Immortality A person loses his innocence when he realizes he
doesn't have to forgive, M.R. I wander through life like my mother's first child born without a name, half a lung, and no liver. My sister's never spoken of. Why should anyone talk about that baby whose name was just chosen for the
headstone? My own history is there on that man-made beach on it's in that 72 Skylark heading down back roads, past near naked children playing hide-n-seek behind the frame of an old Ford pickup while chickens pecked at mud-crusted toes; it's here, on this porch, in these hands which are too rough to caress my wife with. I'm forty and still haven't seen the headstone my sister's name is carved on. I wonder if she was buried in a Sunday dress, something with ruffles on the
sleeves, around the neck, and matching socks with ruffles, and black shoes still smelling of the box they came in; or maybe nothing so sophisticated. Maybe she's in a pink sleeper with a zipper up the back and plastic on her feet. I wonder if my mother returned all the gifts given to her at
the shower, just as she gave her daughter back to silence. That must have been difficult: to ruffle through all those boxes of clothes and thin paper, the
Styrofoam peanuts and good luck cards, the rattle, the pacifier, the
hand built crib. Afterward, I’m sure she returned to the routines she swore off as a child, just to make it through the long days that spun out like buoys in a body of water. She’d get up, clean the apartment, go to work. I’ve read that the cells of each child stay in the mother’s body, distinct,
intact, share space in that holy darkness--my sister and I, named and unnamed, cautious of our liquid edges and still moving in, one small step at a time. Originally published in Karamu |
