by Koboah, A D
“Luna, this...gift. It is something that comes as naturally to me as taking a breath comes to you. It is not something I can stop doing.”
“But you never says. You never told me you could see in my mind!”
“No, because I knew you would try and block me if I did or at least censure your thoughts and...and...I only wanted to get to know you, know your thoughts and your memories.”
“My memories,” I gasped.
I felt almost close to tears now. He knew everything about me. There wasn’t any part of me that was hidden to him. He had access to all my memories, all those things that I did not want to think about, let alone utter to another human being.
“You’s evil and I hates you,” I said.
I didn’t like the fact that he was looking at me as if his world had suddenly come to an end, but I didn’t let that stop me.
“I’s a slave. I ain’t got nothing for my own. I can’t even call my body my own ’cause it belong to Massa and any children I has be his. My mind, my thoughts, my feelings, they the onliest things I has for my own and you takes that from me too?”
“Luna...Luna...I...” Anguish no longer came close to describing his expression as what he had done began to dawn on him.
“Taking them thoughts is the worst thing anybody ever did me. It be even worse than...than...”
I searched my memories for something awful to compare it to so I could make him understand. I thought of the time I had been at a slave auction with Master John. The trip had been during his period of bribery and flattery and the purpose of taking me with him was to hang a silent threat on my resolve to resist his advances.
It was the most soul-destroying thing seeing those men, women and children up for auction whilst slaveholders hung around them like flies, pinching their muscles to test their strength or forcing their mouths open to look at their teeth. At times it was like watching a sick version of “Simon says” in which they were ordered to bend over in a manner of ways or made to walk to and fro. All so that those potential buyers could be satisfied that they hadn’t missed a hidden wound or defect that would mean they paid over the odds for their flesh-and-blood commodity. It was heartbreaking. Especially when I saw the behaviour of a slave who thought he was standing before a kind slaveholder. The begging—for that was the only way to describe it—was humiliating as he strove to persuade the slaveholder to purchase him.
All the while Master John was at my side, his icy blue eyes pitiless as he beheld the slaves for auction, his gaze continually finding its way back to me as he smugly searched my face for signs that his little lesson was having the desired effect.
But even that memory wasn’t enough to make Avery understand how I felt in that moment so I searched for another, my thoughts lingering briefly on that day in the woods as I lay in the dirt with blood seeping through my legs whilst Master Henry walked back to his horse. I was still searching when a strangled noise escaped Avery.
“Is that how you see me?”
I looked up at him. Of course it wasn’t how I saw him. I had already forgotten that he could see everything I was thinking as I tried to gather my thoughts in order to articulate the depth of my feelings. The image of that day at the woods had been a random one I had been in the process of discarding when he had interrupted me. But, seeing a chance to wound him as much as he had wounded me, I stayed silent.
I was torn as I watched him, but I still did my best to keep my mind blocked to his prying eyes. He took a step back, dazed and completely bereft. Another of those choking sounds (was it a sob?) escaped him, and then he put his head in his hands and vanished.
I immediately ran out of the room to the front door.
“Avery,” I screamed, as I pulled the door open and ran outside. “I ain’t finished with you! So don’t you be running away from me!” He was nowhere in sight but I raced out into the night anyway. “Avery, get back here! Avery!”
There was no answer, so I came to a stop, breathing heavily in the night air. I couldn’t sense his presence at all now. All I felt was a strange pull in the pit of my stomach, which made me feel weak.
“Avery! Avery!”
In the end, screaming at the night sky didn’t bring him back. There was nothing I could do but return to the mansion.
I waited for him in the drawing room and at one point even sat down at the table to try and work on my reading, but my thoughts wouldn’t settle long enough for me to be able to do anything constructive. So I threw my pen down in frustration and began to pace the room as the hours ticked by.
I was so angry. How dare he do that to me and then have the audacity to get upset and run away? I strode out of the drawing room to the front door and threw it open again.
“Avery! Get back here. I ain’t finished with you…you no-good snake!”
The only response to my cry was the croak of a frog and the distant hoot of an owl, perhaps the same owl that had frightened me the previous night.
Back in the drawing room I stood at the window, wringing my hands. I may have been angry, but there was something niggling at me, making it difficult to order my thoughts. That something was the look of total despair on Avery’s face before he’d vanished.
I moved away from the window and sat down at the table again.
Stupid man. If that image in my head had hurt him, then so be it.
But the niggling persisted because I believed him when he said it was something he couldn’t stop. Besides, I should have realised that he could read my mind before tonight. I could think of so many instances now when he had given himself away by responding to my thoughts instead of my words and yet I had missed them all, too wrapped up in the silken threads of my own vanity to see what had needed to be seen.
My anger began to drain away, leaving me weary and tearful. He had looked so tormented.
I rose and went to stand at the window. My mood dipped even lower when I saw that the sun was starting to rise.
Rubbing at my temples, I went down to the kitchen to find myself something to eat, and stopped short when I saw the kitchen table laden with fresh food.
Alarmed, I stood staring at it for a few moments. He had been back to the house and hadn’t even come to see me?
