Flushed
Mom sleeps in my sock drawer. I suppose if I were a better daughter, I would clean out the socks that don’t have matches or the ones with holes in them. At least the socks are clean, which is more than I can say about my old mother. She is a courteous inhabitant of my sock drawer, taking up only a six-by-four inch corner.
As I climb into bed, I stop to stare at the tattoo on my inner wrist–a semicolon. Mom’s voice disturbs my concentration.
“What a stupid idea. Why the would you waste your money on something like that, Julia? Something that never comes off. You’ll be old and wrinkled, and it’ll look like a piece of shit on your skin.” Here words echo through time, a memory from five years ago as fresh as the day I got the tattoo.
Yes, Mom, some spots never come off, like the stains you put on my life, imprinted on my soul.
“It’s a semicolon, not a period, symbolic that my life isn’t at an end. There’s still more to come,” I said the day I got inked.
She snorted–then later snorted some crack and drank a bottle of vodka. “Aw, how sweet. You just failed at killing yourself, just like you failed at everything else in life…high school, one job after another. How many boys have you fucked? Don’t tell me you’re a dyke now. Screwing girls is probably the only option you have left. If you haven’t gotten into the pants of every guy in Pepperville yet, I might just have a heart attack.”
“Please do, Mom…have a heart attack, that is. And I learned from the best. You wanna talk failure? How about your failure as a mother?”
Slap! Her hand made contact with my cheek. The sting didn’t hurt as much as the further confirmation of her betrayal to the only person she was supposed to love. I suppose she did love me, in her own messed up way.
I blink into the darkness now, willing the memory to die like my old mom. Ironically enough, it was a heart attack that did her in. With the chemical abuse she did to herself for years, to die of natural causes was a surprise. Of course, dowsing herself with booze and drugs likely contributed to her heart turning on her, but who knows? That her heart killed her, an organ she didn’t seem to possess in the figurative sense, well, that was more irony.
How sweet, as Mom liked to say.
“Shut up,” I mutter into the black.
A switch flipped off the light five minutes ago. Why can’t I flip off a switch in my mind to turn it off, too?
I glare at my dresser, what looks like a dark blob in the corner of my room. Next to the blob in the shadows, slightly darker than the rest of the room, a mass seems to detach itself from the dresser. I shake my head and lie down, closing my eyes. Every night since the funeral, it’s been like this. Two weeks, only two weeks, but it could be two years for the infernal haunting of Mom’s voice from that drawer.
Some people speak of feeling a presence climbing into bed with them when trying to sleep. It’s more than a cat or a dog jumping onto the bed, but something so human-like as it moves across the surface, settling next to the victim. I can feel Mom sidling up next to me in bed, pulling the covers over us and grinning at me with her yellow nicotine teeth and dull skin. Every time I close my eyes, her bloodshot eyes glare at me. She smiles at me like a Halloween decoration and asks me who I’m in bed with now. She blows out smoke into my face.
You, Mom? In bed with you? How twisted is that?
Not by choice, Mother.
I groan as I bolt up in bed, throwing the covers off. The humidity of summer sticks to my goose-bumped skin, and I wonder why the hell I was trying to stay warm only moments ago when it’s so hot. That’s right. Because I was shaking when I got into bed. Yes, downright freezing.
I throw on the light next to the bed and wince at the brightness. My dresser sits as it always does–unmoving. The air smells of stale cigarettes and alcohol-vomit. That’s ridiculous. I leave the bed and make way for the dresser like I’m about to attack. Grabbing the top drawer, I swing it open with such force that my socks spill out all over the floor. Mom’s wooden box clatters to the faux-wooden floor, unharmed.
I pick up the box and glower. “Just shut up, won’t you? I couldn’t afford to bury you, and no one else wanted to deal with you. God, why am I still putting up with you?”
The box of ashes clutched in my shuddering hands, I move to the closet. I yank clothes off their hangers in my haste to dig through the bottom of the closet for it–my safebox. I haul the heavy thing out of the closet, set it on the dresser, then plop Mom on top of it.
I flip on light after light as I make my way down the hall and into the living room, then finally the kitchen. Pulling open the junk drawer, I rifle through it until I find it–my box of keys.
I return to my room with the box and begin my search for the key to the safebox. Grumbling to myself for not throwing away old keys, I spend the next few minutes trying every key like a mad woman. When one clicks the safebox open, I laugh in triumph. I remove the important papers from the box. Nothing is more important than locking Mom away, imprisoning her. How funny that her ashes will be protected in the event of a fire.
Satisfied with my work, I leave the mess of keys and put the safebox back in the closet. I pull the door shut, but it gets caught on a dress half-hanging out. With a groan, I snatch the dress from the hanger, throw it down, and slam the door all the way shut.
I flick off the lights and return to bed. The dresser is a formless mass in the darkness once again, but the shadow beside it is gone. I toss and turn for the next hour and find myself staring at the closet. Does the door seem to be open a crack? Just enough for Mom to peek out?
