“Night Women” is a story of a young woman who does whatever it takes to take care of her son even if it means prostitution. She works in close vicinity to her son’s bed but there is no other choice. The, “…innocent fabric that splits our one-room house into two spaces, two mats, two worlds” is not just a matter of a very short distance between her and her son but also the impassable line between her own personal hell and the good times she used to have with her husband and son without strange men she finds on the streets. Ironically, one of her clients gave him a radio to deafen the sounds coming from the other side of the fabric and he is given the scarf she uses during the day to sleep with as if it is a security blanket.
She notices that as he sleeps, a firefly approaches him as if it is a light to show him the way out of there but it avoids her as if there is no chance. Then she worries if that firefly is actually a blood sucking mosquito that leaves marks on his face, “as though he had spent the whole night kissing a woman with wide-open flesh wounds on her face” – just like her. She uses the butterfly metaphor to describe him as delicate and vulnerable in a very dangerous world he still has not figured out yet.
Her guilt is overwhelming her more and more everyday like a dam that is about to burst. She knows he will find our what she does soon. She lies already that the men he has walked in on were just a dream and that she wears make up at night because she is expecting divine symbols who expect her to be attractive. Her life is like her job: beautiful on the outside but empty and dark on the inside.
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