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glorianaregali · 4 months

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I Have Her Face, I Know Her Soul is about a first born daughter coping with the death of her mother, and how that wound of rage and resentment festers and blossoms into something terrible.

TW! There is graphic scene of childbirth, and pregnancy is a theme throughout. There is a brief scene of attempted infanticide but no child is harmed. More abstractly, allusions to grief and the strange ways people cope with it. Tread carefully.

On certain days, when the heat made everything shimmery and untouchable, it was easy for Tina to fall into herself, to curl up at the edges and make herself so small that she was a child again. If she sat long enough on her back porch and stared emptily enough at the glittering lake and swaying trees, time turned to glass and shattered, falling away around her. She slipped between then and now in a way that made the hour, the day, anything outside of herself, irrelevant.

She was here in the present; curled up on the porch swing, drowning in the muggy humidity, but she was there too, sitting on the blistering concrete of the driveway, wielding her chalk and bobbing to her Walkman. All at once she could feel her leg flexing, rocking herself in the shade of her porch, and bouncing to the rolling guitar of an old rock song. The heat seemed to melt everything into a warped wash of shapes and colors that reworked themselves with each lazy blink until the rocking of the swing and humming of insects became something distant and unknown, a future untethered to the Tina scribbling in her driveway and nodding her head to the music humming in her ears, the clacking of the beads in her hair punctuating each beat.

The weight of them was still a hair too heavy for her head, fresh braids still stinging her scalp as she bobbed her head and shaped out an underwater oasis with her box of chalk. She took her time to draw out each scale of the orange fish and each vein of the lime green seaweed, meticulous and pragmatic in her creation. If one of the neighbors were to have walked by they’d kiss their teeth and say something about how she was definitely her daddy’s daughter.

“Smart as Ion’t know what.” They’d quip at the sight of a four year old knowing plants have veins and fish have scales. Even as a child, Tina hadn’t thought there was anything extraordinary about the things she did, the things she knew. She pulled leaves from trees and ripped them apart at the seams, and had split grass trimming in half until her fingers turned green. Momma made salmon last week and Tina had sat at the counter watching her arm work in quick strikes to strip off the sequin-looking scales from the fish before she powdered it and put it in the skillet. She saw things and remembered them, that’s all. And Tina didn’t want to be like her Daddy anyhow. Daddy was boring. A business man that carried a leather briefcase and wore starched pants. Kept his hair cropped and beard trimmed. Momma was much more interesting to look at, to be like.

And just the thought summoned her out of the house and Tina thought it must be some instinctual link between their hearts. She’d come out of Momma’s body, she was a part of her, of course she knew when Tina was thinking about her the same way Tina went to Momma just as she’d been about to call her. Mother and daughter, the same woman replicated. Tina hoped she’d be a duplicate of Momma. Not how Mommy was; Aunt Dahlia that lived in one of their spare rooms and raised her right alongside Momma and Daddy. Mommy and Momma had been born together, one coming out right after the other and growing up like two trees grown from the same seed.

Mommy was a seamstress. Worked as an apprentice at the tailor’s in town and made Tina clothes out of whatever spare fabric she could sneak from work. Mommy wasn’t interesting. Not like Momma. Momma was an artist. She painted and sketched, filled the house with mosaics made from broken bottles and vases cooked in the oven. Her art filled the house and overflowed through the town. It was on the outside of shops and photographed in the newspaper. She even had one of her paintings hung in the museum in the city. Momma was famous and she acted like it.

Her emergence from the house was preceded by the brim of her floppy sun hat and punctuated with the crack of the screen door. She came clopping down the driveway like a horse, all long legs and the slapping of her wedged sandals, a glass of lemonade poised in her fingers as she came up next to Tina in her cutoffs and tied up shirt. Daddy would’ve shouted about the screen door and her shorts if he was home, saying it was loud and she looked like she was running off to work a corner–whatever that meant–but Daddy wasn’t home and that’s why Tina had been in the driveway in the first place. Had Daddy been home so would his ugly green truck and the bed of it took up any play space Tina could’ve had because Momma had made her studio in the garage.

Tina didn’t mind the truck so much once Momma showed her why Daddy didn’t use the garage. What would a truck do with all that space? Momma made it better with her paints and pastels, shelves of records and her precious record player that Grandma gave her. So Tina never said a word about never being able to use her chalk on the driveway like the other neighborhood kids. The Michelles and Heathers that sat in their driveways all afternoon while all she could do was lay out in the grass and hope she found a ladybug or a worm to entertain her.

“Hey, baby bop,” Momma said once she had watched Tina color for a while. She put her ankles together and crouched down until her knees were at her chin, set her lemonade on the ground and picked up a piece of chalk. Tina had thought Momma was gonna help her draw some more fish or maybe a crab, but instead she’d brought the stick of chalk to her mouth and took a chunk out of the flat end with a loud crunch. Tina watched her chew, eyes feeling too wide for her tiny face and she must’ve looked funny because Momma had giggled, gap toothed smile smeared with Crayola blue.

