5. Light in the DarkPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania 1880 - 1975

5

LIGHT IN THE DARK

PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA 1880 - 1975

I t took a few decades for the new me to reveal herself. But it only took a kind stranger, a shower and clean clothes for this world to tell me I was good.

On that same night, I found myself huddled in the corner of a fowl alley, hiding from the humans behind an old decrepit waste wagon, a prostitute found me. Her name was Sasha, and she had noticed me while a john had pinned her against the wall. Just before he was able to get what he paid for she had seen my foot and let out a muffled scream. The man looked over and instantly thought they had discovered a dead body. Not wanting anything to do with the possibility of the police he grunted and took off in the direction of the alley opening. Needless to say, he disappeared into the night and she got a break from her job that night.

Once her shock subsided, Sasha bent over me and quickly realized I was not dead, just semi-conscious. She took me back to her tiny one-bedroom row house that she shared with others of her profession and cleaned the blood from my skin. Her eyes had widened at all the slices and bite marks, but that didn't slow her motherly nature. In her mission to make sure I was safe and warm, Sasha had held me up in the shower in order to reveal the injuries to my pale white flesh. She had sewn up some of the cuts she thought might have been too deep to close on their own and made sure I ate something and drank a full glass of water before placing me in her bed.

I remember marveling at her dark cocoa skin and thinking to myself, "Don't we make the perfect picture of darkness and light, but in reverse?"

"Child, in all my years on the streets, you're probably the saddest thing I've seen." Her words were soft and filled with concern as she pulled the blankets over my beaten body. "I've witnessed a lot. Besides the friends I have lost, you are the worst breathing canvas I've seen up close."

The words she had spoken to me that night have stuck with me throughout the years. It's hard to believe that seventy-five years ago I sat at her bedside as her sweet soul found its way home. She cared for me like a human mother until the day it was decided, by a heartless male, that it was now my time to care for her. This man had decided he wanted more from her than she was willing to give, and he beat her so badly, that refusal had secured her a slow death locked in her own head. And like most other cases, she never received justice for the crime that was committed on her. With the corruption in this city, I'm amazed anyone is tried for their sins.

Sasha, was a black woman, and though there were no more slaves and she was born free, the people of Philadelphia still looked at her as beneath them. Some looked so lowly at her color that they would spit on her when she walked down the street. It made me so mad, but she wouldn't let me retaliate. She would tell me that her soul was at peace with the person she was and her god made her with love in his heart. She wouldn't wish to be anyone else.

That being said, she wished for a better life for me. Sasha wanted me to be something more, to get out of Philly and live a life away from this dying city. I worked any job I could find that didn't have to do with showing off or selling my body. I've done it all. Babysitting here and there for almost no money. Grocery stores hired me to stock shelves and run the register; thinking my pretty face would bring in more business. I even stood on sidewalks in front of stores to draw in customers. I didn't make much, but it was enough to buy food and help with the rest of the living expenses. It helped that men gave me what they could afford, sometimes more, in hopes I would be interested in a tryst or a couple times, marriage.

I often look back to when we met, and it was as if God was proving a point that no matter what skin you were born in, kindness does not find its home in any specific soul. Our blood runs red, our eyes leak clear tears and our hearts all beat. The way we are born has no bearing on our grace. It is the life we are thrown into and how we cope and react to the hurdles and battles that are thrown before us. Our choices create the purity of our souls. Sasha never lost her tenderness in the journey life gave her. She was a vision of peace, up to the very end.

I had twenty years with her before her loving heart was released from this world, and every moment was a blessing to me. In that small space of time I had with her I felt that just maybe, God had chosen to forgive me. But, like all human's, she was not mine to keep and that feeling of belonging evaporated with Sasha's last breath.

I kept my secret from her for fifteen years, before she noticed I was not aging. And with grace and the softest of voices, she coaxed the truth from deep inside my temporarily mended heart.

It was shortly before the incident that was to be her undoing when she looked at me from across the small kitchen table. Her hazel eyes studied me in the way only a mother's could. The corner of her eyes creased and her lips pursed, drawing out all the fine lines around her mouth. "Either you have an amazing skin regiment, or there is something different about you," she smiled tenderly as she spoke.

My mind froze, and I wasn't quite sure if this conversation was going to damn me in her eyes. But I moved the conversation forward with a simple question. "What do you mean by that?" A stirring awoke within me. My shoulder blades began to itch. If I lost focus, the skin would begin to burn before it tore. I had thought my wings had been torn from me when I chose to take the plunge from the clouds. They hadn't obeyed any of my commands in the past, but now, in the presence of a kind hearted mortal, they wanted to flare out and show her a miracle. Allow her to see that the Divine Creator sees her and carries her in her pain. But I beat back the urge as my soul wept from the knowledge that he hadn't taken my wings.

"Mara, I'm getting old, but I am not blind," she stated as her eyes slid across my fixed expression. With a straight face, I stared back into her knowing eyes. "Your skin is flawless, and your midnight hair seems to only darken as the years pass. You have no signs of aging. Wrinkles and beauty marks have not touched your porcelain skin. When I asked your age all those years ago you told me you were twenty-three. If that is the truth, then you should be nearing your forties, but you just get more beautiful with every passing spring."

"Maybe it's just good genes," I tease and the corner of my lips turn upward as my eyes lower to the surface of the discolored table.

"I have the sense that you are something other than human," she replied, straight-faced. "Maybe you're my guardian angel. Maybe God decided to send you to me in one of my lowest moments to give me a purpose."

I looked up at her and saw the tears she held back in her eyes. If she only knew that I had forsaken our God and He had forgotten about me for a time. If she could only see that it was she who was sent for me. But I let her hold onto that thought. Possibly we were each other's gift. A second chance. The path to a new life. One that reminds us there is good in the universe and hearts that aren't overrun with greed.

I smiled at her and let her see just how important she was to me. How she, too, was my saving grace. My revival. Without her, I am positive I would not have survived one night here. She has made me stronger, less scared of the journey I now take on a planet I once looked down upon. There was no denying her comment and instead of correcting her in her thinking, I merely shrugged and said, "You're correct in thinking I am not of this world."

Failing to inform her I had fallen from the clouds into sin. That my heart was just as easily manipulated as a human's. I allowed her to think I was a creature better than herself. A creature that held light in her soul and good intentions in my heart. We never spoke of it again. We were alone in her final moments, and as I held her hand and felt that beautiful light leave her body. My soul screamed out to a God that would take the only human I loved. And in the pain that poured from me, my wings erupted circling us both and sealing us in a cocoon of mourning.

What I did not know at the time was that in that last second, when her final breath left her body and her eyes were fated to remain closed, my soul lost its hold on that light and spiraled into a void filled with hatred. With the loss of my last tether to the light, I allowed that void to consume me until all I became was a vessel for the acid that would slowly eat away any humanity I had gained.

The feathers that strengthen my wings bled with the lifeblood that was drying up in Sasha's body, until all the white had vanished. I sat there, holding her cold body so tightly to me, for days. It wasn't until the newly crimson feathers shifted to black and the darkness beneath the dome I created became unbearable that I noticed I would grieve forever.