Orient Express

The blooms on the salvaged lily are burning and bleeding emerald as my mind aches with this memory. I am lost in it, near oblivious to the storm rolling in from the north, only slightly aware of the drops that prick the burn on my scaling shoulders.

You stayed thin no matter what I did, doctors owed it to genetics while I blamed myself. Consumed with worry, unable to fight through a quicksand pit of fear, I nursed you constantly. Murmuring the chorus to “Little Ghost” in the cool gloom of your bedroom, my crossed legs on the cold, ancient terrazzo forming a nest for your spindle frame.

Your cough was deep that night, rattling the avian bones that seemed to stretch the skin on your chest to the point of tearing. I carried you from room to room in our isolated house. The avocado green kitchen. The Swedish table set that was our only good piece of furniture. The birds ruffled their feathers with each round, your cough only quieted by gravity pulling the mucus deep into your exhausted lungs.

Around and around, my feet padding on the poured, confetti floor. In the background the BBC was playing a show about the Orient Express. A southern English accent, perfect pronunciation. The distant, soothing clatter of an ancient train.

Another pass through the kitchen where the scratched melamine plates are stacked in the strainer. Chipped rainbow coffee mug that once contained a floral bouquet in 1986.

I am here now, sitting on a damp plywood deck as the storm reaches me and I fight the urge to look back through your handprints at your closed bedroom door. The silence that engulfs me now is paralyzing my ability to form words. I go days without speaking. The scale spells out my breakdown in glowing double digits.

That night the redtail hawks peered through our half drawn drapes. They watched, heads cocked, as I circled endlessly until sunrise and you shifted a small, downy, platinum head back and forth on my soft, fat shoulder. In whispered words I promised you London and Paris. A sunrise east of Zurich. The rise of the Austrian Alps.

The rain is hot on my back now as I remember, this sorrow so strong and deep I am grinding my teeth against it, swallowing contempt.

You are prisoner to my impetuous choices. For now bound to the same state I was as a child. This landmass buoyed by OxyContin.

We are lashed to aluminum siding, rusting cars and beer cans bobbing between the flashlight eyes of watching alligators.

The storm has blown over me. I watch a redtail shake her feathers and catch a thermal as she bursts towards the sun.

In the distance a whistle blows, it is waiting.

His voice, like dozens of rainbow Lorikeets.

“They always say it doesn’t much matter if you STAY up. The main point is getting up.”

So, that’s what I do. I peel my eyelids open and wince against the thud of my steps on the tile. Brush my teeth, put on yesterday’s pajamas, found hanging on the edge of the medicine cabinet. Twist my dreadlocked curls into a bun. Turn down the AC. Death march back to the comforting gloom. Burrow into the center of the bed.

My ears are pricked and turned towards the front door. I am waiting for his father’s hand on the lockset, the rattle of keys.

“Mom!”

It’s like a dozen rainbow Lorikeets have swooped into the room. His voice is winged, it’s in primary colors, it’s eyes pin when it reaches me.

The Velcro on his shoes screams in protest as he rips them off. I hear his sandals thud against the back of his closet, underneath my twenty four year old Schwinn. Then he is lumbering up into the bed, all elbows and knees.

My son has seen me cry so often this year he is not frightened by it. It is his normal. When he asks, I tell him that Mom and Dad have a sick friend. My mind does a little pirouette and realizes that Fox’s likely met him. I do not explain who it is.

My arms are long. He has his face turned against my chest and I’d swear I could wrap them around him and them back around myself. Tie his wrists in a knot. His chest is thin, we are bone on bone. The slow run of my tears is darkening the ephemeral, white-blonde crown that is catching them. I can feel his heart beating and it is slow and calm and regular. He is untroubled by my emotion.

I am a pendulum swinging between guilt and pride.

Rogue Waves

Fox is across from me, at the local homemade ice cream shop. It’s empty except for the owner and his employee and I’m watching him load and unload stock while she’s busy behind the counter. 

Fox is knee deep in his mint chocolate chip. I fucking hate it now. Like eating frozen Crest but, at his age, it was the greatest invention ever. Right up there with Garfield and Breyer model horses. Breyers were far better, and the one that occupies my bookshelf now, perpetually rearing, is testament to that. 

And then, without warning, it comes in a crushing wave, rolling through the broiling heat. It comes carrying the words of every pawn shop owner that complimented his behavior as I dropped off the ring’s picture this entire afternoon, Fox in tow. It comes as I recall him lying on the floor this morning, staring up at the ceiling fan with a rabbit sitting on his chest, asking me if wishes ever came true.

“Yeah, Fox, sometimes they do.”
“I wish I was a bird, Mom.”
“Me too.”

It spills between the shiny cars in the parking lot, floods out ours through the open windows so our lack of AC doesn’t shorten our lifespans. It splashes back against the gigantic ice cream cone chained out front. 

I manage the foresight to grab some napkins before the tide hits the table in huge round drops. There in the quiet of a Tuesday afternoon as the air conditioning hums overhead I concentrate on the neon green at the end of his spoon to compose myself. I stem the flow with a wad of brown paper napkins. I think about our rent.

My chest is crushed from the pressure. This crushing banshee scream of love that is wild and overpowering. This vicious love I cannot get a grip on because the breadth of it is bigger than ten thousand galaxies and I cannot comprehend it at all. I cannot even see the start of the middle let alone imagine it’s edge. 

For one tiny little jet black moment, as I try not to audibly gasp, I wonder if my parents ever felt this way about me. Then I punt the thought away, full-force, and as I watch it sail into an imagined tree line I force myself to approximate some sort of feeling resembling pity or forgiveness.

Because my childhood is long dead and I will find no explanations and I will find no solace by sifting through it’s ashes.

The night before I was nearly drowned in an ice cream shop while my son nonchalantly ate mint chocolate chip we had laid in his bed around seven, when he goes to sleep. His little velvet gloved hands were moving up and down each one of mine, turning the tiny rose gold heart I wear on my left hand.

“Where’s the stone, Mom?”

He knows which ring his Dad gave me, I had the diamond reset and I still wear it. It’s his birthstone. He often turns it nervously. The stone was his great grandmother’s. It’s his ring, really.

“Did they get the one with the stone?”

“No, Fox. They got the big one I barely wore. I’ve still got Daddy’s ring.”

I show him my right hand.

The sky is charcoal strokes behind the slats of the plastic blinds. We can hear the divey complex across from us. A couple fighting. He puts his head on my chest and spins the little diamond ring from his father and we are entangled together and quiet, under the lazy spin of his ceiling fan.
The silence leans in all arounds us, and it starts to spin a cocoon.