As if she thought Tina had been perturbed by her lack of sharing, Momma offers Tina the chalk. And because she wanted nothing more than to be just like her Momma down to the strangest quirk, Tina’s little teeth found the grooves her Momma’s left in the chalk right along with a smear of her lipstick and she bit it too. It didn’t taste like much in her mouth, mealy and flavorless in a way that reminded her of cornstarch. It made her tongue feel like cotton as she chewed. She couldn’t pretend to enjoy herself and ended up trying to get rid of the taste by licking the back of her hand, leaving behind a smear of blue like a paint stroke. Momma laughed again and offered Tina her lemonade to wash away the taste.

“Doesn’t taste so good now, huh?” Momma asked, tongue blue through the space in her teeth. Tina scrunched up her little face like the lemonade was too sour, trying to remember when she’d ever eaten a piece of chalk. She’d licked some playdough once and chewed on a piece of bark after seeing those cowboys in Daddy’s westerns working their teeth over some tobacco, but chalk was something new to her tongue and she said as much. Momma poked her cheek, a wine red nail making a dimple in her brown skin.

“When I was pregnant with you I was eating anything and everything. You had me chewing on tailor’s chalk and sucking on rocks.” She laughed, settling on her butt with her head tilted towards the sky. The sun cut her face in half, golden lips and chin and dark nose and eyes beneath the shadow of her hat. Her red lips were smiling like it was a fond memory, eating those weird things, and it made Tina think pregnancy must be nice. To have a little person stewing inside your stomach and making you eat rocks. She got in closer to Momma, crawling into her crossed legs and tucking her head under her chin like a cat. Momma held her tight, squeezing her close. Tight enough that Tina imagined she was trying to put her back inside her belly.

“Did you ever get sick?” Tina asked.

“I got sick all the time,” Momma answered. Her laugh sounded humorless as her fingers gently played with the beads in Tina’s hair. “But I don’t think it was the chalk or whatever else. Sometimes you just get sick when you’re pregnant. They call it morning sickness but hell if it don’t happen all day.” Tina didn’t point out that Momma swore. Daddy didn’t like it when she did that. Said it made her sound dumb and low class and she already sounded funny enough talking how she did. Momma and Mommy were from the south, down where it was almost always warm and cows walked around like stray cats.

There was a thick twang to her voice when she talked, it sounded warm and smooth like syrup when she sang as she cleaned the house but Daddy still didn’t like her talking too southern. He’d make a fuss about her calling something the wrong thing; for saying “purdy” when she meant “pretty” or “crick” when she meant “creek.” It made Tina not like her Daddy too much and sometimes she wondered if there was even a lick of him inside her. But how could there be when Momma made her and birthed her and raised her?

And Tina was nothing if not a Momma’s girl so she kept on chewing her chalk even after Momma had gone back inside to start dinner. The whole box was gone by the time Daddy pulled around the corner and her teeth were stained pink and green as she ate dinner by Momma’s side.

It was a year later when she got to see pregnancy up close. Tina had seen pregnant women before. Mrs. Bishop from down the street had been pregnant not long before Momma was. Her stomach bloated like a beach ball was tucked under her dress, knocking into the handle of her shopping cart when they’d passed her in the grocery store. It didn’t look as fun as Momma made it sound when she was talking about chewing on sand and potting soil. And this time all she seemed to eat was sour foods. Lemons and limes, pickled anything and vinegar straight from the bottle. Mommy said it must’ve been a boy inside her wanting all those sour foods. Sour was for boys and spicy was for girls. Grandma said she had eaten hot peppers and shrimp smothered in chili powder everyday when she’d been pregnant with Mommy and Momma.

Tina tried to imagine it. Grandma young and round, fingertips red and tongue burning from the spice. It made Tina wonder if Momma had been joking about the baking powder and rocks. Mommy and Momma were spicy girls and Malcolm ended up being a sour boy, so why had she been the flavorless chalk and garden store sand? When Tina had finally gotten around to asking about it, Momma was in the kitchen with Malcolm on her hip and a spoon in her hand, stirring a boiling pot of noodles. Her brother didn’t seem all too happy to be so close to all the heat and steam and Momma was quick to hand him off as soon as Tina got close enough.

“What’s up, baby?” She asked, shaking some salt into the pot. Tina rearranged Malcolm on her hip, wiping away the sweat beading on his forehead while he fussed at her hand. Babies never seemed to know when someone was trying to help them. She briefly considered flicking him between the eyes to give him something to really fuss about, but then she’d get in trouble, so she settled for wiping her hand on her shorts and asking Momma the question that had been bothering her for almost two years.

“Why was I flavorless?” Tina asked, shifting Malcolm’s weight as he squirmed restlessly in her arms, tiny fingers reaching for one of her braids. Momma hummed like she didn’t hear her, too busy glancing through the window to see if Daddy and his ugly truck were rumbling down the street.