I experienced a sense of impending doom at what this might signify. Maybe he intended never to return.
I pushed that thought away and strode over to a basket of fruit.
Of course he would be back this evening, I thought as I bit into an apple. He had to come back, for we only had each other. There was nowhere else, and most importantly, no one else for him to run to.
I threw the half-eaten fruit away and made my way out of the kitchen and upstairs.
He would be back this evening, I repeated to myself when I was in bed.
But I found that sleep was a long time in coming and when it did, I had a terrifying nightmare that I was back at the plantation, standing at the edge of the cotton fields at dusk, long after all the slaves had gone back to the slave quarters. I was three in the dream and I stood there alone and lost, calling for Avery and wishing with all my heart that he would come walking out of the cotton fields. But a part of me knew he was nowhere near the plantation as he had been sold and I would never see him again.
I woke up covered in sweat in the stifling heat of a lazy afternoon. The house was silent, eerily so. Knowing that there was no point in trying to go back to sleep, I got up and wandered around the house, and eventually found myself outside in the field flowers. I let the sweet scent of the flowers envelop me but couldn’t clear my mind of Avery and how close I had come to kissing him. This scared me because it was bound to be the first thing he saw when he returned at dusk.
The only way I could take my mind off what had happened was to picture Master John in Avery’s place every time my mind returned to it. It wasn’t the ideal solution as I knew Avery would wonder why I kept doing that, but it was the best I could do until I found a way to close my thoughts off from his prying eyes.
&n
bsp; The afternoon seemed to stretch interminably, but eventually it drew to a close. I sat in the drawing room wiping my sweaty palms against my dress. I wanted Avery here because I wanted to talk to him and explain the little misunderstanding I had let take root with my silence. I was desperate to see him but worried about what would happen once he got here. If he read my thoughts and decided to kiss me, would I be strong enough to keep my desire for him in check?
I wasn’t so sure, so I waited, wanting nothing more than to lay my eyes on beautiful Avery, but frightened of what would happen once he got here.
Chapter Fourteen
But Avery didn’t return that night. I waited in the drawing room anxiously counting away the hours and when it struck midnight I ran to the front door and stood in the doorway looking out into the unfeeling night.
“Avery! Avery!”
My voice sounded so shrill and the desperation I could hear in it was like a knife cutting into the shadows. And yet there was still nothing, only that pull and the terrible certainty that he wouldn’t come back.
I stepped away from the safety of the mansion and into the dark, stopping when I was halfway across the field of Queen Anne’s lace. Searching the night anxiously for some sign of his presence, I called him again and wanted to venture farther out to look for him. But tonight the darkness all around me seemed impenetrable, especially as the moon was hidden behind a cloud. Everything was forbidding and seemed to whisper of danger now that Avery wasn’t here. So I rushed back into the mansion and put the bolt against the door, the first time I had done that since my arrival here.
Back in the drawing room, my fears took on lightning clarity.
Where was he? Had something happened to him?
I was about to go outside and call him again when I noticed a pile of papers in the corner.
I picked them up and leafed through them. More of the poems and short stories Avery had copied out for me in large writing so I could practice reading. They had not been there yesterday.
Had he been and gone without my being aware of it? That was certainly possible. He could have appeared, placed the papers there and disappeared in an instant whilst I sat at the window looking out for him. I would have been none the wiser. This could only mean one thing. He didn’t want to see me, and maybe he intended never to return.
That made me so angry that I tore the papers in half and threw them on the floor, sweeping everything else off the table to join them.
But I couldn’t hold onto that anger because a mind-numbing fear was drowning everything out.
He wasn’t coming back.
Getting to my feet, I decided that there was no point torturing myself with such thoughts. The best thing for me to do was to get some sleep.
Not wanting to closet myself in the gloomy red velvet room upstairs, I lay out on the chair by the window.
But I didn’t sleep at all that night and when the sun began to rise, I stared out of the window in quiet despair. First the indigo sky lightened to a dark blue, which melted away to streaks of turquoise and burnt yellows, making the clouds that hung below it look like puffs of floating gold. I hated the sun as it came and robbed me of the possibility of having Avery with me again until sunset, though it was unlikely he would appear even then.
I lay there with that pull in my stomach, tired but unable to sleep, until at midday, I finally got up and dragged myself to the kitchen.
Like every other morning, the kitchen table was laden with fresh food, including a plate of what I was certain was a peach pie. Back at the plantation whenever I was down, Mary would bake a peach pie for the Master’s family to have at dinner in the hopes that there would be some left over for me, even if it was only the tiniest slice. And I was sure that she was the one who had baked the one I was looking at.
It really was the last straw and I felt the sliver of self-control I had been fighting to hold onto disintegrate.
“Where is you?” I cried as tears filled my eyes. “Where you be, Avery?”
The pull in my stomach was bordering on pain now and my throat felt swollen and sore. In fact, I felt terrible all over, almost feverish, and my mind was ablaze with nothing but thoughts of Avery and how much I wanted to see him.
