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.
The Dappy Bint 