“Malcolm was sour. You and Mommy were spicy. Why didn’t I get a flavor?” Momma looked back at the pasta then put the spoon down. She stared into the steaming pot for a few moments longer until the hot air brought tears to her eyes and sweat to her brow. Momma dabbed away the moisture before turning to answer.

“I always thought it was because you were supposed to be twins.” Momma said, voice sounding thin and watery. “Boys are sour and girls are spicy, so I always thought wanting flavorless things meant I was having a boy and a girl and y’all were blocking each other out.” She went back to stirring the pasta once it started hissing as water bubbled over the edge.

“But I don’t know for sure. The doctors never said nothing about twins but sometimes it felt like there were supposed to be two of you. I even picked out two names. Y’all were gonna be Christina and Nathaniel. Tiana if I had two girls. Malcolm if I had two boys.” Malcolm gurgled at that, making little noises in Tina’s ear like he agreed with Momma. But Tina didn’t like that. She barely liked Malcolm. She didn’t like the thought of having to share Momma. She was her Momma’s first baby and Tina got it in her head that she was the only child Momma needed.

Sometimes she wished Mommy would move out and take Malcolm with her. But some deeper part of her knew that was a selfish thought. Selfish to think that she was the only one deserving of her Momma’s love when they both came from the same place. How could Malcolm really be less than Tina herself when Momma made them both? But even still, when Momma told her they’d be having another sibling soon Tina immediately wrote them off as irrelevant, too.

She was the oldest. She was the most important. Tina had something that the others would never have. She’d had time alone with Momma. Five whole years to herself. A small eternity in which the only person that seemed to matter to Momma was her. These new babies would only be important until they could take care of themselves. Once they didn’t need Momma to do everything for them she’d refocus, and Tina waited patiently for that day to come. The new baby was only a minor setback. A few more years added to her wait time, but Tina didn’t complain.

Momma’s new pregnancy had hit her hard. More vomiting up dinner and breakfast and lunch and anything else she tried to snack on. And she didn’t want chili peppers or vinegar, she wanted sugar by the fistful. Any time Tina had free was spent tending to Malcolm or running to the corner store to buy up their supplies of Skittles and gummy bears. Momma ate so much candy that in her fifth month she started complaining that her teeth felt loose. Every part of her body ached and ailed. Her teeth hurt, her legs hurt, even her eyes were sore.

Tina began her metamorphosis into her Momma long before she’d expected to. With Mommy and Daddy off at work most of the time it fell to her to take care of Malcolm when she wasn’t in school. He started clinging to her, too afraid to go near the bloated, sweating mess that was his mother. Not when her discomfort started to get the best of her and she was lashing out at anyone that came close to her without a peace offering of cookies or beignets.

Once Momma had sent Tina running in town with a handful of crumpled bills. She’d been heaving and sweating like an overworked horse by the time she reached the bakery doorstep just as the streetlights were flickering on. Her little hand had left a smear on the glass door when she pushed it open, but the owner had been charitable to her. Sitting through all her panting and wheezing as she tried to explain why she’d come tearing through their door five minutes to close begging for some beignets if they had any, anything soft and sweet would’ve done if they didn’t. The owner, a soft looking French woman with a thick accent, had told her to sit for a moment while she got the beignets and something for Tina to drink. She made her suck down two cups of water before sending her off with instructions to be careful walking back, but their neighborhood wasn’t a place that got scary at night, not like the city did.

She could hear the news anchors going on about murder and mayhem happening just a short drive away to where the buildings were all at least twenty stories high and you had to take a bus to get anywhere of importance. In comparison, the little suburbia Daddy had moved them into when Tina was still inside her Momma was hardly anywhere dangerous. The orange glow of the streetlights had been enough shelter for her as she walked from Main Street back to their house. But by the time Tina knocked and peeked her head into her parent’s room the pastries were only lukewarm and Momma had thrown a fit.

She tossed the bag at Tina and it burst against her little chest in a flurry of powdered sugar. It had been the first and only time Momma had ever gotten real mad at her and Tina had stood there sniffling and sweating, spots of white powder on her shirt as Momma yell at her for taking too long, and then louder when she offered to put the ones that had survived being tossed around during her fit in the microwave. She’d raged over those little pastries so hard that she winded herself and waved Tina away with a halfheart wheeze as she began the process of rolling over to get comfortable on her side.

Momma didn’t really leave bed after that night. She just sat propped up on her mountain of pillows eating and crying and fussing over nothing. Mostly her stomach that looked distended to the point of pain the closer she got to the end. Momma’s skin had always been lighter than Tina’s. Light enough to just make out the blue rivers of veins beneath the surface. They stood out like spiderwebs next to the ribbony texture of her stretch marks and the rough line of her scar where Malcolm had come out of. The only reason she left bed was whenever the baby settled up against her bladder and she had to shuffle to the bathroom or risk soiling the sheets. She hardly bathed and Daddy was starting to complain that she wouldn’t be as pretty once the baby was out of her.

