Belladonna

Belladonna. It's a beautiful name, caressing one's tongue like velvety silk on naked skin. Belladonna means "beautiful woman" in Italian, but here, in America, it is a plant. A sprawling, awkward plant with brittle branches that crack under the slightest breeze. Its one asset is its crimson berries that, when pierced by your teeth, erupt in a lava of heavenly juice. I know because I ate one once, although I was promptly made to throw it up. Strange, isn't it, that such a beautiful name is given to the deadliest variety of nightshade?

"Belladonna!" Maria calls. My sister is a large, stately woman who carries herself with a dignified air; an air that is dispelled when she opens her mouth and you see sparse, decaying teeth, or when you look down to a single, twisted foot that drags limply behind her. She is a large woman, but not a fat one. Instead, her wrinkled honey-brown skin clings loosely to her large stature, giving her a slightly emaciated look.

She doesn't eat enough for the simple reason that she can't. Neither of us can. Instead, we get by on watery pea soup with rock-hard bread that sticks going down. Every day for the past two weeks. Our minimum-wage jobs normally would have been able to afford us a more comfortable lifestyle, but my medicine sucks away our life. My medicine for my disease. Schizophrenia. My medicine that every day is tucked away in my cheek cavity to later swirl down the toilet drain.

"Belladonna!" Maria calls again. She is large, but her voice is soft as silk. In contrast, I am tiny- like a stick of dynamite. My voice is shrill; it slices through the air like a knife. Maria is hobbling towards me now, ready to watch as I "take" a minute orange pill which is soon deposited in the folds of my dress to dispose of later.

We are sitting in the factory now, wrapping shoes and placing them in respective boxes. Again. And again. And again. It is monotonous, lonely work, but it is paying work. And that is good enough. Maria is tucked away in another isolated corner of the factory, and so I sit alone, with nothing but the shrill whir of the machines and my own thoughts to keep me company. And then, he comes. G comes.

He is like a snake, gliding towards me, leaning forward, forward... I can smell the danger in his breath. See the venom in his eyes. And he smiles- a dangerous, terrifying, paradoxical smile that chills every last bone in my body. But nothing, nothing is as dangerous, terrifying, bone-chilling as the next phrase he utters...

I received my first vision when I was fifteen. I was young, naive, and not yet tainted by the world. We, my family, were still in Mexico, still whole. I was working the fields that day, and it was a hot day, the type of day in which you lose all sense of reality, anything to escape the severe oppression of the heat.

Yet, I lost more than reality that day- I lost my innocence, my family, my future. Because of him: G, who told me to run away from home with Maria, to stop taking the pills, to betray my family. I remember I was in the fields that hot day, and I was working, and for the first of many terrifying times, he came to me.

We are back in the church now, eating. I am trying to do anything, anything to get my mind off G's order. My hand is white from gripping the knife for so long- I have been turning it over and over and over in my palm for the past two hours. There is a gnawing pain in my gut, slowly rising, threatening to burst in a swell of emotion. I know the pain will do nothing but increase if I ignore him. And yet, I can't do it. I look over to her, and I can't. I get up to throw the remnants of my food away- I cannot focus on eating- and I suddenly jostle Maria, spilling the only food she would eat that day on the floor.

She looks up at me, and her eyes... The look in those beady black eyes, a look of pure annoyance, disgust, hatred, does it. I finally give in to G, to the pain that has been harassing me all day. I plunge the knife into her back, and she takes a final gasp of air, and she is gone. My sister is gone.