Spoiler
Not to disclaim... but I wrote this very tentatively, before sleeping, without reading over. If it's horrible, please be very harsh!
Funeral of an Adopted Mother
She tried on the black coat, her arms straddled to her sides, pink fingers interlocked like a hot winter’s Danish. The plastic fabric chafed and scratched as she turned in front of the mirror. She smiled at the sound her armpits made—a mischievous smile, disrobed of the empty affectations that drape other lips when they are trucked and stretched across cheeks, like slaves for their masters.
This memory is clearer to me than most. Maybe it’s because—maybe it’s because this was her most receptive moment of lucidity, I think. Mine too. She turned, and looked at herself in the mirror, then turned back to me.
“Do you like me?” my mother said.
She meant to say “it,” but it didn’t really matter. Not noticing her mistake, she glanced at me with a grin.
I remember looking from across my bedroom at the mirror. Her reflection was broken by a single, drastic caesura that ripped from the ceiling down, bombastic and edgy. It slit through her ribs; made her look poetic, almost, though not beautiful—she could never be “beautiful”, with her short, oily red hair and stocky arms. The black coat traced against her large arcs like a pencil against the edge of a paper, light and smooth.
“Yeah,” I said.
She smiled again. Then, unzipped it, placed it on my bed in a folded black sash, and left.
For some reason, I thought of that moment—her gently removing the coat from her shoulders, folding it, resting it on my bed, still smiling with pursed lips—as I placed the first flowers on her grave.
After I lifted my hand I realized that my movement was too harsh, too sharp—extended at the elbow, pushing against the wet earth. If only I’d done it in a tress motion: as light as her, as tender as her, instinctive and maternal. Stepping through weeds towards the priest, I felt regretful of the most trivial actions, the closest errors. I felt ashamed that my feet dragged against the ground, that my breath dangled in the air like a willow’s branch—that I didn’t, couldn’t mimic her when she was most aware of me: most gentle, most human, most regal.
Weeks before she died, she laid on her hospital bed and looked at the window. It functioned as a mirror for her; she couldn’t see anything past herself. She didn’t want to, either.
That night she found the sky. She glanced at the stars as if they were her children—her real children, not the ones she discovered in Vietnam at the edge of a forest, naked, stained by nature, shivering and huddling and sobbing at she couldn’t understand what—and she frowned at their glittering smoothness. They grew up without her, all alone—apart from her, yet all together. The white masses of them sparkled as if reaching for her, needing her after all these years, even after she’d abandoned them to the black sky.
Her face pinched into itself.
“Water!” she said. “Darian, please. Hand me that glass of water.”
She furrowed her face with fear. She opened her mouth, almost growled.
I obeyed, and sprung for the cup in panic. Her eyes flushed as she reached for the glass, fingers long and red and sturdy, bending into the cold curves of the glass like snapped twigs. Her hand grabbed, clutched.
Then, it launched.
---
I never figured out if it was me or the window. Even in anger, in sickness, in death she was graceful—her voice asking for water as if a newly-born bird had woken up in her body, thirsting and damp; her aim clumsy, yet temperate... even ambiguous.
My mother has taught me many things. Never to be taken advantage of; never to love without being loved; never to be unduly harsh or obstinate. Yet I never truly understood her—especially not that night, when she left a scratch on the hospital’s window. So small—yet strong enough to echo a sliver of light from the moon, burning an arc of it into the dark room.
It looked sort of like a smirk.
-Gadi