He complained to Mommy in hushed tones while they were watching TV and Tina was supposed to be doing her chores. She’d stare out the dark window from up on her stool, elbow deep in sudsy water, and listen to Daddy talk bad about her Momma until she couldn’t stand it anymore and turned on the radio. He’d sit up on the couch and lament the fact that Momma would probably lose some teeth and her figure after baby number three. He didn’t like looking at Momma anymore, and hardly went into their room. Instead, when Tina would get out of bed to get a drink in the middle of the night she’d shuffle past the living room and find him sprawled across the couch with the TV still droning on. Even Mommy avoided Momma when she could help it, throwing herself into housework and child rearing in Momma’s place. Anything to keep away from the beast in the bedroom at the end of the hall.

And after everything was said and done, all that pain and suffering hadn’t amounted to anything. There was no catharsis. No great revival to punctuate the end of such a grueling pregnancy. When the time came, Michael ended up taking everything Momma had, like a proper parasite. Sucking her dry and coming out in his own time. He’d wanted out earlier than expected and had come bursting out of Momma, dragging half of her out with him.

No amount of time could scrub clean the image of her little brother tearing through her Momma as she sagged into the bloodied bedsheets, too tired, too weak to scream as Michael took souvenirs to remember his time spent inside her. Baby number three meant the whole process happened faster and Momma had been used to the phantom contractions. After all, Michael hadn’t been due for another month and all her babies had been born on the dot. But of course the youngest wasn’t about to be upstaged. Momma had spent most of the day rubbing her belly and complaining about those elusive cramps and Michael kicking at her ribs. She’d called Tina over to feel her little brother throwing a fit inside her belly.

She’d humored Momma, putting her little hand on the stretched skin of her stomach, waiting for that weird fluttering feeling of a hand or foot brushing underneath her palm. It had been a gentle nudge in the afternoon, nothing to raise alarm. But Momma had started shouting in the middle of the night, waking up the whole house. Malcolm was crying and Daddy was phoning the hospital while Mommy tried her best to see what happened. At first, Tina thought Momma had wet the bed again when she saw the damp spot spread out underneath her, but it was quickly followed by a few watery spots of blood.

Michael came early and with vigor and in the end Momma was dead by the time the red lights came flashing through the windows. Her body cracked open and spilled across the floral printed sheets. The men in the uniforms reminded Tina of her Daddy. Starched and impersonal as they took her Momma away and left the mess for her and Mommy to clean up. Malcolm hadn’t been there to see what happened. Mommy put on a movie and parked him on the couch when Momma’s shouting rattled the house awake and Tina put him back in his room before the paramedics could wheel Momma, zipped up in a body bag, downstairs. He didn’t ask about the blood on her clothes or tears in her eyes. No he was too preoccupied with what bedtime story Tina was going to read him and as she read him Goodnight Moon Tina wondered if the two year old would wake up in the morning and think Dahlia was gone and Momma was still around.

She mulled over the thought once Malcolm had started snoring, nose stuffed up from his allergies, and still as she washed what was left of her Momma down the drain. Her blood had gone cold and tacky where it smeared across Tina’s fingers. She scrubbed them methodically, like she was in the kitchen washing dishes. The meticulousness kept her mind off the thought that the beast that tore her Momma open. He would never know what Momma looked like in person. Never know the little differences between Dahlia and Delilah. Would never see how Momma’s gapped teeth were straight but Mommy’s were crooked. Never notice the little scar on Momma’s chin from where she’d fallen off her bike as a kid. He’d taken what he needed from her and abandoned the rest to rot.

His selfishness took everything. Tore the beating heart from the house. Everything had fallen into disarray when Momma had been confined to her bed and now it would never be shifted back to normal. Everyone had to pretend that nothing was wrong. Had to care for him like he wasn’t a little murderer. Tina wanted to leave him out for the wolves like they did in the fantasy books she read in the back of the library. Leave the unwanted baby in the woods to be dealt with by nature. She hadn’t been so vitriolic with Malcolm. At least with him there’d been the promise that Momma would refocus eventually. That the attention would shift back to her once Malcolm could look after himself. But Michael was quick to snatch that rug out from under her.

Coming out scream and shouting like he was the one bleeding out in his bed. It only took one time for Tina to be left alone with Michael after he got out of the NICU for Mommy to start keeping them away from each other, like Tina was a caged lion and he was an innocent gazelle. It would’ve been better if they were because lions didn’t have to answer for their crimes against weaker animals but Tina had to explain what she’d meant to do with Michael and the full bathtub. She’d said she wasn’t going to do anything when Mommy asked and she’d meant it. She was going to put Michael in the tub and then do nothing. A pseudo baptism that would send him straight to the pearly gates.

The thought had formed so clearly in her head. The claw foot tub and the squirming body of her infant brother. The way he’d try to wail even with no air to fill his lungs. She’d read somewhere that babies could survive underwater longer than adults and brought a book and her radio to pass the time as she waited for her brother to drown. There’d been no remorse, no doubt, as she’d knelt on the faded bath mat, holding the baby over the lukewarm water. He was lucky Mommy stopped her or she would’ve had her vengeance. But then she thought better of it in the time she was grounded.

