Love Language
Flash fiction ; TW: domestic abuse, domestic violence
Mold-plastered walls, but it was his house. Rust-colored tiles where dust played hide, and she broke her back and nails playing seek, but it was his house. Pipes roaring with water, she slept under, secretly dreaming they would burst and swallow her away, but they never did, and it was his house. The rooftop where she hung the clothes to dry. Where she brought the worn-out mattress on warm Casablancan summer nights and a glass of Atay1 and observed the cosmos and stars she couldn’t name, wishing she could be one of them, but she was not, and instead she was there, and it was his house. The smell of his alcohol-laced piss in the staircase, and that of gut-wrenching stew of beans or witchcraft or both, coming from his sister’s downstairs apartment, but it was his house. And the — his — fridge, she opened every morning hoping for some miracle other than frozen animal fat and tripes, because that’s all he liked to eat, in his house. And her daughters, who learned to make their breathing sound like silence, who hid their blood-soaked pads, their bras and underwear wherever they could, because it was his house. She had lived there thirty years, so much so that she could name every crack in the walls.
Boys feared her, she hit them, their brothers, their sisters, and sometimes their fathers even. Every night, her mom would open the door to find a weeping mother, and a toothless son, and immediately she would know exactly which one of her children was responsible for the tears and the toothlessness. Things were manageable when it was her mother who opened the door. She’d escape punishment with a pinch of pepper in her mouth — to stop the cursing — and chili paste on her hands — to stop the hitting. But neither truly burned her, for since birth, she carried in her heart a fire that made her immune to the burns of the world.
On the rare days where he wasn’t out fucking whores or drinking himself into oblivion, and it was her father who opened the door, the story was entirely different. He was the one who had taught her the language of violence, and he spoke it far more fluently than she ever could. The first time she considered death was after she blacked out from one of the countless beatings. She realized that if he wasn’t going to be the one to end her life, she would.
She spent all her days at the pool. Her hair constantly smelled of chlorine and four-cheeses paninis. When her sisters judged her new habit was becoming reckless, they took it upon themselves to fetch her every evening, making sure she got home before their father did. One time, they rode the bus during rush hour, squeezed into a seat across from a junkie who had spread his legs so wide his ball sack was resting on the seat. He kept his gaze on them, bearing a silent: “Look if you dare”. It was Bus 65, but they renamed it Bus 9 — “balls” in dialect is spelled with a “q”, and kids wrote it 9 because it looked cooler. They rode bus 9 back to the house, scolding her about what if dad knew, but also laughing to tears because they never suspected a ball sack to look so ridiculous.
All the cracks. The one by the electrical panel, that came from the shock of her skull, that he tried to smash four times against it, and he almost did, but one of her daughters screamed for the neighbors from the window.
His mouth spoke Arabic but he looked American. If she put a cap on his bald head, he could’ve easily passed for someone in a rap video. She was the manliest of her sisters, but he made her feel like a woman. He complimented her bathing suit and said he’d never seen legs like hers — she’d shaved them with honey and sugar the night before, when everyone was asleep, and the swimsuit cost her five dirhams at the flea market. When his hands weren’t busy with a Heineken or a cigarette he would grab her ass and murmur words that meant love in their dialect but sounded like violence elsewhere. When they created Darija2, people were too busy being Muslim to think of love language. At first, she acted like it was just a game. But she kept coming to the pool everyday and never said no when he asked if she wanted to share a panini.
The cracked paint from the rain, on the rooftop that night where she smashed three packs of tea glasses on his head. She couldn’t tell if it was the rain or the blood that made him look so drenched. Afterwards, he got twelve stitches on his bald crane and looked like the monster from one of her daughter’s books.
He called her hbiba — my dear — kbida — my liver — hyati — my life. And on those days when she saw in his eyes he really wanted her, though he wasn’t allowed, he said things like, « you’re gonna have to put your ass on the ground eventually, because you’re gonna be my fucking wife ». Her inner flame flared with lust as she caressed his soft, dark skin — Sahraoui3 skin. She silently thanked the desert and the sand for carrying him all the way to her.
The marks his dying mother’s nails left on the living room wall, when she was too frail to move so she, her daughter-in-law, wiped her feces with her bare hands. His mother looked at her while she worked, she could not talk anymore but her eyes said, “you were my only real daughter in this family of failures, he might be my son but may God cast upon him a third of the suffering he inflicted on you, Inchaallah4”. And ever since his mother died in her arms, her heart mourned deeply yet carried an immense gratitude. She slept with the certainty that the day would inevitably come when God punished him, for the curse of a dying mother upon her child outweighed any stew or decapitated rooster.
Atay: Moroccan tea
Darija: Moroccan dialect
Sahraoui: From the Sahara desert region
Inchaallah: Arabic for “God willing”
such power, beauty, and violence in this little flash. Beautiful work!
Beautifully written!