2011 Issue - Santa Fe Community College

Around Her Neck,
The Weight of Stones
by Roxane Gay
The whores had always been there for the men of the city. They
worked in the Flesh District, a narrow, dusty corridor framed by tall
stone buildings where they draped their bare breasts and damp thighs
over the windowsills for the men passing by. They were the soul of the
city, the bloody beating heart. All day and night men brought the
whores sweet smelling oils, fresh fruits and, of course, silver coins, always
polished to the brightest shine. They also brought their calloused hands
and coarse words, their petty miseries and difficult, demanding, often depraved
desires. The men of the city liked to believe this was a fair exchange.
On the far side of the Flesh District there was a wall built high
enough to block out the sun and on the other side of that wall were the
women who knew where their husbands spent their time after long days
in the quarry or the Spice Market or at the Tribunal. They named it the
Wall of Sorrow and the city’s wives spent their lonely nights beating
their fists against the obdurate stone until the bones broke and the
anatomy of their hands became unrecognizable. It was the whores who
always fixed the broken hands of the wives—a small, terrible kindness—
but the wives relished the fleeting affection, the tender touches of the
women their husbands loved. The wives allowed their bloodied knuckles
and awkwardly bent fingers and torn ligaments to be set right, to be
healed and covered in thick webs of scar tissue that would only tear the
next time they came to the Wall of Sorrow.
The men didn’t care. They bedded the whores, working themselves
into frenzies as they listened to the intense pitch of their wives’ keening.
That miserable sound that only increased the men’s pleasure.
Isadore was the most beloved of the whores. Little was known about
her. She had once been sealed to a man, a soldier it was said. She loved
her man down through her bones. Each morning when they woke up,
she washed his face with a rose oil soaked cloth and massaged every part
Santa Fe Literary Review 81