I Loved My Mom

September 12th

Sometimes I curl up in the bathtub just to feel closer to her. I scrub her down here, once every two days or so, all the humps and knobs of her spine where sickness has spread, gray skin flaying right off the bone. Without any teeth or muscle to speak, her wails are just baby cries, nothing but garbled vowels: Awh-ee, awh-ee, like a door on broken hinges. Sets my damn teeth on edge. She knows it, too. She always knew what her voice did to me. That’s why she screams, even now. Even like this. 

I don’t think anyone wants to be babied at the end of things — especially not her. But it’s our God-given life cycle, isn’t it? Shit and cry in someone else’s arms until you can handle it yourself, then do it over and over until you break. If you’re lucky, your thermal energy gets flushed down the entropic drain, churned into cosmic sewage, and someone holds you steady through it all. Or so I’ve heard. I stewed in my own wet diapers and cried myself to sleep, because my mom and all her mommies before her thought it made for thick skin.

I’m watching her now through the gap in the bathroom: those half-empty, unfulfilled eyes looking through me. Am I even here anymore? Is she? Her cells are clogging up death’s door, dividing to spread and devour, and the hinges are screaming — awh-ee, awh-ee — ready to burst. I want to kick the door down. I want to let all the walls rot until piss and shit bleeds through the ceiling and seeps into the floor. For once, I want everyone to smell what I smell, every stinking day of my life.

More than anything, though, I think I just want her to see me when she looks my way.

*

List for Jimmy. I’ll pay back the difference.

• Milk
• Rat bait (Whatever those pellets are. You know better than I do.)
• Cereal
• Oral swabs
• Yogurt
• Pudding
• Ant spray
• Trash bags

*

September 26th

No thoughts for many days now. She often takes my mind.

*

October 5th

Jimmy stopped by. Nice to see real people once in a while. I don’t even remember all that we talked about. The weather? The rat problem in the building? He might have to call an exterminator soon. You know the funny thing, though? He was joking, but his eyes were wide and his words were whispery, like kids who need you to check the closet for monsters before they can sleep. If I didn’t know any better, I’d have thought you liked the rats better than her.

She was groaning in the next room over, squeaking the old metal box spring until we had no choice but to cut the visit short. He promised to swing by next Friday with an update on the rat situation, all smiles, too many teeth.

*

October 19th

Tried to feed her chocolate pudding cups today, and she bit me. Awh-ee, she kept crying, nasty brown globs of gelatin smeared all over her lips. Awh-ee, awh-ee. I laughed at her because it felt strange — gummy and slimy, like slobbery wet kisses — but once I tossed the spoon in the sink, I laid in the tub and the world blurred into a catnap. Didn’t even bother to wash my hands. Just licked the pudding right off and called it dinner.

Those cries go right through me. I hear the syllables in my sleep. Awh-ee, meaningless noise so she can puff out her brittle-boned chest and make herself bigger than me again, one last time. Awh-ee, a call that knows it can’t be answered to, and thus commands, seizes, suffocates. There has always been a language barrier between us, but even her harsh Gaelic brogue feels gentle by comparison. Is this what love is? Just another fight? The only thing she still has left to hold over me, now that she can barely lift a finger where she used to make fists? 

Maybe I’m thinking too much about nothing. We’ve split nearly hundreds of pudding cups between us these past weeks; she’s probably just sick of chocolate, and I’m just sick of her. 

I suppose I am my mother’s daughter after all. Bu dual dha sin. Cruelty is my birthright.

*

October 23rd

Awh-ee, awh-ee, for days on end. Closed the door sometime after fifty, stopped counting somewhere in the three hundreds. The bathtub is my bed now. I’m dizzy all the time, but I like it more than I let on; when I drift in and out, it feels like somebody’s rocking me to sleep against their chest. I dream of driftwood boats and bobbing waves and holding my head underwater, screaming until my lungs burn out. 

*

October 24th

True to his word, Jimmy came back, groceries lining his arms. He was a day late, but when he dropped the bags on the kitchen floor, I saw the red rings around his skin where plastic cut too deep, and I shut my mouth. I don’t think he realizes how much I need him around. It’s not even the runs to the store, the heavy lifting, the appointments — it’s the way he breathes without gasping and shovels cereal in his mouth without wrestling me for the spoon. He nudges bills and papers aside, carves himself a casual seat without asking. He talks nonsense, but the good kind; he tells stories about his day in between bouts of silence. 

Once we finished having breakfast for dinner, he crowned the mountain of dirty dishes in the sink with his bowl, then peeked around the corner, like always. Earnest, even when he oversteps. She’s asleep, I reassured him. I wasn’t sure, but I was too fixated on the mess to care about her hearing anything. The back of my neck prickled with a kind of heat I hadn’t felt in months: shame, I realized. When I ran my fingers through my hair, they tangled in a mop of curls that had grown without my permission. I was so focused on patting down the knots that I could barely look him in the eye. I nodded and nodded as he spoke, and he smiled wide, far more teeth than usual.

