Carry Me

“I can’t sleep,” I whisper.

I am seven, standing at the foot of my parent's bed. My father is snoring, and the rain is pounding steadily onto concrete. I imagine the worms coming up for a swim somewhere in the grass.

“I can’t sleep,” I say again, but I only hear the bed squeaking as my mother shifts to her other side. I can’t tell her I’m scared. I can’t tell her my brothers shoved me in the linen closet when we were playing hide-and-seek and left me there. It’s dark in my parent’s room, and I know it’s silly, but I am frozen, too scared to get any closer. I feel for her feet through the covers and find her big toe.

“Mom,” I plea. “Wake up.”

I am outside the room now, looking in. Sunshine passes through the blinds, bending horizontal shadows across the floor and bed. My mother is Irish dancing in her closest mirror, smiling to herself and giggling as her feet move like fluttering canaries across the carpet. I watch her like I’m watching a secret being born, one eye’s vision obscured by the doorframe, the other peaking in like a spy. There is no music, but my mother tilts her head side to side, fast and rhythmic. It makes me laugh to see her as giddy as a child. She catches sight of me in the mirror and stops dancing. Her eyebrows furrow, her eyes narrow, and she marches towards me, screaming, “You’re not supposed to be here!” She slams the door, taking the sunshine with her.

I am older, a teenager now, and my nose is touching the door. Behind me, I hear crying coming from down the hall. When I turn towards it, I see a light at the end of it. Whose house is this? I wonder, following the hallway’s path, because it is my mother’s sobs I hear. At the end of the tunnel, there is a red, floral-patterned couch, and my mother is steamrolled flat across it. In the corner, there is a fireplace made of brick, covered in framed photographs from my childhood, but I don’t recognize the room. I didn’t grow up here.

“I can’t sleep, Mom, you’re being too loud,” I say, turning my head back to the couch, but she is not there. She is stepping out of the kitchen on the other side of the room, stumbling and limping, clutching a cane between steps. One of her hips is jutting out to one side, and she is wrinkled, fragile, and frail. When did she become like this?

“Mom!” I run to catch her before she falls, but when I get there, she is already on the floor. She is a child, a small girl, pulling her bloody knee into her chest.

I pull her petite body into my arms and rock her. “Mom, it’s OK, I’m sorry. You can be loud. I didn’t mean it.”

The little girl who is my mother stops crying and smiles up at me. “Carry me,” she says in her childish voice.

I nod, and as I stand to lift her up into my arms, she grows bigger and bigger. My arms try to spread wider and wider, but they feel like they are expanding past their limits. I can hear them snapping.

“Mom, wait! Stop!” I cry, but it is interrupted by a loud crunch.

I only know there is blood because my hands are wet with crimson. When I look down, there are bodiless antlers pierced through my ribcage, and my mother, she is standing in front of me, watching me smear the blood around my chest. I am trying to patch myself up, but there is a strong wind whistling through my wounds. When I glance at my mother for guidance, I see her lips are moving as if she is speaking, but there is no sound leaving them.

“Poor thing,” I say, and then I stand and press my thumb into the bridge of her nose between her eyes. Gunk gushes from her eyelids, and she snickers like it tickles. “That’s better,” I smile. She smiles back before skipping around me and down the hall where the sunlight no longer reaches.

When I try to follow her, I find myself sitting across from my mother at the dinner table. She burps and then swipes a cloth napkin across her thin-lined lips before leaping from her seat. I watch as she skips around the room, yelling, “Look, honey, I’m flying!” And then she does. She flies in circles around the room, and I watch her tornado dislodge every fixture on the wall. Glass shatters all around as our frozen memories disperse across the floor. I dip my green beans into the mashed potatoes, wishing she didn’t forget the gravy.

As the sky turns red, the locusts come. They find their way through small cracks in the walls, vents in the floors, and keyholes in the doors, and soon they are swirling all around us, devouring our still-warm food. They come quick and leave even quicker. In a flash, mother and I are face-to-face again, both of our plates now full of squirming white maggots. My mother stabs a fork into one, and as she slides them into her mouth, she looks right at me: “Try them. They’re delicious,” she hums.

I open my mouth to scream at her, to tell her not to eat those nasty things, but the words are a silent string being pulled from my throat. I can feel them scraping up my esophagus, letter by letter, and I watch as my lost words turn into pearls, twisting and curling around my mother’s wrist. She laughs as she stares at the forming bracelets. “They’re real, you know?”

I squeeze my hands around my neck, and the sound of forced air from my lungs takes us back to my mother’s bedroom. The rain is punishing the windows for keeping it outside, but my mother ignores its banter as she folds the knitted blanket I made for her. "You don't need this. October is always so warm," she says.

When she places it on the bed, she pats the top of it, and I notice the brown spots on her hand. She’s no longer young; she’s no longer dancing or flying. She doesn’t have horns anymore either, just wrinkled skin and a weakened smile.

“Next time, you teach me,” she says.

I stand at the foot of my mother’s bed. It’s empty, and I’m a grown woman now, but I crawl up it anyway. I curl up right in the middle, sliding my feet into the sheets, imagining my mother on one side, my snoring father on the other.

“I can’t sleep,” I say to no one.

And then I hear the rain tell me, “You already are.”