The Last Cup

(I am honestly not sure if this does contain mature content or not, but I figured it’s better to be safe than sorry. This short story is centered around someone grappling with losing their mother and childhood home, reflecting on the realistic and complicated relationship between mother/child and dealing with grief. A reference to the Devil is used as a personification of grief, which highlights the narrators complicated relationship with loss.)

I am steeped in thought.

Slumped over on the kitchen counter, my fingers drumming the marble in a jumbled rhythm. The house is quiet, dark, and vacant. The fumbling of my fingertips echo through every room, having no furniture to catch the vibrations. The rhythm speaks to the storm in my mind, the snow beating down my windows, the thunder shaking my floors. Distantly, the kettle whistles. Minutes go by before it breaks my concentration. I pour myself a cup, my hands quivering and threatening. 

When I take a drink, and I feel the warmth hit my stomach, I am reminded. 

Of the nights we spent, ignoring the call of rest, just to have more time together. 

Just to speak to another person who understands, because neither of us would ever find that again.

To converse, as mother and child, about things I swore I’d never tell her,

and things she swore she’d never speak aloud. 

She’d brew a big pot of whatever flowers were her favorite then,

and time would become ours. 

Sipping, seeking, rolling up our sentiments, and lighting both ends. 

Inhaling the penitent nostalgia by turn.

Sometimes, she asks me what I do with it all. I tell her I swallow it, like we do most nights. 

Like when I’m sick, and she gives me warm milk and honey. 

I tell her I carry it, like an acrobat, walking the tightrope for all to see.

I tell her that it doesn’t hurt, that my feet are used to the cuts. 

The only things I don’t tell her are how difficult things have been. 

I don’t tell her how the drink she brews for us, night after night, has become stale. 

How I can taste the suffering. The resentment. 

I don’t tell her that I can see her bleeding into the pot,

when she has no sugar left to give. 

I don’t tell her how much it hurts to watch. 

I am beginning to wonder how I could love somebody I know so little. 

I wonder if it’s primal, if what I feel can be compared to the way infant animals still want their mothers, even after they’ve been stomped on. Even after they’ve been left behind.

I think about the baby monkey experiment, how the babies only wanted the soft mothers, 

even if they couldn’t survive with them. 

I wonder if my mother was the wire skeleton, or the soft one. I think she does, too. 

The tea is cold, but I drink it anyway. 

I think maybe this is how it was meant to be. Tonight, again, I will not sleep. 

I will spend one more night in my home, and in the morning, my mother will be buried. 

I will sit in the pews, and five years later, I will still be there. 

I will wonder if the sadness will ever change, and it won’t. 

The next day, I will go back to work, and I will curse the birds that sing that day. 

Every night, I will dream of her, and of the devil. He will sit upon the foot of my bed and beckon me for tea. And, like a desperate fool, I will follow him. I will sit across the table, and we will find common ground. He sobs his sympathies and, with the bread we broke together, I dry his tears. 

One night, I will ask the devil what he does with it all. 

He tells me that grief bubbles up and pools in your stomach like loose blood. He says that he vomits it up, like a sickness. Like a fucking infection. 

Retching and gagging, knelt over the sky as if slouched in prayer. 

And then, when he takes his leave, I will attempt to heave the pain away, 

and when I can’t get anything out but a few soured drops,

 I will scream, and scream, and scream.

The pot is empty, but the sun is nowhere near. 

I put another kettle on, soaking in my last few uses of my childhood kitchen. 

The house was my mother’s, and I cannot keep it. After the funeral, I will live with my sister, very far away. I won’t pretend the circumstances are purely financial. 

The air in this place is tainted, the wood warped with memories of a childhood usurped.

I cannot remember being innocent, or even alive here. 

Her ghost seems to wait around every corner, only hoping to see me, to not be forgotten.

The regrets and failed hopes seem to have stained the walls worse than the cigarettes. 

I cannot be here anymore. I have to grow sometime. 

The kettle whistles, and I remember my father doing the same. I think of how sometimes, when I was a kid, I would carry him on my back. How I would feel so proud that my frail body could do such a thing. How I feel now as if the weight imprinted on my shoulders, how my knees still quiver and I do still feel pride, destructively, but it is still there.

He is already gone, but if he weren’t, I know that he wouldn’t understand. He would say that all children’s spines are meant to break one day. 

The sun is coming up. I am watching the rays begin to hit the kitchen cabinets, both dreadfully and hopefully. I can almost hear the memories I leave behind today, voices floating down the halls and footsteps that follow like a signature of everything lost. Every scuff and scratch on the floors has a meaning, and will soon be sanded and painted over. Only faded outlines of children’s inscriptions left behind. I will be okay. The pot is empty, and I have boiled the whole supply. Sighing, I swirl the last bit of tea in my cup, and the leaves seem to mock me when I beg for answers. I let the last few drops escape down my throat, choking slightly on the clumped sugar. 

The tea is cold, but I drink it anyway.