ANGER

Eleven Years Old

Aunt positioned her hand over the candle flame.

‘Your mother was stupid.’

The flame quivered.

‘She trusted love. Who do we trust, Anna?’

‘Only each other.’

‘She was a whore. Do you know what a whore is?’

‘No. Maybe.’ She’d heard the girls at school say it. She wished Aunt would stop. She hated the Knotted Cord and yet she found she was holding on to it like a lifeline.

‘A whore is a woman who gives herself up to a man, gives her body to him to do with it as he likes. It was that stupidity which got her killed.’

The anger flared inside Anna and the flame leapt up from the candle towards Aunt’s hand. Aunt cried out.

‘Anna, you must control your anger. You’re hurting me.’ Aunt’s eyes seized tight with pain.

Anna tried to put her anger into the knot beneath her fingers, but it would not fit.

‘If you make yourself vulnerable, you’ll become vulnerable. She deserved to die.’

The flame shot up into Aunt’s hand again. She roared in pain.

‘Please stop!’

But Aunt continued to berate her mother and Anna grew angrier – at Aunt, at her mother, at herself. She tried to tie it away but to try and control it was only a kind of flapping which seemed to fan its flames.

‘I’m glad he strangled her. I’m glad and you should be too,’ Aunt continued.

The flame seared into Aunt’s skin until she had to move the candle away. She showed Anna the burn mark on her hand, already blistering. ‘This is what anger does. It hurts others more than it hurts you.’

Anna lowered her eyes. ‘Why must these tests be so painful?’

Aunt opened her blouse and showed Anna the bruises beneath her Binders’ necklace. ‘You know nothing of pain. Not yet.’