Every morning is the same. I wake up, shower, get ready for school. I take Mother out of the chifforobe and place her on the dressing table, so she’ll catch a little afternoon sunshine. She tells me I shouldn’t bother, but I think she enjoys it, secretly; on those occasions where I forget, she’s sluggish for the rest of the day, more severe than usual. Like a plant starved of sunlight.
Mother would prefer it if I didn’t go to school. She’s afraid I’ll meet a boy and abandon her. I tell her I’ve no interest in boys, which is true; and that I go to an all-girls’ school, which is a lie, but she has never asked me for proof, and since I never mention boys, I think she believes me.
School is the only place I am permitted to be, other than Home.
Mother appraises me before I leave. I feel the scrutiny of her black glass gaze. The taut wire of her frown; slow creak of hinged jaw sliding open, the better to enunciate her judgement.
YOUR HAIR IS A MESS, HELEN.
“I know, Mother. I’ve run out of conditioner.”
Her brain whirrs. Calculating the last time we had shopping delivered. She keeps track of all the numbers. The receipts, stashed in a drawer, ancient and yellowing, like baby teeth.
IT WOULD BE CHEAPER TO CUT YOUR HAIR SHORT.
She makes demands, sometimes. When she thinks my school skirts are too short, or my clothes have become shabby. Mother says I must be modest, but well turned out; clean, but not flashy. It’s very important that I do not shame myself.
“The nearest hairdresser is in Town,” I say. “I’d have to get the bus.”
This gives Mother pause. She has little concept of the world outside of Home, except that Town is outside her sphere of influence. This is intolerable to her. She rattles and clicks, cricketlike; tilts her head, a sharp and jerky motion.
WEAR YOUR HAIR IN A PLAIT. WE WILL ORDER SHOPPING WHEN YOU GET HOME.
“Yes, Mother.”
IF YOU USE LESS, IT WILL LAST LONGER.
“Yes, Mother.”
IT COSTS A LOT TO KEEP YOU, HELEN.
“I know, Mother.”
She’s quiet again. This brief burst of activity has tired her; her frame sags, the heavy hang of her head, held aloft on fragile vertebrae. She’s getting old, now.
I gently shift her position. The sun is lower in autumn, not quite as strong. As an afterthought, I crack open the window, allowing a cool breeze to infiltrate. Mother’s room is warm and stuffy. The floorboards are thick with dust, disturbed as I pass through; whirling elegant in the wake of my passage, and caught on a thin sunbeam, a procession of tiny dancers sinking slowly to the floor. This is the only room she will not permit me to clean.
I pause at the door.
“Alanna likes my hair,” I whisper, low, so that even if she were awake, still, she would not hear a word.
I do as she instructs all the same.
At school, I let Alanna pull the elastic from my hair. We sit outside on the grass, in the sun; she runs her fingers through the plait, unwinding slowly. Combing my hair out with her hands, so that it fans out over my shoulders. I shiver a little under Alanna’s careful attention. She is a cool evening breeze, stirring the small hairs at the back of my neck. Nobody touched me much before Alanna did. Nobody spoke to me, either.
“There,” she says, with an approving tilt of her head. “That’s much better.”
“I ran out of conditioner,” I mumble. Apologetic, that her soft hands should be exposed to my wire-wool hair, but she just smiles, leaning back on her palms, so that the insides of her elbows face up toward the sun; sleeves rolled up, those lightstarved parts of her a shade lighter than the rest.
“You have mermaid hair,” she says. And then, thinking better of it: “no. You have samodiva hair. All wild and gold.”
I pluck dandelions one by one. Arrange them carefully on the grass. The shape of a star. “Mother wants me to cut it all off,” I tell her. A little thrill runs through me at the transgression. I’m not supposed to speak of Mother outside of Home, much less criticise her intentions. But she can’t hear me here. She can’t see the way I smile when Alanna braids daisies into my hair, hand-feeds me morsels of her lunch. She can’t hear the guilty laughter which spills from my lips when Alanna says Mother sounds like a miserable old witch.
“Some stories say that a samodiva’s power resides in her hair.” Alanna snatches a dandelion from the pile, shreds it methodically. Thin gold petals scatter over the navy of her skirt, her exposed shins. Catching in the fine hairs. “If you cut it off, she’s powerless.” She grins. Mischief in those dark eyes. “Maybe your mum’s afraid of you.”
