More Precious Than Jewels
by Zachary Robert Long (1669 words, estimated reading time: 7 minutes)

For God said, ‘Honor your father and mother’ and ‘Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.’
– Matthew 15:4

The darkness hung around the car like a death shroud. The headlights could barely cut through the fog rolling in from the eastern river that circumvented the small town they were quickly leaving behind. Jim Morrison’s screams reverberated throughout the metal body. Neither occupant spoke and the tension between the two of them created a palpable charge in the air. The chassis below rattled and shook as the driver turned off pavement for a rocky dirt road that wound through the countryside. Darkened farms, abandoned tractors, and fields of luscious grapes pressed close to the road, yet they were barely visible in the light of an overcast moon.

You have to do something about this.

The words were still echoing in the driver’s head. She gripped the steering wheel in both hands, at 10 and 2 just like her driving instructor drilled into her. But her knuckles were white and there was a tremor in her leg that made the car jolt and jostle. She kept the sun visor down, not to fend off any light but so she could see the photograph of Albert she kept taped on the inside. He was mid-laugh, his eyes shut into a tight squint, his cheeks a jolly red.

She avoided looking at the passenger in the seat next to her.

The passenger, however, eyed the driver with suspicion. In her twelve years of life, she had known plenty of strife. Much of it due to the words of her mother, the driver. They fought often, more, it seemed, with each year of life she gained. Her and her father didn’t fight, at least not with the vitriol that mother and daughter engaged in. It was a mystery to her why she didn’t live with him following the divorce, but the legal arm of her country was as unknown to her as the Nag Hammadi library.

Just that morning they had gotten into a vicious fight. No blows were exchanged, but language can bruise just as well. Pictures were ripped off the wall, Arabella throwing them towards her mother. They never struck the woman, nor were they meant to. Frustration boiled throughout the house until, finally, Arabella hastily pulled on her light-up sneakers and fled into the woods behind the backyard, ignoring her mother’s calls to return.

Pepper had stood at the window and watched her little girl disappear from sight. She hadn’t expected her to listen, nor would she waste the energy to go chasing after her. After all, that was just what she wanted her mother to do so the fight could be continued. Instead, she collapsed into a ball of tears.

Albert laid a hand on the trembling woman’s shoulder, soft and light just like his skin. He tried to soothe her with words of encouragement, but even he could see that something had to be done. Things couldn’t be left to go on like this. The lines of communication between mother and daughter were so fractured that, if pressed, neither would be able to identify the inciting incident behind their raucous.

“You have to do something about this, Pepper.”

She cried. He held her. She made up her mind.

Arabella returned a few hours later. Pepper was doing the lunch-time dishes, Albert was drying. Nobody spoke. Arabella went to her room and remained there until supper time. She poked, prodded, and pushed her food around her plate.

“No appetite?” Albert asked.

“I’m starving. It just tastes wrong.”

She pushed the dish away from her and left the table for her room. Pepper, who cooked the meal, said nothing. Albert took her hand in his and squeezed it.

After the dishes were cleaned and dried, she knocked on her daughter’s door. “Come on, we’re going for a ride.”

“Where are we?”

Pepper glanced at her daughter for the first time since they had gotten into the car. She was looking out the window, trying to discern some recognizable landmark. The question was innocuous enough, but there was just enough bite in the delivery to suggest Pepper had gotten lost.

“You’ll see,” was all she said.

In truth, she didn’t rightly know where she was either. She had never been out this way and she kept on taking every side road she could find so that they wound further and further into unknown territory. Fields gave way to trees and small hills.

“Mom, you’re lost.”

The brakes screeched as her foot slammed the pedal to the floor. Arabella lurched forward, her head nearly striking the dashboard.

“Get out.”

Confusion clouded her daughter’s features. She reached for the door handle, started to pull it loose, then paused, something wasn’t right, though just what was beyond her.

“Where are we?”

“Get out.”

“No.”

Blood flowed to Pepper’s cheeks, the air escaping her lungs in a great huff. Instead of responding, she reached down and pulled the latch for the trunk then unbuckled and walked to the back of the car. Arabella turned in her seat to watch, her mother’s face and body glowing red in the blaze of the taillights until she vanished behind the trunk lid. She reappeared with a slam, walked around the passenger side of the vehicle and opened the door.

“Out.”

“What are you doing mom?”

The look on the older woman’s face was new to Arabella. She was used to fighting with her mother, endlessly it seemed, and so she was used to seeing anger, pain, frustration, and a range of negatively charged emotions across her face. But this was something new and it disturbed the child.

“Out, now.”

“No.”

Pepper grabbed a handful of her daughter’s hair and yanked, trying with all her might to pull her daughter from the car but Arabella still had her belt bucked and the straps held her in place so that only her hair was torn from the vehicle, the child screaming in pain and reaching up to bat and bash away her mother’s hands, her mother dropping the handful of hair with its chunks of flesh to the ground reached in and this time with both hands took hold of her daughters hair and head and pulled her with such force as to winch her from the belt without first unbuckling, threw her behind her into the darkness, then shut the door so the interior light switched off.

Arabella was on her feet in a moment, screaming, unsure of who could hear but knowing that she had to try, that something was wrong with her mother, something she had never seen before possessed her, and so she ran into the darkness but was blind, lacked echo-location, night vision, or any of the evolutionary traits that would have offered her an upper-hand in the situation, and so she had no way of knowing which direction she was running or what obstacles littered the ground, yet providence itself seemed to be on her side, her footing solid, no rocks, holes, or crags tripping her up.

Yet if providence was on the child’s side, then it was also supporting the mother, for the woman was on her in but a minute, her shoulder catching her daughter in the square of her back and knocking her to the ground.

Daughter fought against mother, striking out at random, digging nails into flesh where they found purchase, biting the hand that struck her face and holding it tight even as warm blood flowed into her throat and caused her to cough and spasm, holding and shaking like a dog to cause as much violence as possible, until finally her mother pushed fingers into her eyes and she had to cry out in pain, freeing the injured hand so that it could grasp the object held in the other, the length of twain taken from the trunk, now wrapping around her daughter’s throat, once, twice, and then pulled with force in opposite directions, seeing her daughter’s face turning blue even in the darkness, her own huffing inhales covering the child’s cries for help, help, mommy, no, don’t, mommy, quieter with each repetition until only silence hung in the cold, countryside air.

Finally, Pepper rolled off the body of her child and lay in the grass next to her. She stuck her bleeding hand in her mouth, her tongue probing the wound to see how deep it was. She was exhausted yet wired, it felt more like she had just rolled off Albert rather than the body of her daughter. Only she felt emptier.

The breeze was picking up and the clouds moved to let the light of the moon, not quite full, cascade over the field where mother and daughter lay. She wanted to lay there, to let her body cool, but there was work to do. With great effort she got to her feet and, careful not to look at the child, took another handful of her hair and used it to drag her eighty-six pounds through the field to where she could hear the river running until they were on the bank and she let go.

Now she couldn’t avoid looking at Arabella, for her next step was to pull down the child’s pants and underwear, exposing the bare flesh of her pubis. She stared at her daughter’s genitals, knowing, or at least assuming, her to be a virgin, she thought about using a rock the break the girl’s hymen, to present evidence of the sexual assault that took her life, but, despite finding an appropriately sized rock, she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

She fled from the river and her responsibilities as a parent, back to the car, just as the clouds again covered the moon and brought darkness upon the world. The headlights remained the only light until she was back on the main highway with it’s precisely spaced streetlights, but even these seemed dimmer than they had ever been before.