Reflections - cover2

Spilt Milk
little girl’s world thrashed out their frustrations on the dining room floor. Outside, the crickets strummed and the birds settled down for the night.
It seemed the world was not much concerned. She wondered how this could be so.
It had all started over a loaf of bread. Such a little thing. Yet she knew instinctively that this was not what the fight was about at all. It was about
hopelessness. She had watched the tension build all evening. In fact, she had watched the tension build for as long as she could remember. She
felt alone and terribly afraid. There was no place, no one to run to.
After a while, the fighting sounds died. She began to hear mother-in-the-kitchen sounds, water running and plates being scraped. A little later,
her father came out on the porch steps. He didn’t know what to say to her, and she felt sorry for him. He sat down next to her on the top step, took
her hand, and put his arm around her thin shoulders. They sat in silence for a long time in the gathering darkness. She leaned her head on his
chest. She loved his man smells; he smelled like Camel cigarettes and starch and leather and cows and clean sweat. The mosquitoes buzzed and bit
her bare ankles. She got up finally and went inside to clean off the piano.
She kept that piano until she was a grown woman with children of her own. Through all those years, she never sat at it that she didn’t find some
ancient spot of dried milk that had escaped all her efforts, reminding her of those characters in literature that futilely tried to rid themselves of
some damned spot. She never sat there that she didn’t remember that hot August night and all the despair and pain and sadness it contained. She
never sat there that she didn’t feel absolutely subject to her mother’s iron will, eternally beholden to her for all the motherly sacrifice that the piano
represented, guilt-ridden for hating the imprisonment of always trying to please someone she loved and always failing.
One day she sold it. Her mother could not understand why she would sell a perfectly good piano. She offered no explanation. She remembered
watching the men move it out of the house. It felt as if they were taking a great weight off her, as if chains were being broken, as if a great
ulcerating sore was healing.
At last, the spot was gone.
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