“Maybe,” I say, careful to keep the doubt from my voice. It’s not that I don’t think Mother understands fear. She’s afraid of many things. The Outside. People who aren’t us. Discovery, and abandonment. She’s afraid that one day, I’ll leave, and never return.
“Don’t cut it,” Alanna says. Scooting over so she’s beside me; dusting my hair with dandelion petals, bright gold filaments, and someone across the playground yells fucking dykes! but she ignores them, fussing with the placement, scattering the petals until they’re exactly to her liking. “Never cut it. Grow it so long it’ll trail behind you. Like a wedding veil.”
I laugh at that. “But it’ll get dirty. I’ll catch leaves in it.”
“Like a forest nymph.”
“Mother would never let me.” I mimic her voice. The susurration of dry leaves, twigs snapped underfoot: “People ask questions about scruffy children. It is very important that you look presentable.”
Alanna snorts. “There’s no way she sounds like that.”
No, I think. She doesn’t. My throat can’t produce the sounds hers does; too fleshy, too soft. She sounds like bow-scraped wires, an untuned violin, rusted and creaking. She sounds like old floorboards in an empty house, the light tread of feet. None of these comparisons are accurate.
I feel Alanna’s chin on my shoulder.
“You’re nearly seventeen, Helena.” Slipping a daisy behind my ear. “You can make your own choices.”
I imagine telling Mother this. The dull anger of her black glass eyes; teeth-shards bared in bitter laughter, the empty hole of her throat.
I remind myself to plait my hair again before the end of school. Brush out all the petals. I don’t want a trace of Alanna to pass the threshold. To be tainted by Home.
“I know,” I tell her, and hate myself a little for the lie.
I bathe Mother with a soft cloth. Warm water in an old plastic bowl. Dish soap and tea tree oil, to ward off the scent of rust. She becomes fretful if the cloth is too wet, if I don’t dry her quickly enough.
I wonder, idly, if I could drown her in this bowl.
THERE’S A STRANGE SMELL ABOUT YOU.
“Is there?” I run the cloth along her spine. Folded edge in the alcoves of her vertebrae, out along the apse, methodical. Mother does not have olfactory organs; the imagined scent of her own paranoia manifests in accusation, which she cannot prove any more than I can disprove It took me many years to learn this. “I’ve been cleaning the kitchen. That disinfectant you like, the cypress-scented one. It’s quite strong.”
I feel the slow whirr of her brain, vibrating along the taut cord of her neck, her eggshell skull. She had skin, once, or something like it; it fell off in shabby patches, like an old chamois, rotting with age and humidity. Exposing the yellowed porcelain beneath.
TELL ME WHAT YOU LEARNED IN SCHOOL TODAY.
I exhale, smooth. Practised. “Red shift is an example of the Doppler effect,” I recite. “When a faraway interstellar object moves towards us, it looks more blue than it usually would. This is called blue shift. Red shift is the opposite—when the object is moving away from us. The colours are shifted to the red end of the spectrum, so it looks more red than it usually would.”
THIS DOES NOT SEEM LIKE INFORMATION THAT WOULD BE USEFUL TO YOU.
“It’s what’s on the curriculum, Mother.” I brush out the sparse filaments of her hair with a baby brush. This too has diminished over the years; no matter how gentle I am, how carefully I comb the nylon fibres, faded with age and sunlight, they seem to shed, steady, like spring blossom. What remains is barely enough to cover her skull.
IT WOULD BE BETTER TO TEACH YOU PRACTICAL LIFE SKILLS. HOUSEHOLD MAINTENANCE. FINANCIAL RESPONSIBILITY. DO THEY NOT TEACH THESE THINGS?
“That’s not really what school is for.”
PERHAPS I HAVE BEEN UNWISE. ALLOWING YOU TO WASTE SO MUCH TIME THERE.
Irritation prickles at the back of my neck, the fine hairs on my wrists. I tug the brush a little harder; a scattering of hair fibres peel from her skull, flutter to the floorboards, where they will stay forever. Stark white on old varnish.
“What would I do instead?” I ask her, masking my peevishness under affected curiosity. “I don’t suppose you’d let me get a job.”
THIS HOUSE HAS GROWN SHABBY. YOU DO NOT TAKE GOOD CARE OF IT.
My fingers tighten around the hairbrush. I lower it gently onto the dresser. Sweep aside dry scraps of scalp with my palm. “All I ever do is take care of it.”
