“Everything So Blue”
I am dreaming hard about heat. About fire. It's been fifteen years, the memory now brittle lace. My hand is splayed in birdcage fashion. Four pink fingers are latched onto the paint flecked copper heat vent at the head of my mattress. I am a witch at the stake. Someone has poured gasoline on me and set the match. The feeling is becoming unbearable. I am a lonely, quiet ten. I am about to spontaneously combust.
I wake up still drunk on the dream, a gauze stuck tongue reaching the corners of two latex pink lips. I can remember the way the grips on the bottom of my footies caught on each other each time I rubbed my feet together. I can remember the extreme silence. Except for the steady sigh of the furnace. It's as if everything in the house had ceased to be. Maybe it's because I would feel that way now, or maybe I really did, but I recall being acutely aware that something had shifted in the night, something had fallen away or broken through. I sat only minutes before sliding off of the bed, scared to make a sound. holding my breath, I bled to and invisible blur.
Her room was a sunny skies blue turned slate gray from dirty hands, from forheads searching for coolness, feet longing to break free. Everything was so bright and hot, everything so muted in the stillness of the air. My toes came to curl around the paper thin oriental rug, also blue, also sad. I must have melted into the arms of that day. In blue pajamas. Everything so blue. Her body, soft and fleshy as I remembered, face down, in a muscle defying twist. Her spindly fingers gripped the bedsheets – a last plea for help. I stopped here and just watched her, this broken ballerina.
This is the last time we would meet. I could not make the connection. Only could I think she had passed out again, as she usually did from the pills she blamed us for stealing, the coke she dusted from her nose, the vodka she hid under the bite of orange juice. I stayed methodically calm as I gathered water in a brown glazed vase to rouse her. I had afterall become her mother, yet somehow I had failed.
Her head was so heavy, so full of regret and nothingness. It took both of my hands, still stinging from the night, to lift it, and turn it so her eyes would meet my own. How easily it gave way. Butter. Bungee cords giving up on the stretch. Surrender. I cannot remember her expression anymore. Or what she looked like. But I do remember the blood. The crimson smoke tendrils, dried and dragonlike under her sharp, ghost white nose, from her nicotene stained mouth. Blood also, from her ears, so soft, so much like my own. I dropped her face from mine hastily. Like a bowling ball, so akward, lifeless, it bounced against the carpet, a last drum solo.
I wore her all around me. The crispy sound of hairsprayed curls. The perfume of her skin. I was fashioned from every part of her but could not think of her. I turned then, not thinking, just breathing, little moth hands fussing with the zipper against my chest, I walked the halls of the house. One by one I saw every room for what it was. Brown, old, and mine for what would perhaps be the last time.
*Kate White is a working writer near Detroit, Michigan who has a restaurant review column in the Troy Gazette newspaper, Troy, Michigan's local press.
