Beauty Is a Wound Read Online Free Page B

risen from the dead. There were only the bats who flew with all their might, slamming against the storm, moving in the sky, and the curtains that occasionally parted to reveal faces pale with fright.
    She shivered from the cold, and was hungry too. A few times she tried to knock on the doors of people who she thought might still remember her, but the inhabitants preferred to stay quiet, if they hadn’t already fainted dead away. So she was overjoyed when from a distance she recognized her own house, which still looked just as it had before the people had laid her in the grave. Bougainvillea blossoms lined the length of the fence, with chrysanthemums along the perimeter looking peaceful under the sheets of rain, and there was a warm light coming from the veranda lamp. She missed Rosinah terribly and fervently hoped a plate of dinner was waiting for her. The image made her hurry a little, like people in train stations and bus terminals, which in turn made her burial shroud come loose as it was tossed by the storm, revealing her naked body, but her hand quickly grabbed the calico cloth and wrapped it back around herself like a young girl in a towel after a bath. She missed her child, the fourth one, and hoped to see what she was like. It’s true what people say, a good deep sleep can bring a change of heart, especially if it lasts for twenty-one years.
    A young girl was sitting on a chair on the veranda alone underneath the ghostly halo of light, right where Dewi Ayu and Rosinah used to spend the afternoon hunting lice in each other’s hair. She was sitting as if expecting someone. At first Dewi Ayu thought it was Rosinah, but as soon as she stood in front of her, she realized that the girl was unfamiliar. She almost shrieked when she saw the horrifying figure, who looked as if she had suffered severe burns, and a malicious voice inside her head said that she had not returned to earth, but was instead wandering through hell. But she was sensible enough to quickly realize that the hideous monster was nothing more than a wretched young girl; she even gave thanks that she had finally met someone who did not run away at the sight of an old woman wrapped in a burial shroud passing by in the middle of a downpour. Of course she didn’t yet realize that it was her daughter, since she didn’t yet realize that twenty-one years had passed, and so to clear up all of the confusion, Dewi Ayu tried to greet the girl.
    “This is my house,” she said in explanation. “What is your name?”
    “Beauty.”
    Dewi Ayu erupted into a truly impolite laugh, before quickly stopping herself and understanding everything. She sat in another chair, separated by a table covered with a yellow tablecloth and a cup of coffee belonging to the girl.
    “Like a cow who sees that her glazed calf already knows how to run,” she said mystified, and then politely asked for the coffee on the table, which she drank. “I’m your mother,” she added, full of pride that her daughter was exactly what she had hoped for. If the rain hadn’t been coming down, and she hadn’t been starving, and the moon had been shining brightly, she would have loved to run and climb up to the rooftop and dance in celebration.
    The girl did not look at her and didn’t even say anything.
    “What are you doing out here on the veranda in the middle of the night?” Dewi Ayu asked her.
    “I’m waiting for my prince to come,” the girl said finally, even though she still did not turn her head. “To free me from the curse of this hideous face.”
    She had been obsessed with that handsome prince ever since she realized that other people were not as ugly as she was. Rosinah had tried to bring her to neighbors’ houses back when she was only a babe in arms, but not one person received them, because their children would scream and cry for the rest of the afternoon and the old folks would instantly come down with fever and die two days later. They rejected her everywhere, and it was