IT LOOKS OLD AND TIRED.
“Then give me the money to redecorate. I can do it on the weekends.”
I SPEND ENOUGH MONEY ON YOU.
“It’s not even your money. It belonged to-”
Her hand swings up, swift. A flash of silver; sharp, glassy pain, like a firework bursting below my eye. I grab my face instinctively, hiss through my teeth. Pressing my palm to wet-shredded skin.
FINISH THAT SENTENCE, HELEN. SEE WHAT IT GETS YOU.
My right eye waters. Warm blood trickles down my chin, through my parted fingers. I reel back, out of her range, stumbling over my own feet, the warped floorboards. Her black eyes regard me with cold indifference; the serrated knives of her fingers, hinged and vicious and tipped in crimson. I had forgotten, in my complacency, how fast she can move. How savage.
CLEAN YOURSELF UP. UNGRATEFUL CHILD.
Her voice is a low rasp, wrenched from her throat. Anger borne on the out-breath, an old bellows breathing sparks from an ashen firepit. A thin spray of blood arcs up the wall. Red on white. Oh, Alanna, I think, grabbing the damp cloth, pressing it to my cheek; Alanna, you were wrong, you were wrong.
That night, I push the dresser up against my bedroom door. Dab my wounds with TCP, wincing at the burn, the hospital stink of it, which seems to burrow into my sinuses, into the tissues, like an illness which will someday kill me.
Mother won’t follow me in here. She never does. Not since I was a child, and I needed her, in a way I haven’t for a long time now. I burrow under musty blankets. The sagging mattress I’ve slept on for over a decade. More nest than bed. A comfortable nostalgia.
I fall asleep to the ceaseless throb of my wounds, the memory of wounding.
I dream of Mother crawling down the hallway, spider-swift on sharp fingers. I dream of my flesh-mother, gurgling in the bathtub. Cut throat and warm water, the scent of lavender, and I am so small, I am barely tall enough to see over the rim of the bath. Her cheek pressed against the tiles. Red on white. I dream of Mother flensing her, a slow and perfect peeling; red-jewelled Salome, draped and dancing in the veil of my flesh-mother’s skin. I dream of bones wrapped in velveteen. In the dark of the chifforobe, where the afternoon light can never find them.
I dream of black glass eyes. A voice dredged from the depths of a lake. Silt-rich and so cold.
IT’S ALL RIGHT. SSH. DON’T CRY. I’LL BE YOUR MOTHER, NOW.
I forget, sometimes, where the memories end and the dreams begin.
At lunchtime, Alanna drags me to the girls’ toilets, peels back the gauze taped to my cheek. She inspects my wounds, ghosting glistening furrows with the tips of her fingers. Her dark eyes are wide and horrified.
“She can’t do that to you,” she says, fretful. “You know that, don’t you? There are laws against it.”
I watch in the bathroom mirror as she assesses the damage. My jaw cradled in the curve of her palm. Her hands are soft. Everything about her is soft. I frequently forget what it feels like to be touched gently, until she reminds me.
“I don’t think she cares about the law,” I say.
Her brow creases in sudden anger. “Bet she’d care if I came round and scratched her face to shit,” she says, with a venom I’ve never heard before. “Maybe someone should. Treat her the way she treats you. See how she likes it.” Her other hand tightens in my sleeve. I brush her knuckles, soothing, until her tendons uncoil, the gentle creak of muscle fibres held too tense for too long. I do not want anger to harden her. Not for my sake.
A girl walks into the toilets. She’s from the year below, still in uniform. She glances at us sidelong, looks quickly away again; disappears into a cubicle with a purposeful slam of the door. I turn on the tap, an automatic reflex. A concession to courtesy.
“I’m sorry,” Alanna says, quieter now. “Probably shouldn’t threaten your mum.”
“It’s okay.” I replace the gauze, streaked rusty with dried blood; stick the medical tape back to my face, white stripes running beneath my red-puffy eye. Like war paint. “I know how it looks,” I say. “But she’s doing her best.”
“Is she?” She sounds aggrieved. And it’s not like she knows, is it? I watch water swirl into the sink. The ring of rust around the plughole, red on white. My flesh-mother, absent even in her presence. Her empty catatonia. Hunger and silence and cold nights, alone in the dark. For all Mother’s flaws, she is, at least, a mother.
Of course Alanna doesn’t know. She has a normal family.
