Photo by Randalyn Hill on Unsplash
All her hatless ogre babies dead in bed, Mother no mother no more Mrs. Ogre heads for the door, lights off to the forest of her room, inside a gingerbread house, hungry for children she calls to her. They fill the belly, babies, the Mother says, talking in mirrors, to mirrors, on the walls. You might as well eat them now. Get someone or another inside you. Keep to yourself. Swallow all you can candy can can. In a can. On the can. On the lam. Dancing the can-can.
People get mixed up.
Mothers vanish.
Orphans abound. How does it happen? In which to witch?
Like missing an exit.
Like a wrong turn.
Like that instead of this, kist instead of kiss.
Like now instead of then, swallows instead of wrens.
Like hats upon our heads, and all of her is dead.
But maybe if you slipped on in the middle of the night as in a story, the right hat, bonnet maybe, you could keep your head, and the heads like hands you wished still to hold, from being sliced off by the ogres.
But there are never enough magical boots for everyone.
Someone will be stuck with the wrong hat.
And especially in fairy tales, someone’s head will be rolling, is going to roll.
* * *
Mother sings, A tisket, a tasket. On the way I dropped it I dropped it I dropped it.
Mother says, Gingerbread houses. Candy hearts. Lick apart. Lickety split. Lickety stick em up on the roof top. Click click click. How many licks. Does it take. No Geppetto who art in gelato. Only wood children would be safe in these woods which will be mine now as too the children who trespass against them.
* * *
You’re in somebody’s pocket, Mother says to the daughter on the couch who says she’s hers, who used to be hers, but the mother says she isn’t.
I want you to leave, Mother says to Daughter sitting on the couch.
But I live here now. Remember. With you, the daughter says.
Mother moves closer toward Daughter on the couch who may have been once her daughter. Mother brings Mother’s head, her face, her mouth close to Daughter’s head, Daughter’s face. You’re an atheist, Mother whispers in Daughter’s ear.
* * *
Over and over, around and around the one-bedroom apartment, trying to get past Daughter who lives in the living room, sleeps on the couch, sometimes the floor, sometimes by the door, who is trying to block the front door and only real exit, in the night with her things as if she were going to work in the morning, but she doesn’t have that job anymore, according to Daughter, isn’t working anymore, dispatches no more mail, Mother paces and sings, A foundry is not a foundling which is a baby abandoned but found, but to founder is like drowning is to fall to the ground or sink to the bottom of a filled ocean or break down and trip and topple and go lame. Golem. Which means witch? I carrot remember. I carrot? I parrot.
You’re a foundling, Mother says to Daughter. Merengue is a dance, Mother says, on Dancing with the Stars. Meringue is the pie, like Auntie used to make, lemon meringue pie. And merengue is the dance, whirring Mother says, sometimes dancing, sometimes pacing.
* * *
Mother says, Is that a cat outside crying or a woman somewhere screaming?
Daughter says, I can’t tell. I didn’t hear what you heard.
You should go check, Mother says.
But Daughter doesn’t.
Daughter writes things down. It can be hard to remember later by the time they get to a hospital and go through the intake interview what happened and when.
Mother says, Are you making a list?
Daughter says, I’m just writing.
Mother says, No. You’re making a list. That’s your paranoia!
Keep a disability perspective, say the pamphlets from the times before, and Daughter writes, Keep a disability perspective, while Mother wanders through the little maze of the little upstairs apartment, trying to find a way out.
Did you hear all the guns going off? Mother asks the daughter, and tells a long story about the guns that the daughter does not understand.
Are the kids on TV? Mother asks. Do you know what I mean?
No, I’m sorry, Daughter says, I don’t know.
And Mother now is on the telephone carrying on a conversation, except there is no phone in her hands, according to Daughter, but Mother is giving directions now to someone invisible on a phone no one sees or believes but Mother.
* * *
Mother says to Daughter, I’m going to hell.
Forgetting what the pamphlets say about what is helpful and what is not, Daughter says, No, you are not.
Mother says, I’m going to hell.
Daughter says, No, you are not.
Mother says, I’m going to hell.
Daughter says, There’s no such thing.
Mother screams, There’s no such thing? Well, then you’re an atheist! I was right!
* * *
Mother from her room calls the daughter on her cell phone, from one cell in one room, to another in the other. Are you the one making all the plans? Mother asks.
Plans for what? Daughter says, but Mother doesn’t say. I’ll come to your room to talk, Daughter says to quiet Mother.
Making plans for what? Daughter asks Mother in Mother’s room.
Oh, I thought we were having a brainstorming session this afternoon on what to do about the television, Mother says.
Oh, Daughter says. It’s the middle of the night, Daughter says.
I don’t want to talk about it now. You can go, Mother tells Daughter who sees a glass of urine by Mother’s bed and all the bedding has been taken off again Mother’s bed.
Hello, my fear, Mother says as Daughter lingers there, stands at Mother’s door to go back to the other room, the living room. Not fear, dear. Goodbye, my dear, Mother says.
A moth flies in from a hole in the window screen. They come in that way, but never leave that way. And the lightbulb a sun only it isn’t pulls the moth to it.
I don’t know what happened, Mother says. I was in bed and then I was not. And from under the cat I pulled my blankets to hide, make a fort and go under, go in and buried alive, how you learn to hide and play go seek, Little Bo Peep, to market, to market to buy a fat pig. And now Mother according to Daughter is lost inside a sentence inside a room under a blanket, and Mother won’t come out.
