I kick a pebble and dislodge a memory. I’m sure this bruised stone has known the intimacy of my much smaller foot. I've been gone for thirty years and it is all the same, the same roads, the same dirt, the same ache in my throat as I look up the street towards sun-yellow walls; the top right corner of an upstairs window mocking me, winking in the midday sun. Well-nurtured roses and soda-pop wisteria clamber in bubbles over the sun-brushed brick and yet, they cannot mask the veil of petroleum energy, the grasping fine wire mesh that is Her.
For years I blocked my ears to her pleading, the wheedling phone calls from a Christ to her Judas Child. I coddled my soft inner self in my unrelenting anger, my resolve fortified by the love I poured into children who unfolded like lilies, perfumed and unafraid to cause stains. My relief is they are grown now, unfractured adults forever distanced from the lash of her razor-cruel tongue.
She had the doctor call, to speak to me of failings—the corporeal kind. A last ditch swing of the lasso as the slowest grains of sand eke from her egg timer. And here I am, on a road I had long since abandoned, humming an old nursery rhyme for comfort; three blind mice, three blind mice — see how they run? The aural blanket I summoned when trembling skin was the only glue for my word-whipped enamel. When I had nowhere else to go.
I know not to expect an apology. I know she feels no guilt. I was the defective daughter, too large, too plain, not enough of her genes to make me worthy of my name. The daughter born with her heart switched off. Yet I’ll search her sallow face for signs of love and when she passes on, my stomach will harden to concrete and restrict the flow of air through my lungs and I will cry tears that burn my cheeks to blistering troughs. For I am her child, and she is my mother and that is where we were lost.
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