Dearmom,
You text at one in the morning to tell me you have a fever and an achy chest. And that the other pain is still just as bad, thanks for asking. I open the message but don’t respond; I’m so tired of responding. You’ve been inside for months but leave it to you to manifest the virus. I open an app and scroll. If you pop back up, I will brush you off my screen. You’re on your phone too much, you know.
You’re like the boy who cried wolf, except you never lie. There has always been a wolf, though it’s looking more like a dog these days. Something to curse at, play fetch with, and curl up around at night. If I tried to shoo it outside, you’d let it back in. You’d leave food out for it in one of your handmade ceramic bowls.
Dearmom you are like a boy. You kick and scream, you pester and expect, you demand. You are sun-bitten and relentlessly, adorably immature. You belong to your body. You ask things of me I am not willing to give. We used to fit right into each other back when I was small and energetic, a honey-blond child with itchy feet and fingers. You must miss it more than I do.
Dearmom, your mom is dying, and you are hyper. You recount her ailments in the jumbled language of misconstrued medicine. You draw the embolism in her lung with your finger; you map out the strokes in her brain with your two fists. You stay fixed at the center of the action, breaking into peals of laughter, somehow. There is a center and it holds, because you’re holding it.
Your mom is dying, so I come home. This house didn’t always feel so small. Did it shrink when I left? The counters and sinks only reach my hips. The silverware is dainty and precise. The towels don’t quite wrap around my body. The TV is boxy and old, though I remember when it felt like such an upgrade. You’ve got no time or money for upgrades now, I understand, but there’s no room for me here. Even the closets are small—the doors look like portals to miniature worlds.
You break quarantine to come sit in the backyard with me. I ask you to keep your distance but know you won’t. You stretch out on a blanket and comment on the weather every other minute; you are sixty-five and the sun still manages to surprise you. You point at purple weeds in the grass and call them flowers. I correct you—I can never stop myself from correcting you—but you say they’re flowers if you say they are. Well, then.
Dearmom, I’ve always been more like your mom: stationary and undelighted, a born critic. She and I share the same aversions to restlessness and inaccuracy, two things you shamelessly embody. You shift and blunder so that we can be still and correct. Dearmom, when she dies, I may not be capable of performing my grief the way you’d have me perform it. I may not be able to point at weeds and call them flowers for you.
Do you remember when I was six and asked what would happen when we died? These questions come early when you raise a child without religion or summer camp. I asked if it would be like nothing and you said you hadn’t really thought about it. I think you were being honest.
Dearmom, yourmom is lonely. Do you think she’s been bored; do you think she expected more from us these last months? Dearmomyourmom is alone in a hospital and her birthday is in five days and we can’t see her or hold her hand.
Dearmom I envy your ridiculousness, your talent for making things what they so plainly are not, your ability to hold fast to a center that does not exist.
Dearmom, you haven’t seen the past four houses I’ve lived in, but nothing has changed in yours. I keep hoping a storm will come and sweep away all this clutter, all these dollhouse messes. I’m going to mail you socks and answer your midnight texts and make sure you are never bored. I’m going to let you be a weeping orphan instead of a mother, always a mother. I’m going to squeeze myself into your tiny home and tell you what you want to hear:
Fine, I see them now. Purple flowers.
A Philadelphia native, Kira K. Homsher is an MFA candidate at Virginia Tech, where she has edited The Minnesota Review and The New River. She currently serves as a reader for Carve Magazine. The winner of Phoebe Journal's 2020 nonfiction contest and a two-time finalist in CRAFT's flash fiction contests, her writing also appears or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Passages North, and Pithead Chapel, among others. She is working on her first short story collection. You can find her at kirahomsher.com.
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