikes the braid from her head and does not stop despite the bite of glass on her scalp, her palms, the blood slicking her locks with tack and rust. She feels nothing but the cool of the breeze against her neck and the three sections of hair slipping brittle and lifeless through her hands like falling leaves. Down below, Mother is pacing before the rose bushes and shouting up bribes: bunches of mulberries and gooseberries and blackcurrants, baskets full of apples, sweet lush oranges from her garden.
With the first hank of hair, she will lash her child to her body. With the second, she will bind her mother to the bedpost. With the third, Rapunzel will let down her hair.
Jasmine Sawers is a Kundiman fellow and graduate of Indiana University’s MFA program whose work appears in such journals as Ploughshares, AAWW’s The Margins, SmokeLong Quarterly, and more. Sawers serves as Associate Fiction Editor for Fairy Tale Review and debuts a collection of flash through Rose Metal Press in 2022. Originally from Buffalo, Sawers now lives and pets dogs outside St. Louis. Learn more at jasminesawers.com and Twitter @sawers.
