Your palm is the second to love me, first to touch. In the hallway of a Venezuelan
hospital, my mom is deep under blankets, shaking, sedated to survive the fever of another baby ripped out of her. Then, you’re sitting on a chair, or standing in your cowboy boots and jeans, leaning against an aged yellow wall, holding your fourth tiny thing. Baby.
Your palm is the last to touch my thigh, squeeze it confidently before I tense the muscle, signal the horse to move forward, on into the rink. Your cowboy boots are caked in mud like my leather ones, you watch her and I jump fast and you think you’re on the other side of the fence but the breath you are breathing is the one I am holding as we race forward, up, down, and then back to you. All trails lead back to you like you’ll never end so I gallop fast and I’m projected when in fact you do. End.
One moment we are in that mud together, you’re telling me I can jump higher, faster, in
greener pastures. And is it time moving or is it us moving through it? Do we move through
anything or did we just create things that stay still? Like the marble in our dining room or living room or kitchen depending on the house, depending on the good times or bad. I used to pull my chair out from under it, always the same one, creatures of habit, you and the person you made me, I. I sit at this table, place my cheek against its cold surface, cool reverberations of the mountain it once made. Now it does not move unless we move it. But it still records time somehow, bending slightly at the middle, stories carving themselves in the rivers of chipped stone that become deeper and deeper, weighed down by detail.
The marble is white and gray and holds our family together like a magnet: strength but
little permanence. The fever that almost took mom hums continuously right beneath the surface of her skin, like it won’t be forgotten that she had a life before all this. In a good times house–your palm still warm and endless–she cleans and sets a tall, cylindrical glass vase on that marble table. The table is on the veranda, and as she sets the vase down I imagine her watching you, dad, picking a new flower, white, burgeoning, wondering if you would pick her again if you could. The porch is screened in. In a whisper you prune your flowers, slice a stalk or two. Each dusk you turn and see the marble and the prepared vase, and women around it who see nothing but you.
A mountain won’t slice your skin: it’ll carve itself into your membrane like death, the
loudest silence ever heard.
It’s almost Spring. The pulsing slab is inside now–less good time house–and threading it are our familial stretch marks. My index follows one along–a first bad grade, pleas for more freedom, arbitrage of some strife or other before chocolate chip cookies and milk.
Time
Time
It passes however it does.
And then one night in place of cookies and milk we have and the words I’m dying
befalling its surface, rippling waves long dullened by perfection.
He is dying, the flower picker, the beating heart, the cowboy and his all knowing palms.
Not dying, no, as good as dead, he will be dead, he will be killed in fact, that is his wish, to be granted not by the smallest percentage of his lungs, but by a kind doctor whose papers will be placed on the table humming behind the couch of this smaller home, his last, no lawns to mow, no pool to salinate. And it seemed the bigger homes were needed for all our love but this smaller one does well, almost better. Less hiding places.
The mare and the mud are vestiges of time too, never to be had again those moments of honest love and shared Kit Kats. Socked feet make for a stupid soundtrack for the end of the trail.
Those he gave life to surround him in his favorite chair. Muted sounds of mauled animals searching for home, not finding it. Their bodies not shedding enough tears to forestall his last breath, the reckless cooling of his left palm between my own.
No more furrowed brows.
No laughter or open arms healing the hangovers of existing.
No getting to know him untrapped from borrowing his comfortable, worn in wings.
Someone will apologize for my loss across the marble top, a distended belly made of
what was once straight and hard. His empty chair between us. I will raise my forearms from the table, my cheek, too. No more cold against my skin. Sadly, I’ll think:
I have not lost him. I know exactly where he isn’t.
Sophy is a Québécoise writer based in Brooklyn, New York. Find her writing in Bending Genres, Deal Jam, 86 Logic, and The Creative Independent. Her play was featured at New York Theatre Festival's Summerfest in June. She is producing two plays and a short film, and loves trees.
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