The blood would’ve so plainly been on her hands and she couldn’t guarantee that Mommy and Daddy wouldn’t send her away. And drowning would’ve been so impersonal and come much too soon. She wanted her brother to feel it if she was going to kill him, to be able to know what it meant to be alive to feel the visceral fear that surely comes in the face of death. A baby doesn’t know it’s alive anymore than a tree does. So she waited. The distance Mommy put between the two of them had given her time to plan. Years to formulate how to repay the crimes he committed against her and her Momma.

Daddy didn’t want any sort of revenge. Truthfully, he didn’t want anything to do with Michael. For as much as he’d bemoaned what had become of his beautiful wife in the throes of pregnancy he still loved her, or so he said. It was hard to tell with men like Daddy. He had a pretty wife and beautiful babies but he never seemed to care for any of them all that much. Work was his true love and he seemed to only come home so he could miss it. The man left sometime early in Tina’s planning. It had come a few years after Momma’s death.

Tina was twelve and trauma tended to add a few years to your age. She understood what Daddy was saying and why he was saying it when the storm had finally come tearing through the Woods household. Momma was the glue keeping everything together. Mommy–Dahlia–tried but she’d always be a poor substitute. Even when Tina could hear Mommy and Daddy in Mommy’s room across the hall moaning and groaning like they were sobbing and laughing at the same time and that quick smacking like they were hitting each other in between the mourning and celebrating.

Mommy was spare parts. The second twin that came up beside her sister–behind her–always standing in Momma’s shadow. Because some nameless seamstress couldn’t hold a candle to a woman like Momma, to the gorgeous artist that did that mural in the park or had painted a portrait of the mayor when he came to visit from the city. Plain, unremarkable Dahlia was the one that should’ve died if Daddy had his say. He couldn’t love Mommy because as much as the wrapping paper was the same the present was different.

Daddy hadn’t chosen Mommy, he’d settled for her when his real prize was sealed into a box and put away in the ground. And his anger over her inferiority festered over the years. Anyone with eyes could see it. The nosy neighbors frowning and lamenting about Mommy’s poor treatment, Tina herself as she watched Momma’s ghost drift through the house trying to fill up her sister’s space, even the man that came to fix the TV that one time seemed to stiffen at the pressure Daddy brought into any room he entered. Those years had been calm before the storm and when it finally hit it was devastating.

His finger pointed at Tina first. A little over a decade old, just starting middle school and still a weird mishmash of the hands that raised her. There were pieces of Daddy still tucked inside her, his fingerprints stamped into the clay of her skin even as he said she shouldn’t have been born. She was a mistake in her father’s eyes, always had been. An accident that wasn’t dealt with in a discreet doctor’s office and a girl to add salt to the wound. She’d made him a married man, tied him down and straightened his laces. The way Daddy saw it, he wasn’t done living but Tina might as well have come out of her Momma with a gun in her hand to kill him herself.

When he started all his hollering she let herself get angry, let the flames of unattended anger, a deep loathing honed by years of neglect, well up to burn him. Her father stood there like an angry bull, sweat beaded at his hairline and spit dabbled in his beard as she tried her best to burn him to the ground.

“I didn’t ask to be born.” He knew that as well as she did. Though Tina would like to imagine her soul in some ethereal, incorporeal form, drifting through her Momma’s dreams and asking to be brought into the world as her child. Chalk and all. It hadn’t been her that killed Momma anyhow. No reason to yell at her when Michael was the one that turned Momma into pulp on his way out. Daddy is a raging storm but she’s an immovable shelter, foundations unshaken by his presence.

“Momma wanted me,” He needed to be reminded and Tina could almost hear Momma’s voice ringing through her own. I want it, that should be enough, Momma used to say when Daddy questioned her. She wanted it and she didn’t have to explain herself to nobody. Tina watched him catch fire, the anger rushing out of him as she turned the knife of Momma’s death that was still stabbed deep in his chest. They were all hurting. He had no right to make it out like Tina was the one at fault. If she had to suffer his wrath, he could suffer hers.

“Momma wanted me and she wanted you. Blame me all you want, but you could’ve left.” That was the child in her, still young, unaware of the unseen bonds that tie people together even when they’re far apart. Daddy would’ve never gotten over Momma. He needed her more than she needed him, and as Daddy stared at her from across the living room the look on his face, drawn in and haggard, said that he knew it too. Momma was a storm. A roll of thunder and a flash of lightning, bombastic and untouchable. He caught her and there was nothing in the world that was gonna make him let her go.

Even after her death he still held on. Held on to the sun-faded magazines that Momma never got to finish, pages missing parts from where she cut them up in preparation for a new collage. They cluttered the coffee table next to the sketch Momma had only half started. She was sewn into every stitch of the house and Daddy must’ve lost his mind seeing evidence of her presence for so many years and yet not being able to find her in anything besides a poor copy.

That night he emptied the house of any evidence he’d existed, packed his clothes and nicknacks into that ugly green truck, and drove off into the night. Tina had watched from the driveway as the rusted truck disappeared around the corner and when she went back in the house she let the screen door slam behind her.

