It was in the summer, the year before I left for college, that Mom painted our entire living room purple. I came home from school and there it was, her purple life. Mom, listening to Prince, her medium mom-jean-sized ass wiggling around.

“What is up with this?” I said, feeling the need for a tourniquet, pity for her bleeding out all over the place. What the fuck was wrong with her?

“What is going on here?” I said, sounding like Dad. Sometimes I could remember his voice, the way he’d say “what is going on?” as if there were some conspiracy brewing. And how Mom would laugh.

Mom had never cared for Prince before, but she had been dating, seeing someone who had a thing for 80s disco, someone she described as having a ‘furry chest and great taste in music.’ He had made her a music playlist, and the living room was filled with refracted light from a disco-ball lamp. Even her hair had a violet glow.

“Honey,” she said, “tell me the truth. Do you think you'll miss me much when you go off to college? On a scale of 1 - 10 how much do you think it will hurt?”

“You keep doing weird shit like this and it will be hard to miss you!” I spit, sounding even angrier than I felt, a lump caught in my larynx. There was always this feeling of pressure, to be there—to not be the next one to abandon her. I hated this feeling. To me, purple was the representation of this mess.  “This is so ugly!” I yelled at the walls.

Mom began to cry. As usual I had gone too far.

“Mom, I said, “I have to go now, I’m so sorry about this.”

***

And I was out the door, I was out of her house, I was not going to return. I was driving to Ron’s house and I would ask him to save my fucked up soul. I would ask him to hold my hand and fuck me and love me and make me some homemade chicken soup, because I was getting a cold again. I wondered why I was always getting sick. And always this same cold, it seemed, with Mom on low-simmer, an emotionally disabled mother, no longer able to notice these very basic things. For example, making her kid some very basic chicken soup.

Ron was so much older and wiser than me, and a good cook. He didn’t want me to go off to college either, I suspected, but he never said so. He was used to life not going his way, his wife had run off, and he was simple enough to find me interesting, I guess. I hid him from the kids at school. They didn’t know about my secret life.

“Don’t be so angry at her all the time,” he said. “You’ll regret it someday.” He stuck a thermometer in my mouth and covered me with a fleece. “I’m going to boil some chicken bones,” he said.

His house smelled like home. I imagined myself pregnant with Ron’s baby, taking the baby to my purple house, feeling like I would always be there for her now. Would it really be so bad? A job at Safeway, shacked up with Ron, not asking too much.  

Ma had asked too much of life—had wanted to have a husband and a family, had not planned on joining dating sites in middle age or tinting her hair or painting her living room. Nobody plans for these disasters, I told myself.

That night I had a dream about living in a purple house with my father. He was back from the dead. I’m the father of your colorful life, he said. And it was true. He always made the world more colorful, he made Ma laugh, he made me feel like a healthy child. In the dream we are sitting in the purple living room and smiling. We are holding hands. We are saying, we are not going to ever argue with this.

Meg Pokrass is the author of six flash fiction collections, an award-winning collection of prose poetry, two novellas-in-flash and a forthcoming collection of microfiction, Spinning to Mars recipient of the Blue Light Book Award in 2020. Her work has appeared in hundreds of literary magazines including Electric Literature, Washington Square Review, Waxwing, Smokelong Quarterly, McSweeney's has been anthologized in New Micro (W.W. Norton & Co., 2018), Flash Fiction International (W.W. Norton & Co., 2015) and The Best Small Fictions 2018 and 2019. She serves as Founding Co-Editor, along with Gary Fincke, of Best Microfiction. Find out more at megpokrass.com.