E S Soppitt

Mol's Voice

Mol’s hands still stung, raw fingers flexing nervously at her sides as she waited in line with the rest of her classmates. Her mother always insisted on clean hands. Obsessively so. No child of hers left the house without scrubbing themselves from elbow to fingertip with those awful bars of lye, as if they could scour away their poverty as easily as the dirt beneath their fingernails. Her mother was convinced, for reasons that eluded Mol, that if her children’s hands were clean then no one would notice the ill fitting shirts with mismatched buttons, or the darned elbows on threadbare blazers, or the slap slap slap of too big Oxfords that “You’ll grow into,” and “You’d better not come home with those scuffed up!” Glancing down now, Mol rubbed the toe of her right shoe against the back of her calf, just to be safe.