SCORPION FINGERS

Serene grey haired grandmother,
Draped in mature matriarch’s dignity,
And best silk sari, dripping antique jewelry
At a celebration that bursts with family.
Her own children’s successful weddings
Add consequence. Her radiance spreading,
She rates a special welcome from many
And red velvet chair to sit out the ceremony.
Suddenly she sees a spectral face,
Shriveled shadow from a haunting hell:
A long unmet paternal uncle, doddering now
With bent back, bald pate and furrowed brow.
Despite the yawning gap of many years
She goes cold yet sweats stench-like fears,
Crocodilian surfacing of menacing memories,
Mysterious torment, childhood’s puzzled tears.
Flashbacks blur past, her dilated pupils sear
He was a young man and she a toddler,
Her parents often spent the day at his home
Her mother and his sister commenting
How good he was with children unlike
His peers who preferred to straddle a bike
Or smoke beedies behind the banana trees.
“How helpful for the one he marries,”
They tease as he tucks the gurgling girl
Under his arm to swing and twirl
Her into a laughing bundle of helplessness.
The women immerse in women’s business.
He heads for the dark, cool box room
Light barely filtering into its dusty gloom,
On a steel trunk, Baby is at the mercy
Of tickling fingers which crawl and scurry
Predatory scorpions in curved-tail hurry
To the core of her tiny female body.
Her laughter turns uncertain but continues
Because his one hand innocently tickles
While the other does the adult probing, crude
Invasion of Baby’s crevices, till she cries aloud
And closes her chubby thighs together
Up against her small pot belly in defense.
His breath comes fast and choppy, excited,
Pleased he got away with it once more.
When they call, “why is she crying?”
He lies that Baby wants a sweet and he
Will find one. A sticky, guilt-gift toffee
Is tucked into her small balled fist and she
Is soothed, distracted while the background harm
Burrows into her baby mind, a tiny putrid worm
To pierce and torture, ever wriggling to niggling
Nightmares that ambush her sleeping senses.
Life separated Baby and man
to far parts of the globe for a life span.
Time healed her, smoothed the scar.
But now, seeing him had the sick power
To resurrect deep lurking layers of pain
She feels faint and intensely less than sane
“Have some juice, you look pale. Are you well?”
She nods and rises in one vengeful thrust
Walks up to face him, she simply must,
To kill that long festering brain-worm.
His sister holds his arm, smiles in recognition
But shakes her head when Baby rasps his name.
“He won’t know you; Alzheimer’s, then a stroke.”
Baby stares as he grins back in drooling vacuity
Safe now behind blank idiot’s innocence,
Scorpion fingers propped paralyzed in his lap.