He handed me a pamphlet from his back pocket. I didn’t even need to look down to know what it was for. This is a step in the right direction, he said. I know it’s hard, but it’ll be better for both of you.

I’m taking care of it, I tried not to yell, and the look on him sears me still — the way he reeled back instead of forward, wrinkling every muscle in his face as if he was disturbed. 

‘It?’ he asked.

Things, I corrected. Her. I’m taking care of her, Jimmy.

Alright, he backed off, if you’re sure, then closed the door on a bad silence that lingered in the space he left behind. I haven’t seen him since.

*

October 25th

Rat problem went from bad to worse. I’m handling it the best I can, but I don’t know. I never know. Sometimes I think she would. Maybe that’s just the part of me that wants a pant leg to cling to, the crook of an elbow to bury myself in. Life’s probably a hell of a lot better when someone else is around to wipe the snot from your nose.

*

October 28th

When I sit her up, my fingers run across her exposed ribs like the bars of an animal cage. When I steal the pillows out from underneath her, shuck the cases for a wash, I watch the machine cycle the whole way through, knowing how easy it would be. While other kids were climbing monkey bars, I was scaling chain link fences to get away; it’s nothing, hopping over to the other side where you don’t belong. I could lay in my neighbor’s lawn for hours, no better than a mutt, rolling around and sniffing dirt. Nobody else gets that smell besides me — not even Jimmy.

The smell of greener pastures.

*

October 29th

I hate her for dying so slowly, for putting us both through this endless swan song. She’d call me a coward for writing something I wouldn’t scream at the top of my lungs, if she could even string more than two syllables together. But guess what? She can’t. Why would she, anyway? The only day she’ll grant me peace is the day she forgets how to swallow pudding and chokes. 

She’s nothing now. Barely human. I try to face her, but she’s always turned over in bed, away from the lamplight. Whenever she cries, the bony shoulder blades under her skin seem to take flight, lifelessly grounded in her own misery. She's a baby bird, washed out of the rain gutters and onto the sidewalk, twitching in turns. Awh-ee, awh-ee. 

I sing with her.

*

October 30th

I miss my mom. 

*

October 31st

I shoved this book in her hands and flipped to a clean page. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of this before. I snatched a pen and stuck it so far I thought it went through bone marrow. Her grip was too loose, so I kept my fingers around hers and guided her, like she was learning how to write for the very first time. It was the closest I think we’d ever get to a hug.

What does it mean? I asked her.

She said nothing, so I held on tighter, got louder; that would’ve made her proud, once upon a time, but she only cried now. Awh-ee, awh-ee. 

TELL ME, I said. Can’t remember how. Loud. Everything was just so loud. TELL ME WHAT IT MEANS.

Tears blotted ink as we hunched over the book. We were two nasty sets of limbs pretending to be one, and I felt like a dog with a bird in its maw, feathers poking through my teeth. She was so much smaller when you held her. The letters veered this way and that. At one point, we carved into the page too hard; the paper broke, more ink bleeding through.

When we got to the last letter, I realized that her wrist was already rubbed raw. I ripped my hand away from hers and the pen rolled out. She was still crying. 

Awh-ee, she said. 

I looked down at big trembling letters, gouged into the book like a stick-and-poke, skin raised bruise-blue off the page.

SORRY.

*

November 1st

I mixed it into the pudding. Isn’t that terrible? She hates pudding. I couldn’t even be bothered to add it to the yogurt. I didn’t want to. When I put the spoon to her lips, she thrashed her head, and that was it — I jammed the whole cup down her throat. Then I opened the fridge too hard, more cups came tumbling out, and so I kept going. The bag’s near empty now. The pellets went down so easy, like little green pills.

I’m seeing her through this. It’s sick: she’s blue all over, shaking, whining. She won’t stop throwing up on herself. The rats keep scurrying under her bed, to and fro. They sound like the pellets that dropped everywhere, skittering across the floor, over my bare feet. It’s like they know what’s coming. Can they smell it the way I can? 

*

November 2nd

Jimmy: 

These pages will be long gone before you even see them, so let me write this now, because we both know I’m a coward, too walled up to say it to your face. You’re a good man. You try even when you shouldn’t, because you might be stuck down here with the rest of us, but you were raised by love, and so you want to carry everyone else back to the surface with you. But I’m not good like you, Jim. Most days, I’m not even a man — I’m a bad dog. Down is all I know.

All these years, I hated because I knew I was hated too, and that was our requital. When she gave me a mean shiner, I wore it with pride. Welts were kisses, Jimmy. You wouldn't understand, but that doesn’t make it any less true. We were up to our necks in sewage, she and I, but we were drowning in it together, and that was the only thing that mattered. Then she went and took that away.

SORRY, she said. To think that one word was all she needed to box my ears and turn the world to white noise. That awful sound, all along — it was sorry. She was sorry, and now I have nothing. The anger was the only thing keeping me, Jimmy. I realize that, now that it’s too late.

To hell with sorry. I’m not sorry. I loved my mom, and that’s why I killed her.