Ma’Marie

by Nichole Perkins, Los Angeles, CA, USA

“They wanted more boys, you see,” Marie began, cradling her steaming cup of green tea like the treasure it had become. It was one of the bribes I had to use to get her to talk to me today.

“The war in Iraq, the Little Big One, all of it took so many of our boys, our men, and then the water became infected. Men started dying. Women began having…” she looked around, even though we were the only ones in her studio. “Women began having periods for months on end.” Her forehead folded on itself, the wrinkles hiding the ruins of her former identification number.

“I was 20, maybe 21. Had really started enjoying sex the way it should be, you know, and then I got my period and the shit just lasted and lasted. The third month, I cried myself sick for a week. They’d started rationing tampons!” She looked up at me, and for a moment, I saw panic in her wide eyes before she remembered the now. She lowered her untouched tea and reached out for the basket of peaches—another convincing gift—with her left hand, a hand with four tallies sliced onto its back.

She noticed my glance and tucked it beneath the table.

“Four miscarriages,” she confirmed flatly and turned her head to the window.
I waited, unwilling to speak. Her eyes chased dust motes dancing before the glass pane. I jumped when she abruptly pushed her chair away from the table and approached the window with a salt shaker from the makeshift lazy susan. She layered the grains against the windowsill before returning to her seat.

“The witches—they have to count the grains of salt before they can come in to steal your babies,” she advised, a tilt to her head.

I kept my face neutral. She sipped her tea.

“The bleeding stopped during the fifth month. They came for me during the sixth. My room was very nice, very comfortable. I yielded three, but there were four who knew the best way. They’d give us a month to recover when we lost one. Everybody lost one. So many girls killed themselves that they shortened it to two weeks, but then we’d die from bleeding. So they gave us a month again.”

Marie traced the final notch carved into her hand.

“I ran away after I lost Bliss. One of them—he liked me. I had to kill him, but I think I liked him, too. I made it to Refuge, in former Watts. It took three weeks. There were a lot of Sisters with eraser burns across their foreheads. I was home.”

She picked up her tea, and I knew the interview was over. It was as much as she was willing to give and more than I thought I’d get.

As I climbed onto my bike, I looked back and found her sprinkling the doorstep with salt.