My mother stole one of my father’s ribs to make me, so she told me as soon as I could understand human language. Of course, before I was three, I could only understand the language of stars. They would hum and low through the night, changing pitch during the day as the sun’s endless solo drowned them out.
But slowly, Mother’s words replaced the singing stars, the flowery bursts from her mouth becoming solid shapes of speech, thudding like work tools onto the floor of my brain.
And one day, as she prepared bread for baking, pressing at the rolled dough in a motion called punching down, she mentioned how she had uncovered my father as he lay sleeping in the moonlight, slid her hand in under his lowest left rib, and broke it off.
“Hurt?” I asked, in childish sympathy.
“No,” she smiled, “I drugged him with bitter herbs.”
She explained how she hid the rib from him under a pile of leaves deep in the forest, ignoring him as he threw rocks and cursed her. Every day when she had a chance, she would sneak away from the farm and carve at the rib, fashioning a girl child, like a sailor working at scrimshaw, finally anointing me with the four sacred fluids of her body.
One late afternoon with the light slanting in gold rays through the trees, she emerged from the forest with me, howling and naked in her arms.
My father wouldn’t speak to her for months, she told me, laughing. And that’s how I came to understand, men only beget men. But a true woman is carved out by another woman, with wiles.
Even now, when my father looks at me, his hand goes to his ribcage as if he’s in pain. He eats supper grunting, perpetually offended, with alcohol on his breath and chicken stew in his whiskers.
But the notches my mother carved into my skeleton shimmer and glow in the dark, rustling a story only we can understand. If you look closely at my hands, you can see, through the skin, dancing pinpricks of light.
~~~
Linda Ann Strang is a feminist educator, poet, writer, and artist. Her fiction has appeared in Gone Lawn, Bending Genres, Litro, and elsewhere. 'Sirens' was shortlisted for the Nightmare on Story Street prize in 2024. Star Reverse, her second poetry collection, was shortlisted for the Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. Linda lives in South Africa.
