Please enjoy the first chapter of my upcoming book, Macy. You’ve been following the short story for years, and I’ve fallen in love with her so much, I feel she deserves her own book. I hope you enjoy.
By:Mia L. Hazlett
Chapter 1
Hate – void of love. Just as passionate as love. Just as consuming. And just as hard to release. So why did I hate this dead woman? I just did. A lifetime of hate was inexplicable. But, hating this woman for as long as I could remember was normalcy.
I stared at her dead body in the casket and continued to hate her. My head was not bowed in prayer like my mother, who knelt next to me on the hard padded bench. Instead, my eyes absorbed this wretched still woman. As I stared at her, in that same exact moment, I remembered being told, “Pretty gal, you gon waste away all ya time and energy hatin’ her. She don’t even know it. And baby if she did, she wouldn’t care. Wouldn’t care a damn bit.”
At this very moment, I understood what my mother was telling me about wasted time and energy. I never told this woman I hated her. I thought it. Boy had I thought it. Now, as I looked at her pasty dark tar face, it wasn’t her I hated. I hated hate. It was an obsessive, stressful, controlling emotion, which had governed my life. Even though I knelt before her lifeless body, I was still in hate with her. Yet, the peace upon her face told me, she was already in the kingdom of eternal love. Oh how I hated hate.
Beyond this moment of lifelessness and unfulfilled hate, another revelation knocked at my conscience, my hate for her stemmed from her hate for me. We were in hate with each other. Her matriarchal position allowed her limitless torment. All the while, my position remained the weaker because of my birth. I was born being me.
I stood with my mother, but before I walked away from my lifetime bully, I finally bowed my head and hated. It may have been eye to closed-eye, but I was finally able to look down on her. My twenty-two years of loathing the woman I shared a name with, came down to two sentences, From one Macy to another, I’m happy you’re dead. I hope you burn in hell grandmother.
©2015 Mia L. Hazlett
A Young Writer Coming Up 