“Stay at my house tonight,” Alanna says, tugging my hand into hers. “I know you always say she won’t let you, but . . . does she have any right? After hurting you like this . . . ”
I know I should say no. This is everything I didn’t want. Dragging Alanna into my business, even in this small way; because Mother will blame her, and any punishment I receive will be with Alanna in mind. My flesh as proxy.
I know I should say no, but I want to know. I want to understand what it’s like to be normal. To be surrounded by normality. To absorb it, maybe, the way a plant absorbs sunlight, parcels it away, into its own cells, so that it becomes the sun, a little.
I suppose I really just want to know what it’s like to be loved.
I can’t remember the last time I set foot in a Home that wasn’t mine. And of all the things I’d expected—all the vivid fantasies I’d conjured of normality, pulled from books and painted in imagination—what strikes me most is how warm everything is. Sunlight, and colour, and incense burning on the mantlepiece. Movement. The heat of the oven. Of bodies sharing space. And I accustomed to silence, to shivering in the dark. I hadn’t even realised I was cold, until now.
“It’s so nice to finally meet you, Helena.” Alanna’s mother is dark, like her; wild black hair and full-bloom smile, softly rounded, the way Alanna is, but with the gentle laxity of age. It suits her. It will suit Alanna, someday. “You know, Alanna never shuts up about you.”
“Mum.” Alanna rolls her eyes, performative, but her hand on my arm is reassuring. Possessive. Helena is mine, she seems to say; telegraphing my belonging to her entire family, in case they forget themselves.
“Make yourself at home, love.” This as Alanna drags me into the living room, away from the curious eyes of her siblings. “Dinner will be ready soon.”
“I told her she’s not allowed to mention your family,” Alanna says. I perch awkwardly on the edge of the sofa, unsure of what I’m allowed to touch. I feel as though I’ll dirty it all somehow. Dragging lonely fingers through all this beauty.
“I don’t mind.” I’m used to lying, I think; I’ve been lying about Mother for years. I’ve been lying to you all this time. But Alanna just shakes her head, stubborn. Throws a cushion at me, so I have to lean back to catch it. Tricking me into relaxation. And I do, a little. Coaxed by the warmth. The soft lights. Pictures on the walls. They all resemble one another.
I try to recall my flesh-mother. Before she was bloodied, blue-marbled. Her pale and lifeless eyes. I try, but I can’t remember.
After dinner, Alanna takes me to her room. I stand in the doorway for a long moment, until she looks up at me, quizzical; tells me to come in, sit down, and so I do, stiffly, on the edge of her bed, until she sighs, drapes her arms around me. Rests her chin on my shoulder, and I know now why she always smells faintly of incense, carrying the traces of home with her. Do I, too? Does the dust cling to my skin, the oil to my hair; wire and rust and glass, inorganic and cold?
“I don’t understand you,” she says.
I flinch. She feels it. Tightens her arms, so I can’t wriggle free, put myself in the corner, the way I might had Mother rebuked me. The throb of my cheek is a reminder of how dangerous my strangeness is. It will scar, probably. So that I will never forget.
“I just mean . . . ” She pauses. Turns the words around carefully in her head. I think I’m a feral animal to her, sometimes. She’s afraid she’ll spook me, if she says the wrong thing, moves too sharply, and she’s right. I’ve always been a creature in need of managing.
(HELP ME TO HELP YOU, HELEN.
I CAN’T DO EVERYTHING MYSELF.
SHE DIDN’T BUILD ME FOR THIS.)
“I don’t know what she’s told you,” Alanna says, after a time. “About yourself. That there’s something wrong with you, or . . . I don’t know. That you deserve this.” Her thumb, tracing the gauze at my cheek. “It’s not true, though. You’re . . . smart. And interesting. I’ve never met anyone as interesting as you.”
I smile, a little wry. “Because I’m strange?”
“Well, yeah.” On a shrug. “But what’s bad about that? I’m strange too.”
I gaze around Alanna’s room. Faded daffodil paint, unchanged since childhood. Blu-tack marks where posters have been put up, pulled back down, her allegiances changing with age. Desk piled high with books about mythology, legends, fae folk; the school textbooks pushed to the back and forgotten. A battered laptop. I know she writes her stories there. About selkies and huldra and samodivi; speywives and mavka, of whom I know little, save that they are all strange girls, of a kind. Like her. Like me.
