Poetry of the Redeemed
Copyright© 2026 by Oz Ozzie
The Worst of It
(Sefa)
I went up the stairs behind Orla in a state I could not have named if you’d paid me — and the not being able to name it was its own small horror, because I have always known exactly where I stood, to the inch; it is the one thing the trade taught me that was ever worth the keeping, and tonight I had lost the thread of myself entirely.
Three times that day the world had taken me to pieces. Smith’s drawing-room, and the look, and the question he asked across the table. The kerb, and the shut door, and the long wait for somebody to decide what I was worth. The kitchen, and the three loud children, and my own daughter’s face arriving at the truth. Three times down to the boards. And three times this house had reached down without being asked and stood me back on my feet — fed me, named me, made me a place — and I did not know what on earth to do with being built back up, having spent twenty years learning only how to be knocked down and stay useful while it happened.
My two were on a high. I could see it, and it frightened me near as much as it gladdened me, because I knew what lay underneath it — the thing about their father, which had gone nowhere, which was sitting in the dark of both of them waiting for the high to wear thin — but tonight, just now, they were lit up like lamps, dug clean out of the grave they’d been thrown in at that table by a houseful of other people’s children who had decided, with nobody asking them to, to dig.
And Brin. The eldest girl, who had looked straight at the gaps in my story — and my story is nothing but gaps — and seen clean to the bottom of every one of them, and then chosen, a child of seventeen, to set the questions down and pass me the water and let me keep what was mine. I have been weighed and priced and sorted by experts the whole of my life, and twice over before that day was out, and then a half-grown girl took me seriously and chose to respect me, and it went through me like something I have no word for. It was, I think, the kindest thing done to me in years, and it had been done almost absently, by a child, over a water jug. I was undone by it. I was undone by all of it. I went up the stairs undone, and knew it, and could not make it stop.
At the top she opened a door on a small plain room — three narrow beds, a window, a press, and nothing else in it at all — and said, “This is yours tonight, the three of you. It’s not much. Just beds.” She said it the way you say a thing to someone you don’t want feeling they owe for it: lightly, almost throwing it away. “Just beds, that’s all.”
But first, she said, the bath; and she took us along to the end of the corridor and showed the children where the necessary was, brisk and ordinary, the way of a woman who has settled a great many frightened children into a great many strange houses, and then she had the water ready and put the two of them in it.
She gave them a game with it. They were to wash themselves properly, ears and all, and she’d be checking — and then, once they were clean, they were to make the water rock, hard enough to tip a little over the lip and onto the floor, but not so hard that it set ringing the little bell she’d hung over the edge. A game of precisely the wrong amount. The pair of them took to it like scholars to a prize — Tobin with his tongue between his teeth, Tamsin gone careful and exact the way she goes — the two of them so taken up with the not-ringing of that bell that the whole black day slid off them for a while. Which was the entire point of it. I saw that it was. And I thought: she does this. She knows how to do this. Wherever does a woman learn to do this?
And then she sat me down.
On the floor, in the corridor, my back against the wall, just outside the bathroom door where I could hear the bell not ringing and the children murmuring over it; and she crouched in front of me with a cloth and a basin, took my face in one hand, and began, very gently, to wash it. The way you wash a child’s. My face, and then my hands, the one and then the other, turning them over in hers.
I didn’t know what to do with myself. Nobody washes a grown woman’s face. It is a thing done for the very young, and the very old, and the dying, and I was none of the three; and I sat there while this stranger wiped the day off my skin and felt something coming up in me that I had held down so long I’d forgotten it had a top to come up over.
And there was a thing beneath it I could not look at. The warm cloth, the sound of the water, the children’s voices through the door — it reached back into me and found the oldest version of this exact thing, and turned it over, and showed me I was on the wrong side of it now. Because twenty years ago, in a room not so unlike this one, I had been the one kneeling with the cloth. I had knelt in front of a girl whipped near to nothing, a girl with the new marks still healing on her, and washed her face, and told her low and steady how to stay alive inside what was being done to her. I had been the one with the hands. And I could not look at it — I could not — that the hands were on me now, that the girl had grown up into the house I was weeping in, that the whole wheel had come round twenty years to set me on the floor where I had once set her. It was too much. It was the whole of everything, too much.
“I know,” Orla said. Quietly, into the top of my head. She’d set the cloth down. “I know. You’re not all right. Nobody is, the night they first get here. You don’t have to be.” Her arms came round me. “Let me hold you.”
And I came apart.
I came apart entirely, and I did it without a sound, because the children were ten feet off through a door and would not hear their mother break if I had anything left in me to spend on it — and I had that; I had the silence; I have always had the silence. Twenty years of being used in houses where you learn to make no noise had left me able to weep like a drowning thing, soundless, the whole body going while not one breath of it gets out. Orla held me through all of it. She did not shush me, and she did not tell me it would be all right, and she did not ask me a single thing. She only held on, with the particular sureness of a woman who has held people before, and let me come apart against her for as long as it took, while the bell did not ring next door, and my children played their game, and never knew.
And when it was finished — when I was wrung right out, and lay against her like something hung up to dry — she said only, “Good.” And then: “That’s the worst of it. You’ll not go that far down again. It only goes all the way down like that the once — and only if you’re lucky, and there’s someone with their arms round you when it goes.” She said it the way a woman reports weather she has stood out in herself. “There. The worst of it’s behind you now.”
I heard myself ask it before I had decided to. “What is this place?”
“Lady Kara’s sanctuary.” She said it simply, as you’d say the name of your own town. “A house of safety and peace — for the body, or the soul, whichever’s the one that’s broke; or both, the way it’s both for you tonight. Upstairs and down. Downstairs is the work of it. Up here’s the rest of it. Guests come up to these beds and stay as long as they need, and go on when they’re mended enough to go, and others come. It never empties. There’s always somebody on these beds.”
“And you?” I said. I was still against her shoulder; I hadn’t the strength yet to lift off it, and she didn’t make me. “Who are you? She has a whole houseful of you — you, and Della, and the boy — and she doesn’t —” I couldn’t find the way to say it without saying the whole of my own bewilderment, the thing that had not gone in all evening: a great house, full of people who served, and not one of them owned. “She has the lot of you, and she doesn’t use you.”
Orla laughed, low, not unkindly. “No. She doesn’t use anybody. That’s about the whole of her, in the end.” And then she told me, plainly, because I’d asked plainly and she was a plain woman.
She’d been a breeder. Bought young for it, kept for it, good at it the way you’re good at a thing you were given no choice about — child after child, not one of them hers to keep, every one sold on or kept on as it suited the house — and then her body had gone out of the work, the way bodies do, and a breeder who can’t breed is a horse that can’t pull. So they’d put her out. Not sold. Put out. Walked her to the edge of the city and left her on the road with nothing, too old to fetch a price; and — she said this part with no change in her voice at all, which was how I knew the size of what it cost — sundered, in the doing of it, from every child she had ever carried, not one of whom she would find again in this life, or name, or hold.