—IS THERE ANYTHING LEFT, MAYBE STEAK AND EGGS?

 

 

Growing Older; A Memory

 

 

You sometimes forget that your mom is a woman. It’s nothing at all misogynistic, but you’re 14 and your mom is just your mom.

And so, it’s more than jolting when you come home early from school with a migraine and find her bedroom door cracked, the screen on her wall filled with the image of entangled naked limbs, moans coming forth in an unsteady and syncopated rhythm.

Through the slit in the open doorway, you spy her bare ankle and up to her mid-thigh, the sheet below compressing and contracting as if its alive and somehow playing a part in all that’s going on.

Minutes later, in your room, you sit down on the edge of the bed and shake your head and shake your head and shake your head. And shake your head again. Right now, you’d very much like for it to snap off, doddle on the floor like a moldy Halloween pumpkin. 

You’d also like to be someone else’s son, with a set of normal parents who love each other, or at least don’t hate each other, but there’s no way that’s happening, and what’s actually happening is your vision is blurry and a drill bit is stealthily boring through your skull as the migraine furthers its meticulous work.

Your father left two years ago today. He’d said how much he loved you, yet you didn’t even hear him say goodbye.

The world in your room at the moment seems both enormous and cloistered, just another paradox that your teenage brain wrestles with.

A half hour later, you find you’ve vomited on yourself and the bedspread—ribbons of orange-yellow foam. 

Through the closed door, your mother asks when you got home, that she didn’t hear you come in.

You say you’ll be out to eat dinner in a few, though you have no idea how you’ll be able to swallow a thing, how you’ll be able to face the woman across from you.