My Dead Mom Was Born on Halloween

+ a reading of The Facts of Your Body (Hippocampus Magazine)

Most of what I’m sharing is from the food-adjacent memoir-in-essays/poems I’ve written, Butter Thighs, that I’m not currently querying but I will again when the time is right.

I will know.

---

It might be true what they say.

How time stops for a moment when you feel the air leave your lungs.

I’m standing at the edge of the campsite willing my phone to stay connected to service. I’ve officially been Shop Manager of the barbershop for four days and I am deeply committed to making myself available even if I’m on vacation. Even if we’re camping for my 25th birthday that is in two days.

I don’t recognize the number and this means I must answer it.

Your mother, an unfamiliar-to-me voice says on the other end.

She passed away.

My eyes are x-rays. I laser focus into one singular hole on the tree in front of me that the beatles tore through. I've decided that if I stare at it long enough I’ll expand the rot and the bark and the hole itself until I can discover the air that escaped me.

As if someone has shared that they might crochet that evening, or they are considering snowshoeing, I very steadily respond-

How?

He tells me he doesn’t want to talk about it right now.

And just like that, like someone hitting “rewind” on a VHS player, I find myself back inside the hole, the bark, and the rot. On the edge of the dirt-road that winds through the mountain pass I’ve been on too many times to count, in the sun heating my hair to the touch, in the dust that has collected in the webbing between my fingers when I spread them apart. I’m just a manager and my phone is ringing from an unknown number, and I am available, and my lungs empty like a deflated balloon, and I am no longer steady.

I am feral.

Just like his voice is unfamiliar to me, my own is a ghost, and the words that leave my mouth come out as snarls, each consonant containing sharp edges I do so wish would cut.

What the fuck do you mean you don’t feel like talking about it? She’s my mother.

What’s the saying? Hurt people, hurt people?

The only thing familiar is the sound of the line disconnecting. I’m on a cell phone so there is no audible “click”- just the sound of nothing, of air escaping.

I’m no longer upright. I collapse at the waist and I can very clearly see the same rot, bark, hole now upside down and between my legs and the screams that are born from the parts of me also unfamiliar, travel there. I imagine them expanding it all until the tree falls into itself and takes me with it. 

I’m no longer standing. The air that left and quickly returned to my body fills all the space in my head. The salt of the earth and the scent of my father’s shirt and Deet crawls around the inside of my mouth. I hear too-curious and elevated voices, too many of them, but I don’t hear words.

I hear whooshwhooshwhoosh, the air inside my skull mixed with my heartbeat. I don’t even hear my own voice, my own strangled, hysterical voice screaming she’s dead, over and over and over.

I feel like if I could just push the dirt away with my feet, maybe I’ll push so hard that the entire road finds itself pouring into the rot and bark and hole, like quicksand, like the sand pouring in an hourglass. Maybe it will also take me with it.

And then it’s silent. 

I am silent when someone hands me the handle of Fire Ball and walks away.

They always leave.

---

Your mother passed away.

You can unravel a life, a lifetime, an existence with four words.

There’s a universe I used to visit where the call is not a stranger telling me my mother has died and is instead a boy, still a stranger but less offensively so. He has sandy blonde hair and acne on his hairline. He’s just turned eighteen and discovered his father is my father. I have a brother: a life granted. I picture him hunched over his phone, pacing his bedroom inside his own mother’s house. I realize he looks like my son but my mother is still alive and I don’t have one.

In another universe it’s a social worker from the hospital I was born at. You see, there was an accident and somehow you were switched with another baby at birth shortly after you were whisked away for your first bath. Your mother wasn’t a teenage mom with enough grief to take you out to sea and the fact that I look like the only mother I have ever known is simply science and nature’s way of covering the truth of our careless sins. The stranger on the other end of the line says things like “estate” and “inheritance.” I can finally breathe. 

The universe I exist in is wild and relentless where everyone is tired and yet nobody sleeps. Where phrases like boot-strapping are a way of life and you are resilient not because you actually are but because you have to be or you won’t survive. Where dreams go to die. Where strangers unravel your knowing.

The Queen of Halloween

---

The day after she died I dreamt of her

There she is

plait squarely between her shoulders

a heavy snake 

curlicue at the end and she is all shimmers.

Her silver jewelry casts beams of light on the kitchen wall

and I walk the length of the sidewalk knowing she is watching me.

There you are

standing in the window

her smile- exalted mouth, playful canine

beckoning 

come in

come here

come to me

everyone is waiting.

A line forms just to hold you one last time and the rooms smells of

sadness

but you are not.

It’s good to see you

last in line

tiny rosebuds dance on white and hug your hips

honeysuckle and summer heat

thick

mixes with your perfume

all patchouli and warm skin from the sun.

Here you are

but you’re not

I turn around to press my palm to your cheek one last time

but you have already left. 

The next morning I rise and I search for you. I lift pot lids and tea towels. Are you in the sugar bowl? I peel the plastic back from the coffee tin. Is that you?

I leave the window open for you to return

but you never do.