Beauty Is a Wound Read Online Free Page A

she was already pregnant), and that she was sick of having children. They often chatted in the afternoon, sitting in the kitchen doorway while watching the chickens that Rosinah had started to raise claw at the dirt, and like a Scheherazade Dewi Ayu would tell many fantastical tales, mostly about her beautiful daughters. That was how they established a friendship that was full of understanding, so that when Dewi Ayu tried to kill the baby in her stomach in all those different ways, Rosinah did not try to stop her. Even when Dewi Ayu began to show signs of despair, Rosinah again proved herself to be a wise young girl and signed to the prostitute.
    “Pray that the baby will be ugly.”
    Dewi Ayu turned to her and replied, “It’s been years since I believed in prayer.”
    “Well, it depends on who you’re praying to,” Rosinah said and smiled. “Indeed some gods have proven to be quite stingy.”
    Tentatively, Dewi Ayu began to pray. She would pray whenever it crossed her mind; in the bathroom, in the kitchen, on the street, or even if an obese man was swimming on top of her body and she suddenly remembered, she would immediately say, whoever is listening to my prayer, god or demon, angel or Genie Iprit, make my child ugly. She even began to imagine all kinds of ugly things. She thought of a horned devil, with fangs sticking out like a boar, and how very pleasing it would be to have a baby like that. One day she saw an electrical outlet and imagined that as the baby’s nose. She also imagined its ears as the handles of a pot, and its mouth as the mouth of a piggy-bank slot, and its hair that would look like the straw from a broom. She even jumped for joy when she found some truly disgusting shit sitting in the toilet and asked, couldn’t she please have a baby like that; with skin like a komodo and legs like a turtle. Dewi Ayu ran with her imagination that grew wilder every day, and all the while the baby in her womb kept growing.
    The height of it came on the night of the seventh full moon of her pregnancy when, accompanied by Rosinah, she bathed in flower water. This is the night when you make a wish for how your baby will be and draw their face on a coconut rind. Most mothers would have drawn the face of Drupadi, Shinta, or Kunti, or whichever wayang character was the prettiest, or if they were hoping for a boy they would have drawn Yudistira, Arjuna, or Bima. But Dewi Ayu—perhaps the first person in the world to do so, and because of that even up until the day she died she could not be sure of the outcome—used a piece of black charcoal to draw a hideous baby. She was hoping that her baby would not be like anyone or anything she had ever seen, except maybe a wild pig, or a monkey. So she drew the figure of a frightening monster such as she had never seen nor would ever see before the people buried her dead body.
    But then finally she did see her, after those twenty-one years, on the day she rose again.
    At that time, day was turning into night, and rain poured down in the cyclone storms that signaled the season was about to change. The wild ajak dogs howled in the hills with shrill voices that drowned out the muadzin who was calling people to Maghrib prayer at the mosque, and who was apparently failing, because people didn’t like to go out when it was raining heavily at twilight and they could hear the sound of howling dogs, and especially not when there was a ghost in a burial shroud walking along the roads in a bedraggled condition and whimpering.
    The distance from the public cemetery to her house wasn’t a short distance, but ojek drivers preferred to crash their motorcycles into a ditch and run away as fast as they could rather than give Dewi Ayu a ride. No minibuses would stop. Even the food stalls and stores along the road chose to close down for the day, locking their doors and windows up tight. There was no one in the street, not even any homeless or crazy people, no one except this old woman who had