I eventually strode back out into the hallway.
“Where is you?” I cried out again to the silent, miserable house as I wiped away my tears. I ran up the stairs and down the long corridor into the small room in which he kept his clothes. I went straight to the jacket and trousers he had been wearing when I first saw him and held the jacket to my face. I thought I would be able to detect a scent of some sort, but there was nothing, only the faint smell of earth that still clung to the fabric and this made me even more miserable. It was as if he didn’t really exist.
“Where is you? I ain’t gonna stay here. If you ain’t coming back then, I’s leaving.”
I said that even though I knew he was no doubt too far away to hear me.
But I meant what I said and ran out of the room. I held the jacket against me as I ran out of the mansion, only barely aware of how dishevelled I looked and that I was in the grip of a mounting frenzy that bordered on mania. I expected to feel that incapacitating nausea the moment I got near enough to the road, and, as unpleasant as that feeling had been, it would at least be a sign that Avery was still nearby.
So I ran as I had done on my first morning here, trying to run toward him instead of away. But this time I didn’t feel my limbs grow heavy the closer I got to the road and I was able to run past the point where I had been weakened by nausea the last time. My feet hit the brown, baked road before I stopped, this time not because Avery had used his powers to halt me, but because I realised he wasn’t going to.
I sank to the ground and wept bitterly, my emotional turmoil coming out in long, rasping sobs.
“Where is you?” I managed to choke out again as I held the jacket against my chest and rocked on my knees. “Please, don’t leave me here. Please, come back to me.”
I wept and wept until it felt as if every last bit of moisture had been wrung from my body, leaving behind only the dry husk of a woman in mourning. Then I stood and began the walk back even though I was walking back to nothing.
When I reached the mansion, I didn’t go inside. I couldn’t bear the thought of being in that large, silent house without him so I sat outside in the field of white flowers, still holding his jacket to my chest.
It seemed as if the childhood memories of Mama that I had repressed for so many years were coming back to me. I could remember everything. I would be sitting under one of the trees by the slave quarters playing marbles with the other children when I would feel something warm and loving envelop me like a warm breeze and smell Mama’s scent. She always smelt of cinnamon. I would jump up and run down the hill to the edge of the woods and seconds later I would see her, often looking angry or simply exhausted. But the moment she saw me waiting for her, it was as if the arduous day she had endured ceased to exist and she would laugh and ask how I had known she was coming. My answer was always the same. Your spirit came before you and kissed me on the cheek.
I remembered other things as well, like the time she had come home with one small heart-shaped chocolate wrapped in shiny red paper, which had fit perfectly into the palm of my tiny hand. Mistress Joan, Master Henry’s first wife, had given her two of those expensive chocolates and she had saved one for me. I sat by her and ate the chocolate whilst she cooked our dinner on a small fire in front of the cabin, and even though she appeared to be absorbed with the task at hand, I knew she was thinking about those chocolates. Puzzled by a strange image that had popped into my mind, I had asked her if she would be bathing me in chocolate that night. She had laughed and laughed before explaining to me that she had been thinking that the chocolate had been so sweet she could have eaten more and would have loved to swim in a bath full of it.
She used to take me with her to find herbs and I remember she would teach me the names of the different herbs and fl
owers. “This one is called bloodroot,” she explained in the woods, and when we came across a small cluster of Queen Anne’s lace, she had smiled sadly as she picked a few and stared at them for a few moments. I was bored and didn’t want to know the names of these plants but it was time with Mama so I tried to look interested.
“This is called Queen Anne’s lace. I was searching for this when I met your father.”
Sorrow clung to her as she handed them to me and moved on. I didn’t question her as I had no real interest in a father. Mama was everything I needed.
I also remembered the aching anguish that had befallen me when she was sold. I had been so distraught that a week later I crept out of the cabin in the dead of night and stood at the entrance to the woods. I desperately wanted to try and make my way to the cotton fields in the hope that I would find her there, but was too frightened to go into the woods by myself at night. A frightened Mary had found me and was trembling when she pulled me into her arms. She had held onto me fiercely, her voice breaking as she spoke, and she had eventually coaxed me away from the woods and back to the slave quarters.
Oh, Mama. When you were stolen away, a part of me went with you. The part that was loved and knew how to love in return.
That devastation I felt then had been terrible because I could only see things through a child’s eyes, and even though it had been explained to me that Master Henry had sold her, I couldn’t really accept the fact that Mama was gone for good.
I asked myself if what I felt in Avery’s absence was merely those repressed emotions being replayed but I knew the answer was no.
Then what was this? Why was I feeling this way over someone, or I should say, something I had only been with for about a week? I desired Avery, but was my desire for him so strong that it could leave me in such an acute state of angst and despair now that he was gone?
What I felt for Avery was more than mere physical desire for a man. A lot more. And yet I couldn’t bring myself to say it. That word I didn’t want to say, even to myself, was not something that happened overnight. It was something that could take years for people to feel for one another, especially if the feeling was as intense as this. But I couldn’t deny that that’s what it was because my mind, body and soul told me so.