He’d chosen to run from his grief, hide from it like it wasn’t something sewn into the very fabric of his soul. But Tina could never run. She couldn’t even leave that house. Not completely, not when, if she sniffed hard enough, she could still smell Momma’s perfume in her bedroom mixed with the salted iron tang of her blood. Dahlia hadn’t thrown out the sheets. Instead she’d dried them on the clothesline after the men in uniforms had cleared away the macabre mess Michael had made of her Momma. The bloodied floral sheets fluttered like a flag of surrender as the sun rose over the backyard. She’d taken them down after breakfast and folded them into an old hat box to be shoved to the back of the closet with the rest of Momma’s clothes and she and Daddy had flipped the mattress to hide the rest of the evidence like murderers cleaning the scene of a crime. Sometimes when the house was empty, Tina would do something forbidden. She’d sneak into her parents’ abandoned bedroom.

With the house empty and the room deserted there was no one to see her enter. Years ago she would’ve knocked or suffered a tongue lashing but the dead and disappeared don’t require privacy, so Tina simply waltzed in the same way she would her own room. The stale air still carried hints of her mother as she went through her abandoned clothes, tried them on and posed in the mirror like the models Momma sketched. Looking for her mother in her reflection. She was there. In the curl of her hair and length of her lashes, the shape of her nose and the pout of her lips. If Momma and Dahlia were twins, Tina was their triplet. Her body was still soft with youth, Momma’s clothes sagging off her developing body. Tina liked to think of that future when she’d be full and pretty like Momma had been, like Dahlia still was. She’d wear the same cutoff shorts and cropped t-shirts as Momma and the same tight dresses and high heels too. Those clothes weren’t so special but Momma’s oversized clothes that only got used when she was having a baby looked sacred as they hung on hangers and sat in drawers next to the empty space left by Daddy’s abandonment.

Tina only tried those on when she was feeling particularly far away from her Momma. She’d chew on her chalk and spoonfuls of cornstarch and rub her hand over her flat belly as if she expected something to poke her back like the Virgin Mary. Tina would twist and turn in front of the vanity cluttered with photos Momma took of herself and her two babies and imagine she was having a daughter that would look just like her, just like Momma. She’d repay the labor of Momma carrying her inside her. She’d suffer the morning sickness and bouts of anger and sadness, moan through the aching back and enjoy the strange cravings her little alien brought along. She’d remake her Momma and bring her back into the world as her own daughter.

Or so she thought until she dug a little too far back and found the forgotten hat box and saw the last of Momma’s life smeared across the blooming roses. She hadn’t forgotten. She’d been there holding Momma’s hand when Michael came bursting out of her. But it was easy to separate him from her and Malcolm. They’d been easy. Safe. Momma had been fine with babies until Michael came along and ruined everything. But that night was easy to repress once Tina stopped thinking about it. It became Momma is dead not this is how Momma died. She cared less about the cause and more the effect that lived in Michael, but seeing those bloody sheets brought it all back like she picked off a scab. That night Tina dreamt of being pregnant as she often did but instead of a baby looking just like the pictures in Grandma’s photo albums, she birthed a disgusting pale monstrosity, head long and eyeless just like an alien.

The nightmare had woken her with a start and the wetness between her legs made her pull her sleep shirt up her thighs like there was a monster waiting between her legs. Tina had been hoping that she’d been so scared she wet the bed. At twelve she shouldn’t be peeing herself but she knew how to do laundry and could easily hide the evidence. But instead of pee she found blood, dripping from the place babies come from. She watched the puddle between her legs get bigger, terrified to move and wake the beast that might be coiled inside her, cramping her stomach and tearing up her insides.

When the gnawing in her stomach finally waned she dared to creep into Dahlia’s room, asking what was happening to her as blood dripped in piddling ribbons down her legs. Dahlia told her how to get stains out of sheets and underwear with peroxide and explained what periods were in the first place. School had neglected to tell her but now she knew. It made children all the more appealing after knowing she’d have to suffer this inconvenience every month that she wasn’t filled with one, a sort of cosmic revenge from all the children she refused to take into her body. Each month gave her a painful reminder of the promise she’d made to her mother’s reincarnation. But Momma would have to wait. There were things Tina needed to do first.

Namely, deal with her murderer. Michael hadn’t done anything to offend since his violent arrival but Tina was inclined to believe that such first impressions shouldn’t be forgotten and some offenses can’t be forgiven. So she lived with her Momma’s murderer. Changing his diaper and feeding him once Dahlia decided Tina had gotten past that first hiccup with the bath, sitting across from him at dinner and walking him to the bus stop. She acted as any sister would, being nurturing when she felt so inclined and cruel when the sardonic haze of adolescence set in. Malcolm she still tried to treat nicely. He didn’t know it but they were a team. There was a binary divide in the house; the before and after, those who knew Momma and the one that didn’t.