Mother says, Why am I a ghost but they haunt me? Why am I the why I mean the way I am and not some other? Where especially did I go? Mother asks, but Daughter doesn’t know.
Winsome, lose some, Mother says.
My eyes don’t know where to look, Mother says, when everything is dark.
The light by the bed and the one overhead and the lamp near the door where Daughter stands are lighted.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell who the monsters are and where.
* * *
Bending Mother leans over maybe sleeping Daughter lying on the blow-up mattress by the front door. Someone’s implanted something in Mother’s leg, Mother says. What happened to me is just like what happened to characters on NCIS, Mother says, pointing to her calf, and frantic she is frantic and frightens Daughter by the door. Can’t you see it? Mother says, but Daughter says she can’t. Google it, if you don’t believe me, Mother shouts to Daughter on the floor. My limbs have been lengthened. My legs, not the trunk of me, what a car has, and elephants, what trees have. We climb them. Limbs and trunks. Swim in them. Go out on them. Pack them. I’m taffy now, Mother says.
* * *
Mother in the galley kitchen opens up every cabinet and every drawer.
What are you looking for? the daughter says.
Arms, the mother says.
* * *
In the deep deep woods, there was no camel with wrinkled knees. There were no lions, no bears, no talking dolls as in fairy tales. No Anns, no Andies.
And the mud after rain looks like chocolate milk.
Queen and King of Sleep, Daughter says to sedated Mother, come to me now. Sit upon my head for I am taller now and I shall carry you atop my head so that you may see if you wish the clouds and the rain washing down and I might float upon them, pillow boat clouds, with you if you wish for a little while. For rest. Anything for rest. Into the forest for rest.
* * *
Come now. Go now. Time to go.
The hour’s up.
The doors are closing.
The locks are locking.
People without shoes, only socks and slippers, get into their cots. In the observational rooms.
* * *
In the land of Nod, east of Eden, the land of the wanderers, City of Wandering, wondering, we were wondered. We wandered. We wore hats upon our heads. Beret today, Homberg tomorrow. Nobody was dead. We wore dormeuse, stovepipe, sugarloaf, and a vagabond: the sleeping cooking nourishing wandering hats.
That’s that.
This, this.
Equations in our heads, such as Once upon. Put upon time.
Someone wanders on a page, into a sentence, and one sentence goes one way. And another, and another, and another creeps into the places. Paces. Scuttles, scatters, scrapes, what is the matter.
Point of view gets muddled. Muddied.
Married.
Murdered.
Mothered.
* * *
Wipe your feet at the door, Mother says. Don’t lose your shoes. Boogie. Fever. Man.
Knock-knock. Tick-tock. Clock clocked. Rock rocked. Scissors paper covers rock a bye around the clock, around the clock top, around the bend it backwards and forward. Forewarned. Shorn. Snored. Snared. Thee well. Fare thee well. Love and war. Hell, and lo.
Ago, ago, agone. Night light, bright light. Alight upon. Befalling, befelling. Beheld. Be well. Swallows swallowing singing. Ding-dong dinging. Sing sing singing.
Happy endings.
Happy fendings.
How we go. Now we go. We’re goners.
* * *
Mothers vanishing, orphans abound up on once upon a time happens to us all.
Look at a photograph.
Dream her in your almost sleep.
Dreams of please don’t go alternate with dreams of matricide, crushed Ambien in the glass of milk, the wicked daughter thinks after Mother holds a knife to Daughter’s neck, as accumbent Daughter heretofore slept upon the couch. Mother naked from the waist down, in a pajama top, with a floppy hat upon her head, lipstick circles ringed round her cheeks, and a knife, big for slicing watermelons, in her hand, and the wicked no longer sleeping hatless daughter thinks, This is not my mother, thinking I no longer have a mother.
And soon she didn’t.
And you can before the poof goodbye that comes then goes without announcement, discussion, agreement, bring them regulation socks, and block the doors when they try to leave, and brush their hair and say, Here’s your lipstick, Mama, and keep their cat and birds when they cannot, and say, Come Back, and can point to the birds, say, See them there? You can sing the songs of goodnight. Lullabies. And goodnights. The finches sing. Even after dark. Confined, together, clean. In conclusion in collision in collusion.
But people look like trees from far away, and vines like limbs tangled in the lines of telephone wires, like arms with hands and fingers flayed and reaching in the falling night that falls instead of rain after the rain and then it’s dark beyond repair and no one after all is there.
Memory is not storage or a garage. Resolutions measured by pixels.
Everyone remembers everything all wrong.
Still the sky could be anything: a box of melting crayons, a milky spill without system or way or time and stain. And you could crawl through it if only you could get to it but there’s no such sky no matter how hard you try. Still Daughter misses gone Mother most of all.
Kristi’s fiction has been published in American Literary Review (which nominated her story “O Negative” for a Pushcart), Another Chicago Magazine, Pleiades, and Third Coast; and her essay “Native Witness, White ‘Translator'” was published in Violence, Silence, and Anger: Women’s Writing as Transgression (University of Virginia Press). A recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation fellowship, Kristi was born in Long Beach, California and can be found on Twitter @KristiDalven