This, I realise, is what I should have had. It isn’t that Mother stopped me. She might have begrudged the cost of the blu-tack, the paint. She’d have drawn the line at a laptop, the way she did a phone; to be plugged in is to be disconnected, she says, and allows an internet connection only to manage finances, order shopping. But my room is mine. She hasn’t crossed that threshold since I was very small, and would cry in the night; crawling in on her spiderlegs, her knife-fingers, and I’d thought her eyes like stars, then, her voice a song.
I have always kept my room exactly as my flesh-mother left it.
Alanna and I fall back onto her bed. She pulls me close, head pillowed on her chest; toying with my hair as I stare up at her ceiling, counting little silver stars. I wonder if they glow in the dark.
“I don’t give a shit if nobody else likes me.” I hear her voice inside her ribcage. The slow inflation of her lungs, the whoosh of exhalation. The steady rhythm of her heart. Human sounds. I must have heard them before, when my flesh-mother was alive. “They can say whatever they want,” Alanna says. “I don’t need them. Not now I have you.”
“People like you,” I say.
“No, they don’t. They think I’m a freak. I had no friends before I met you.”
“Neither did I.”
“Well then.” She’s so easy in her affection. So free. Her mother hugs her casually; her sisters climb over her, lounge in her lap, and she ruffles their hair, pushes them playfully. Perhaps my flesh-mother was like this, once. Thoughtlessly gentle. I can’t recall. My body doesn’t remember it.
When Alanna tilts my chin with her fingers, it’s without ceremony. The brazen confidence of one who has known love their entire life, gives as freely as they take.
“We’re meant to be together,” she says, “aren’t we?”
She kisses me like there’ll never be consequences. In her world, perhaps that’s true. She kisses me, and she smiles, and my heart bursts. I think Alanna could save me. I think Alanna could love me, maybe.
I wake in the night. Startled by the sound of her breathing, her warmth at my back. I sit bolt upright, my heart hammering in the base of my throat, until I see the stars glowing pale on the ceiling, the scent of incense in the borrowed nightclothes hanging from my thin-stark shoulders.
“Helena?”
Alanna’s voice. Sleep-thick and mumbled. I exhale. Lower myself back down, into blankets which smell like her. She tangles her legs in mine. When she speaks—low, and soft, and nothing like Mother—her lips brush against my neck, and the small hairs on my wrists stand on end.
“So there’s this samodiva, yeah?” she says. “She’s bathing in the stream with a bunch of other girls, and this shepherd comes along and steals their clothes. The other girls convince him to give them back, but the samodiva accidentally lets slip that she’s an only child, so he insists on marrying her. She doesn’t want to, but she doesn’t get to choose. See, in this version, her veil is the source of her power, and since he stole it with the rest of her clothes, she’s got no choice but to obey him.”
“So, the other girls go free, and the samodiva marries him. Stark naked, according to some versions. Others say he gifts her a new dress for the occasion. But the samodiva is smart. When she goes to dance at her wedding, she tells her new husband she can’t possibly dance without her veil. So he brings it to her. And the second he does, she flies away. She sets herself free.”
I lay in the dark, listening to her breathe.
“I’m not a samodiva,” I say, after a time.
“No,” she says, tucking her ankle behind mine. Casual in her possessiveness. “But you can still fly away.”
I return the next day to a darkened Home. The upstairs curtains are still open. Night is falling, and Mother frets about the streetlights, convinced they’ll illuminate the room, so that people across the street can look in, see her there, on the dressing table, still and strange.
I open the front door. The House is silent. Cold. The scent of dust. Incense lingers on my clothes, my hair. I know Mother will sense it, even if she can’t smell it. How can I possibly explain it to her? If I tell her I’ve met a boy, she’ll kill me. If I tell her I’ve met a girl, it’ll kill her. I don’t know which would be worse.
“Mother?” I call, tentative. Stepping into the darkened hallway. Stark floorboards. A swirl of dust caught in a shaft of streetlight. I look up at the stairs and she’s there. Spilling over the lip of the landing, the gears and wires of her, in tangled disarray. A spattering of black on the worn cream carpet, soaking into the fibres.
I run to her. Dropping my schoolbag in the hallway. My feet thud on the floorboards. A low keening sound emerges from her hollow throat. An imitation of weeping.
I scoop Mother into my arms. Steel bones and pale nylon hair. She weighs nothing at all.