Michael was ignorant to what he’d lost, unfettered by any feelings of remorse or wonder towards what could’ve been. He didn’t know a world where the Woods children weren’t raised by Dahlia, didn’t remember a world where their Daddy was around either. He was unmoored in the same way Tina couldn’t imagine. Floating out to sea, untethered to the shore. He called Dahlia “Auntie,” and doesn’t remember that Daddy had a beauty mark under his right eye the same as he does. Momma would’ve loved to kiss it, to leave a heart shaped stain of her lipstick high on his cheek the same way she did with Daddy’s.

Truly, everything about Michael was other and yet he acted as if they were all the same. As if there wasn’t an ocean’s breadth between him and his older siblings. Tina found it mildly amusing that Michael still went through the motions of pantomiming what a younger sibling should be. Tina remembers the time he’d fallen off his bike and skinned his arm. He’d come wailing up the sidewalk, bike abandoned where he’d fallen, crying for Tina to make it better. Strangely, Tina hadn’t taken any pleasure in his suffering. She didn’t feel the same acrid rush of anxiety that prickles like a thousand needles from her scalp to her feet, the constricting of her lungs and jumping of her heart that she did when Malcolm got hurt. In those moments she felt like Momma had possessed her, filling every corner of her body in a panic as she reached from wherever she was–waiting and watching–to take care of her baby.

With Michael it was the same empty diligence she felt when she did her chores. She wiped away the blood and dirt like scraping scraps into the trash, dabbed the stark pink patches of stripped skin with peroxide like bleach on a stain, and smoothed on the bandaids like making her bed. Michael hadn’t been able to tell the difference, hadn’t been able to see the emptiness behind her brown eyes when he asked her to kiss him better. And when she washed his blood off her hands once he’d gone back to play she’d felt no satisfaction.

It seemed like the universe was set on torturing her with glimpse of her brother’s suffering. As he grew he became more reckless, having no regard for the body Momma suffered to give him. He scraped up his skin and broke his bones, then went back for more. Dahlia said he was like Daddy but by the time she brought it up the man was only the wisp of a few memories in the back of her mind. She’d wiped clean any trace of him from herself, scrubbed away his influence until she was left nearly blank aside from Momma and Dahlia. She hated that the older she got the farther her Momma seemed. Her face started shifting in her memories, her voice morphing. Tina was slowly losing the only thing she held close to her heart and it made her angry and she liked it. Anger was familiar, she’d been angry for so many years. At Daddy for leaving, at Dahlia for never being enough and betraying Momma’s memory by pretending she was, at Malcolm for tainting the few years she had with her Momma, but especially at Michael.

Every new scar, every trip to the hospital made Tina bitter in a way that was palatable. But it seemed she was exceedingly good at hiding it by the way Michael seemed to gravitate towards her, always looking for his older sister’s approval. Malcolm wasn’t nearly as desperate for her attention and perhaps it’s because he knew that she held him in higher regard. She never told Malcom but she suspected he might hold a small fraction of the animosity that she did towards Michael. And he didn’t try to hide it. Michael had figured out sometime when he turned ten that Malcolm didn’t particularly like him. Perhaps he felt obligated to love him in that way estranged families tend to, but Tina knew that Michael annoyed Malcolm even back then. Perhaps it was just a part of being siblings but Tina couldn’t tell. When it came to Malcolm her feelings switched between maternal and tolerant and for Michael it was a dial that ranged from annoyance to blinding rage depending on her mood, but she tried to keep it bottled up. It wasn’t healthy but the alternative of letting go and moving forward in peace was wholly unappealing. Her grief was a bottomless maw, swallowing her whole and she’s fallen through the stages, never passing beyond anger or depression.

His presence was like a perpetual thorn in her side, a wound that refused to heal. It festered and throbbed and she started finding ways to stay away as long as possible. She loitered at school, milling around the library and circling the back fields until a teacher asked if she’d be interested in swimming. Truthfully she wasn’t. She swam in the creek that ran behind their street until she was too tall. Malcolm used to join her, little fingers bringing her turtles and frogs as she sat with her ankles in the water. Michael never liked the creek. Never liked deep water. She could imagine why. It made her like swimming. Knowing Michael cringed and clung to Dahlia every time they came to watch her compete. But really she liked the feeling of being in the water. In the summer when the water was warm, Tina could imagine this is what it had felt like being inside Momma. The weightlessness, the muted silence. She could hear her own heartbeat as she held her breath and shut her eyes. It soothed her, pouring water over the embers of her anger. But it could only last for as long as she was in the water. It always came back like a pyre lit beneath her feet, rising until she was consumed.

She couldn’t forgive and the gory scene of her mother broken and bloody in her bed was impossible to forget, so she held tight to her hatred, refusing to let go for even a moment. Tina held onto everything. Even when she left, first for college and then for good, she carried everything with her.

