The Big Yellow House on Andrews replaced memories with ink-blot stains in the folds of my mind and scars that would do exactly as they intended- some things never leave.
We lost a lot in that house.
Baby pictures and journals my mother kept as a teenager that she let me read. I asked her once if she had done drugs while she was pregnant with me when I already knew the answer. For years I got to know my mother this way; by retracing her steps to a life I was never meant to be part of. I could taste the urgency in which she whispered excited confessions onto the lined pages in her loopy writing- mushrooms. A lot of them. For all the times I’ve watched my mother crumple inside of herself I’ve never seen her shame so exposed as when I asked her this. I felt powerful, like she was at my mercy. Like the roles had finally been reversed.
That house never smelled the same after the fire.
Commercial dryers and air filters left behind a medicinal odor, all chemicals and ash that would imprint inside your nostrils for days on end.
My mother suggests we drive to Fargo that afternoon. Quaker is looking for kids and teens for a commercial!
We contemplate it while we pack a bowl and light some incense. We snicker, imagining the obscenity of our faces on cardboard tubes of rolled oats.
Half of us were fat and the rest were teenage-gangle with tits we all knew how to use. All of us had box-dyed black hair complimented by various hues of colored roots, dark lips, and the sparkling white glitter we wore- pixie dust. An offering to the small town we lived in; atonement for our gothic sins. We tweeze our eyebrows too thin and wear band t-shirts like they’re our religion and I reckon they were. I set my head in one of their laps and cackle at the absurdity of her suggestion.
You want us to audition for an oatmeal commercial?
We get stoned; we don’t drive to Fargo. Instead, we pile in the van with her and head towards the grocery store.
It’s the first nice day of the year. It’s grilling weather. It’s April Fool’s Day.
We wait in the car while she shops, smoking cigarettes with the windows rolled down, collecting side-eyes from locals who shuffle their kids in the opposite direction. Not even the school secretary threatens us with a write-up for smoking as she walks by. It’s too beautiful out to be bothered.
My mom is running out of the store, frantic.
She’s shouting, but I can’t make out the words and when she abandons the shopping cart in the middle of the parking lot I am embarrassed by her. By such a display.
She’s screaming, What did you leave on?! What did you leave burning?!
It’s April Fool’s Day.
We’re driving too fast. It wasn’t a joke.
The window, my bedroom window, is breathing heavy sighs of fire in and out, in and out, in and out.
I watch the window heave and I’m taken by my own stillness.
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