I THOUGHT YOU’D LEFT ME.
Her voice is so small. A raw whisper, like the throat of grief.
“No, Mother. No, I’m here.”
I WAS SO AFRAID, HELEN. I CALLED FOR YOU. BUT YOU WEREN’T THERE.
I smooth her hair with my palm. Black blood pools on the landing, oozing down the lip of the stair. White fibres stuck and gleaming. Sorrow heavy in my chest, sharp-edged guilt. Carving at the space between my ribs. My heart aches for her, even after everything.
“I’m here now, Mother.”
She seems to tremble in my arms. I see the fissure in her skull, leaking thick oil. She must have fallen. Trying to find me. She must have lain here for hours, crying alone in the dark. What a pitiful thing she is. More pitiful, still, that I’d been so afraid of her, for so long.
Is this what my flesh-mother felt, I wonder, as she lay in the bath, bleeding out. Watching me tiptoe into the bathroom, wide-eyed, uncomprehending. The child she’d left behind. The choice she’d made. To fly away. I hadn’t understood, then. Perhaps I never would have, if not for Alanna.
Mother’s hand tightens around my arm. The flat of her fingers bite dully at my skin. Knives sheathed in contrition.
I NEVER MEANT TO HURT YOU, HELEN.
My jaw tightens.
“My name is Helena,” I tell her, without anger, and she nods, vague. I pick her up carefully, supporting her neck in the crook of my elbow, as though she were newborn. The dull beads of her eyes, gazing at the ceiling. I wonder if she can see me. If she’s ever really seen me.
“Come on, Mother. Let’s put you to bed.”
YES.
“You’ll feel better in the morning.”
WILL I?
Querulous as a child. Blood drips from her skull in fat gobbets, hitting the carpet with a dull sound. I move slowly, unwilling to cause her any more pain, though my cheek throbs like an ill memory. Along the dusty hallway, featureless as a hospital corridor; past the bathroom, my bedroom, to the room at the end of the hall, where my wire-mother resides, like the flesh-mother before her.
I open the chifforobe. A sea of black eyes stare back at me, empty as photographs. Mother once told me they were the ones who came before her. My flesh-mother’s creations, wrenched into being; alienation given shape, the strange lines and vicious angles, wire and metal and glass. I see in them now the desolation she must have felt. Their slit-mouths and jagged fingers. Their gaping chest cavities, dripping with silvery solder, in which no heart resides, no lungs with which to inhale. I don’t know what makes Mother different, except that she was the last.
I place Mother gently on her shelf, wrap her in blue velveteen. A swaddled old babushka. She can’t close her eyes, so I pull the cloth over her face, a poor facsimile of sleep. Her mouth falls open. The piteous shiver of her wires as she struggles to speak.
I WAS SO.
AFRAID.
“I know, Mother.”
Her voice is a slow wheeze, now. Broken bellows leaking air.
IF ANYTHING.
WERE to happen.
to you.
i.
I look down at my hands. Black slick palms. Fingerprints on the door. Like bath tiles, streaked and bloody. Her cut-throat gurgle, fading into silence.
helen, i.
only wanted.
to protect.
you.
Her head lolls. Still under velveteen, in the dark of the chifforobe. I wait, but she doesn’t speak again. I think perhaps she never will. I feel no sadness, no regret. No childlike terror at the thought of a world without her in it. I have grown past the need for Mothers.
Outside, the streetlights flicker on. White light peels in through the open curtains. Across the road, shadows move in distant windows. I think of Alanna. Of her heart beating beneath my ear, the seashore hiss of her lungs. The softness of her hands. I think of daffodil yellow paint, and posters on the walls. Of incense, and warmth. A house where love resides.
“My name is Helena,” I say, as I close the chifforobe door. Over to the curtains, pulling them shut. No more streetlight. No more afternoon sun. Dark, and quiet, and clean. This will be the Home she always wanted. Free from the shackles of my need, as I am from hers.
How hard she must have worked, to love me.
I glance at the dresser. The marks in the wood, on the wall, worn smooth over years by her diminishing weight. Streaks of rust, or perhaps dried blood. Nylon threads cobwebbed in the furrows between floorboards. The bedroom door creaks as I pull it slowly shut. Turning the handle, the lock. Stained black, like the landing carpet. Like my hands.
I leave her behind. Like my mother did before me. This too is love, of a kind. This too is love.
