Skeletons

My mother’s skeleton leans against thekitchen counterof our tiny apartment, cigarette in hand. Her hands look more like crow’s feet as she goes to pick up another piece of shriveled lettuce. She started with four pieces of lettuce on a napkin; I know this because she counted them as if they were grains of wheat going through a conveyer belt. Now she has three and a half, I still have aheftybowl of carbohydrates in front of me.

“Ma!” I call over to her; my voice is tiny compared to the constant tension following us around.

“Hmm?” She raises her crane neck up too look at me, her eyes bulging out from her withering skin.

“I’m done eating now. You want the rest?” I hold the bowl out in her direction. She cringes and throws the remainder into the trash not looking down at it once.

Her skeleton moves and sits across from me at the table, yellow nails patter at fake wood. I don’t dare face her. We both wanted to talk but what was there to say anymore? We couldn’t even talk about the one thing that our thoughts were constantly occupied by, food. We scurried around food. Food didn’t want us. It was a flip of a wrist, a tiny shallow crack that couldn’t crumble the entire glass.

“Are you going to die?” The sentences slipped throughthe gapbetween my twisted teeth. The room washed over by a frozen mist turning into shards of ice pointed at me.

“I don’t know, maybe,” She looked me in the eyes as each syllable left her mouth. Nibbling on the dead skin surrounding her cuticle she shrugged, “Are you?” Her skeleton moves from the table and navigates itself upstairs. It’s not long until I am dragging behind her. She goes to her room, I go to mine.

December, I am sent to live with my father. He tells her skeleton that she needs to go back to the hospital. The bones cackle back and refuse; it’s all a joke here. Masculine arms take me away because ‘dad’s house is closer to your school’. That’s not why I’m leaving.

February, my mother’s skeleton is locked away in and forced to have life pumped back into it. She is confined in bland walls covered in fake femininity. Aging wallpaper frilled with flowers rams its way down her closing throat till she can’t breathe. She’s forced into paper gowns and pulled up hair. The boney finger of her skeleton reaches out to touch me.

April, the skeleton returns. She drops my father just like she does with the weight they gave her. My father moves to Ohio with his new girlfriend, I can no longer be pushed into his arms. Occasionally the skeleton unhinges its hold on my frame and I run back to masculine arms, arms that are no longer open for me. I am growing too small and girlfriends are prying in-between us.

May, my days fill up with thoughts of aging floral wallpaper and stiff cardboard beds. I try to imagine myself trapped in paper gowns and pulled up hair. I imagine myself counting lettuce with boney fingers until it became a reality. My mother and I switch places. I am a skeleton of a daughter, backing away from life. My mother was radiant now. I fear that when she came to her senses I lost track of mine. For the first time she was determine to bring them back/

November, we both attend thanksgiving dinners again. We go grocery shopping to buy food not just look at it all. Life comes back. We come back. The skeletons never leave. The images of what we once were stalk behind us. They hide in shadows, in pauses between the words in your sentence, in the tags of the clothes thrown in your closet.

My mother is leaning against the kitchen counter of our house, bagel in hand. She threw away the bag they came in before she could check the calories. She slides into the seat across from me at the kitchen table. She asks about my day and I say more than just a ‘nothing’. I am not afraid to ask her the same. Her face glows with confidence I have never seen. For the first time, my mother smiles at me from across the kitchen table.