Home > Fight Like a Girl

Fight Like a Girl
Author: Sheena Kamal

one


   I know that people don’t like going to funerals, but this is something else. There’s almost nobody here for Dad’s cremation service. Some distant relatives, a few of Ma’s colleagues and a handful of acquaintances. Whose acquaintances, I have no idea. I’ve never seen these people before in my life.

   Dad’s rum shop friends couldn’t even peel themselves off their barstools long enough to show up in the afternoon?

   What the what.

   Somehow, in the middle of the service, Ma senses my mind wandering and sends me a glare that could cut a lesser person with its sharpness. But I’m used to her stabby looks, so it just comes as a warning to sit there and behave, and fold my hands in my lap, and pretend that I like to wear a dress for some reason.

   I tried to get away with my black jeans that show off the thick muscles in my legs, but I got a good old Caribbean slap upside the head for that. Ma wasn’t having any of it today, of all days. When she was about to say goodbye to the love of her life (gag).

   As the service drags on, I should one hundred percent be thinking about my dad and how he died, but I can’t bring myself to do it. What I do instead is replay the disastrous events of my last fight. I guess I look dazed because Ma pinches my arm and mutters, “Trisha, don’t make me break something over your head, girl. Have some respect!”

   Now I have to pay attention because her nails are sharper than her looks and if she threatens to break something over my head, you know she will throw down in front of all these people without a care in the world.

   Alright, fine.

   I focus on the pundit singing religious songs that nobody understands. Finally, after he does the bare minimum to collect his fee, a few people get up to say nice things about Dad and, whoo boy, is it slim pickings up in here! Until Ma gets fed up and makes her way up to give a heartfelt speech about how they met blah blah, how much she loved him et cetera, how long until this is over?

   I glance around the room and see “diversity” because this is Toronto, after all, and “diversity” is what it’s all about. I mean look at all the assorted Degrassi kids, and that was even before Drake came along. We have everybody in Toronto. But in this room, let’s be honest, we mostly have Trinidadians and Pammy. And, except for one nice old man who looks like he got lost on the way to the grocery store, the majority are women.

   The curse of my life. Trinidadian women. One in particular.

   Ma is watching me again and I can tell she’s thinking about a slap. I can’t really blame her. I’m very trying on her nerves and she’s had it rough, my ma. Not that you would know by looking at her.

   Rule number one of being a woman from Trinidad: be hella fierce.

   I’m not kidding, people. This is the rule. Not only will people expect you to be educated, have a job and provide, you must also have it in you to be an all-round queen. Look after whatever stray children happen to wander your way. Drop everything and whip up some roti on a whim. Plus, you will be fetishized like crazy and you need to be prepared for the sexual energy random assholes will want you to expend whenever a bass line pulses through your prodigious hips. Courtesy of the grand bacchanalia that is Trinidad Carnival, people will look at you and imagine you in barely-there sparkling costumes with your tits out and your ass exposed to the warm sunshine, shaking and backing back on whatever sweaty crotch just so happens to be around for a well-timed jook.

   Well, what about the men? (Some people might ask this. Idiots, mostly.)

   Well, what about them? The men, they don’t matter. Not one bit. Looking around this sad excuse for a funeral, they’re not even here. They’re good for a poke in the night—two sapodilla and a nine-inch banana, as the calypso goes—but not much more than that. I’ve got hordes of useless uncles and semi-uncles (and people I’m just supposed to call uncle even though we’re not related) to prove my point. What they do best is disappear. Even when they’re right in front of you, they’re somewhere else. Forever playing cards in the rum shops of their minds.

   It’s the women that stay.

   They’re with you even when they’re not around. They give you pieces of their souls, jagged pointy things, and you can never give them back, no matter how much you want to. No matter how much these pieces cut you and make you bleed for them, over and over.

   I have to tell you something.

   The women of my family are both warriors and witches. Creatures of the night, vampires that haunt the dreams of Caribbean children, soucouyants who will suck the life right out of you and burn you with our flames.

   I first begin to suspect this about my family after Mr. Abdi gives me a book about a soucouyant living in my hood. Fiction, he says. Yeah, right. Like women who take everything you have and keep wanting more could ever be some made-up shit in the pages of a book.

   Another pinch from Ma tells me the service is finally over.

   Mourners trail out and some of them even make it to our townhouse co-op in the east end of Toronto for the food part, which is probably what lured them to the service in the first place. They walk into the front door, past the boiler room, which we call the basement, and up the stairs to where the living room, dining room and kitchen are. There’s another floor with the bedrooms, but nobody goes up there to poke around because the food is laid out on the dining room table. People practically eat and run, muttering their condolences, and we try to find something new to say every time.

   It’s an ordeal, but we do our best.

   We are the saddest people you ever saw, but after everyone leaves our house with their bellies full of dhalpuri, curry channa and sahina, all of a sudden it feels different somehow. Lighter. Like how my arms feel at the gym after Kru makes me punch with weights for what seems like hours. Like they could float away.

   I walk into the kitchen and I feel this airiness about Ma. The grief she should feel over my father’s death is suddenly somewhere in the wind, far away from here. Maybe her sadness joined him at a nearby rum shop—no doubt where his spirit flew when it exited his mutilated body. Even in her black dress, her face bare of makeup, her hair pulled tight into a bun, she’s light itself in this moment.

   Which is weird, right?

   And it’s like I’m waking up from a dream. I see the smile that my mother gives to my aunty Kavita. Pammy, our next-door neighbour, comes in and grins at them both. A pit of dread opens up inside me because it’s like I’m not even there and they’re sharing something I SHOULD NOT be seeing. Pammy’s inclusion in whatever’s happening here shocks me. We are the witchiest of warriors if we’re starting to corrupt the white people in the neighbourhood, too.

   Make them into killers, like us.

 

 

one month earlier

 

 

two


   In the warehouse district on the east side of the city, the Muay Thai gym I train at is tucked between two underground sweatshops that pretend in the daytime they’re legit clothing manufacturers. The ring has seen better days—

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