Zafira’s seventh birthday is an exercise in disappointment – and a lesson about life she shouldn’t have to learn so young.
Content warning: contains triggers for enslavement, human trafficking, child labor, psychological stress.
I woke before dawn on my seventh birthday with my stomach already fluttering. For a moment, in that soft grey space between sleep and waking, I forgot where I was. I thought I smelled my mother’s corn cakes on the griddle, thought I heard my father humming the hymn he always hummed on birthday mornings. I reached for my tin cup before I remembered it was gone, lost somewhere between the caravan and the auction block.
Along with everything else.
The bedroom came into focus around me. My sleeping pallet at the foot of Enid’s bed, her soft snoring through open mouth, the collar around my neck. I was seven years old today, and I had survived almost a full year in this place. Surely someone would remember?
__________
When I brought the tray up, Enid was waiting for me at the top of the stairs like usual. No smile on her lips, but she could not hide from me the kindness that danced in her eyes. She had started hiding her affection for me from the rest of the household, and I obliged her secret, bribed as I was with love. Soon we both figured out that it was hard to hide a child who was cared for from the lady of the house, and so Enid became cold and distant to me most of the time. Once in a while she let me see her eyes smiling, so I knew things were okay between us.
As I set the tray down I looked at her expectantly. She stared back.
“What is it, child?”
“I’m seven today,” I prompted.
I saw a look flicker over her face. Surprise, maybe. Or pity. She quickly smoothed out her features and for one bright, breathless moment I thought she would smile. I thought at least she might produce a honey cake from somewhere, or tell me to take the morning off, or at least say the words I longed to hear.
Happy birthday, Zafira.
“Seven,” she repeated. “Old enough to start learning science properly then. Sit down, we’ll begin with biology.”
She began grumbling to herself and disappeared behind a row of bookshelves. I reluctantly sat myself down at my little desk, my knees already starting to cramp against the metal underside. She did not mention my birthday again that day, and as the lesson on mitochondria dragged on I felt as if bricks had been tied to my limbs and heart.
_________
I looked for Henry during our midday meal. He was sitting with my sisters on the back porch near the kitchen entrance, shoveling baked beans into his mouth with his fingers. He was four years old, still round cheeked and quick to smile. I crouched beside him.
“Ash,” his slave name tasted bitter on my tongue.
He looked up, beans smeared on his cheeks. “Zafi!”
“Do you know what today is?”
He considered this seriously. “Monday?”
“It’s my birthday,” I said. “I’m seven today.”
“Oh.” He blinked at me. “What’s a birthday?”
My throat tightened. He probably didn’t remember any of his own.
“It’s the day you were born,” I said. “Everyone has one.”
“When’s mine?”
I opened my mouth and realized I didn’t know. I knew it was in the spring, a bit after mine – I remembered flowers, our mother making a fuss – but the actual date had slipped away from me like sand through my fingers. We had not even given him a birthday last year.
“I’ll find out,” I told him. A lie. There was no one left to ask.
Henry nodded and returned to his lunch. I watched him eat and felt something hollow blossom in my chest.
_________
I found my younger sisters in the laundry, elbow-deep in soapy water. The year had changed them in ways it had not changed me, and in ways I did not fully understand. They didn’t play much anymore, they didn’t laugh. They flinched at sounds I didn’t hear and shared glances I could not read.
I stood at the edge of the washing tubs and stared at them. “It’s my birthday today.”
“Okay,” said Lordes, glancing up with a shrug.
“Happy Birthday, Zafi,” Sandra smiled at me, her little cheeks and forehead dirty from cleaning. I smiled back, and shot a dirty glance at Lordes.
“Thank you, Quartz,” I said pointedly, and stomped out of the room.
__________
By evening I had stopped hoping. I ate my dinner in silence, watching the other slaves move through their routines. I thought about my mother, how she brushed my hair on my birthday night and told me the story of the night I was born – the thunderstorm, the midwife who almost didn’t make it in time, the way I came into the world screaming like I had something to say.
No one here knew that story. No one would ever tell it to me again.
I curled up on my pallet that night and stared at the dark ceiling. I made a decision: I would never again wait for someone else to remember. I would never again put my hope into others to make my days special. Hoping led to disappointment. Expecting was foolish. I had spent an entire day waiting for people to give me something, and I had received absolutely nothing.
Next year I would not wait. Next year I would tell everyone in advance. I would teach Henry what a birthday was and I would make my own celebration, however small, because no one was going to make it for me.
We are alone in this world, and the sooner I accepted that, the better.
As I turned onto my side I slipped my hand under the pillow and felt something cold and hard. I sat up and pulled a smooth, small agate shaped like a heart from under the pillow. It gleamed in the low light from our tiny window. Enid was already asleep, breathing slowly. Who else would it be from? Who else could have slipped it under my pillow? But I was not sure.
I fell asleep clutching it tight in my fist, my only birthday present that year, feeling slightly less alone in the world. A glimmer of hope, an ember alive in the darkness. I curled myself around it and slept.
