prompt: curtain, title: a final bow in misc. flash fiction

I was pulled from the earth by enslaved hands, in the beginning when I was just tufts of cotton, when all I wanted from life was to rise and spread seed, instead caught up with those men in the clutches of greed. Hands that knew only shackle and whip, for no reason other than cultural myth and the death god rich men call Profit. Step by step, combed out by people considered properties, similarly spun and similarly weaved, up the chain they may’ve been sheltered from sunstroke but abused in other subtler ways, often worse than the horror in the fields but even more secret. I saw all these things on my path from plant matter to whole cloth. Far from the sole victim of a broken nation, they treated each other even worse than they’d treated me, I wondered if I was to become one of their battle flags just to add insult to injury, harsh retribution to unspoken inquiry.

Woven in full, I passed into hands lighter and technically-free but still paid out pittances, still in squalor yet believing themselves the betters of slaves as was the scam of the day. Dividing two oppressed classes along ethnic lines put them in an opposition quite fruitful for the monied few, together could’ve burnt down their mansions in two lamb-tail shakes, of course, but with myths forcing them to war over crumbs, the landed amongst them could have their cake and gloat over it too. In the end, my fate was not as flag, rather in some plantation palace of avarice, festooning a gaudy windowpane as a decorative curtain.

Some born-rich bitch was temporarily poor, the war had briefly stolen her privileges unearned and how the idiot gnashed teeth about it, how she would never go hungry again when if anyone deserved starvation, she did. Her wealth inherited gains from families her family had worked to death, somehow her loss was the real tragedy. She whined and wailed at the notion of eating roots from the earth as all humans had until a few thousand years before her birth, even.

Her pretty dresses burnt down in war to free humans from decadent bondage, in a fit pretending herself still a princess, she pulled me down, made me into a gown and in a way, I finally became a flag, a totem of how shortsighted selfish men become when used to the fruit of others suffering, believing they somehow deserve it.

But I had revenge, our revenge, as she cried over some other rich moron, she first thought it her childish weeping stealing her breath as I tightened, like the forces of freedom encircling Atlanta, I drew myself up and strangled her in recompense for her life of thoughtless greed. I don’t know if there’s an afterlife for curtains or pretty ballgowns but if in due time, I am made to answer for the crime of stealing her ungrateful breath, I’ll only say, frankly, my Lord, I don’t give a damn.