—EVERYONE FALLS DOWN SOMETIME, YOU JUST GOTTA KNOW IT’LL ALL BE FINE

 

 

Mother Says

 

Mother skims my eyes, seeing poverty in them, seeing forfeiture maybe, or else some kind of awful addiction plopped down in the cornrow of my future. Next, she spits into her coffee cup=turned ashtray, the lit cigarette inside hissing, Chhhhitt.

 

Brother comes out naked but for goofy=huge basketball shorts, his muscles gleaming from sweat after a workout.

 

Mother’s eyes linger on his pecs. She smiles. Squints catlike. Says, “You look like your father before the rock got him.”

 

For a moment, we three share the same trailer air that smells like roots and scorched sassafras. For a moment, we three are waiting for the phone to ring, but Sis, wherever she is, always makes us wait.

 

“Gonna grab a shower,” Brother says, making his puckered nipples squiggle.

 

“You always miss the action,” Mother says.

 

“I am the action,” Brother says, and Mother laughs without sound. Takes a dead drag from her cigarette. Exhales a sour, radish burp.

 

“Quit your goddamn staring,” Mother says to me.

 

I find my shoe laces. Stretch one out long in my mind, then make a loop so it’s a noose.

 

“You’re going to end up just like him, a dead rat,” Mother says. Meaning Dad, Mother says. Mother says. She keeps flipping over the same tarot cards, the ones that mark me guilty.

 

The phone never rings, just sits there, clinging to the wood-paneled wall like an odd bone.

 

“She wasn’t calling for you anyway,” Mother says. Mother says. Mother says.

 

My eyelids itch. My eyeballs, too.

 

“Goddamn it, go ride your bike or something. Get hit by a car,” Mother says, so I stand and leave and decide to take her advice this time.