No such thing as love

“You cannot be in love.”
“But I am.”
“You do not know love.”
“Of course I know it.”
Her mother slapped her, leaving a blue film of paint from the wash.
“You are only fifteen.”
“I am sixteen, actually.”
“Oh! Sixteen! So you think you know love at sixteen?”
She laughed, a mean laugh, a terrifying laugh that echoed sharply in the still air.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
“Why are you laughing at me?”
“Because you are a fool. Look at me. I am more than thirty years older than you. I have four daughters. I have a husband. But I have never encountered love.”
“Because you never searched for it.”
She slapped her again, but harder than ever before, and the world erupted in a blaze of color and dull pain. Her white cheek was stained a filmy lilac from the trousers her mother rubbed against the wooden basin.
They did not speak.
They did not speak.
Her mother lifted the sopping corpses of white night gowns and yellowed men’s shirts, cream colored brassieres and blue flower print skirts and pink checkered summer dresses, and folded them, one on top of the other, dripping color onto each other, staining the grass rainbow.
“So what will you do with your love?”
“Marry him!” The excitement in the voice thinned with youth made her mother wince and she looked away.
“ And live with him forever.”
“Forever!”
The older woman shook her head.
“Oh, sweet child. You cannot even imagine the burden of forever.”
“I know enough.”
“No.” She let her large hands, thickened with years of work, float in the cooling water, palms down, allowing the soapy water soak into the sharp contours of her calloused hands. “You don’t.”
She began to laugh again. A rasping noise that she forced out with heaving thick shoulders, almost like she was weeping. Her mother laughed and laughed her terrifying, coughing cry, and soon she began to laugh too. They laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed laughed laughed. The girl fell on the ground, her long yellow braids enveloped her cheeks and grimace, her chin and arms, the wrist with the freckle where he kissed her two nights before, the finger with the broken nail he smoothed with his hand just the other night.
“There- There is no man.” She almost stopped laughing.
Her mother balanced herself on her large knees, her black black hair trailing down her waist and back and nodded. “I know.” She wheezed. “I would have been a fool to believe it.”
“Then why did you laugh?” Her elbows dug into the gritty earth and her small stomach felt the clumps of dirt and rocks through her soft dress as she turned. “If you knew, why did you laugh?”
“Because.” A cough rippled through her shoulders. “Because I almost let myself to think like you; that there is such a flimsy thing as love.”1