It somehow trapped and freed her all at once as she lived abiding by her singular desire to give the ghost of her Momma a new body to possess. Tina couldn’t see her clearly in her mind’s eye by then, the years gone by making Momma’s face a faded wash of abstract shapes pinned in place only by the broadest strokes; her gapped teeth, her long lashes. She knew Momma looked like Dahlia but those subtle differences slipped through her fingers. She couldn’t remember the exact shade of Momma’s brown skin or which side of her chin bore the childhood scar. Not without looking at her picture. She’d stolen many of them when she moved out. Most of the photo albums in that house were half full or only showed her and Malcolm as babies, then toddlers. Momma had been the one that liked photography, liked the art of it and the cataloging of her babies getting older.

Photos of Michael were few and far between. Dahlia wasn’t sentimental that way, especially not after being saddled with motherhood when she herself hadn’t birthed any of them. Tina imagined that being with Daddy, loving him, had made it easier before he left. But once he did, she slowly fell out of love with her niece and nephews, with life itself. Just like everyone else that raised her, Dahlia turned into a wraith haunting Tina’s memories. She forgot that her aunt was still alive, still tangible between the walls of her childhood home. Tina had fled long ago, looking for her Momma everywhere she went. She studied and graduated, did all the things she was meant to do in between, but never forgot her Momma. She was like a dark figure looming in her periphery. Waiting and wanting, scorning Tina for taking so long. So she settled.

The way Momma talked, Tina knew she adored her boring father and he’d loved her Momma in his own way. But Tina wasn’t about to wait around to fall in love. She didn’t need to be in love to make a baby, and surely didn’t need whoever she chose to stick around. Her Daddy had decided to stay, then, when he grew weary, he decided to leave. Tina didn’t want her baby, her Delilah, going through that. She had long since decided that whoever she chose would either be there until the end or not at all. And in her junior year of college she’d finally decided on a man she figured she could spend the rest of her life with. He wasn’t strikingly handsome or eclectically interesting in the way mousy men are in movies, but he was a person she could talk to for hours without a thread of annoyance lacing through her thoughts.

Tina spent most of her life pretending, playing at being what everyone expected her to be. A caring older sister, a doting mix between a niece and daughter. The teachers expected her to swim, so she swam. Dahlia expected her to use her good grades to make something of herself, so she went to college. A confectious institution that taught her that cooking wasn’t love, it was science. A careful balance of ingredients. Tina didn’t much care for the superficiality of it. In those big chrome and marble kitchens there was no one next to her to peel her oranges and hold the spoon while she tasted. It was a lonely, bitter kind of career despite the cloying veneer of sugar that clung to the roof of her mouth at the end of every day. It wasn’t until she met Nate that she realized life could just exist in its softer, less focused form.

She wasn’t madly in love but that was for the better. Love was what made Michael and she didn’t want to damn herself to that fate, not when her whole life has been dedicated to righting that wrong. His name helped, too. For the first few months of companionship Tina thought he was a Nathan. She hadn’t met any Nathaniels in her life. He was the first and she supposed that was the sign she’d been waiting her whole life for, the bloody red string of fate she’d been following. It faded to a less vivid shade when it appeared in her hands. One, then two pink stripes declaring her body occupied. The shape of her stomach hadn’t flinched, skin still pulled taut against her muscles, but Tina knew that would change soon as Delilah took shape inside her. The red string was nearing its end, but the line that inevitably led back to Michael.

He’d gone and hurt himself something fierce this time, got so broke up he needed a wheelchair and the house Daddy left with Dahlia wasn’t equipped to handle any of that. All the bedrooms were on the second floor, as was the full bathroom. The only accommodation Dahlia could offer was a plywood slab over the steep steps and a futon squished underneath the window of the living room. So of course her aunt called Tina to cajole her into taking Michael off her hands.

“You’ve got your big house now, and he needs the space. Let him stay with you, Tee, please. There ain’t nothing for him here no more.” Her aunt had said. As if there’d ever been something for him. She’d sounded drained and distraught, each word steeped in exhaustion. Tina said she’d think about it and asked Nate what she should do.

“You want him here?” He knew very little about her family and what small knowledge he had was given with an air of loveless detachment.

“No.” Tina had decided since the moment Michael was born that she didn’t want him here. Not in her house, not on this earth, nowhere in existence, heaven or hell. But the more she thought about it, letting the thought of passing him in the hall and eating dinner at the same table again festered in her head, the more she decided she did want him here.

The coals of her rage had begun to simmer down in the years separated from him. She truly hadn’t been home since graduating high school. Even for holidays and summer breaks there was nothing for her to go back to. A husk of a house standing like a tomb in the middle of the street. All that was left in that house were ghosts and the reaper that killed them. Malcolm had escaped that purgatory a few years after her and it left Dahlia trapped with her sister’s murderer and now, Tina was sure, her aunt wanted him gone. And the fruits of her labors were ripening just in time, Momma quickening inside her as she mulled over the thought of taking in the stray. Because Michael was never truly part of the family, more like a back alley mutt that followed someone home. Tina wondered if he’d bite because Tina sure did. His death was a mercy. Like taking him out back with the shotgun. It wouldn’t be in cold blood, either. No, Tina’s blood was so hot it was nearly evaporating from her veins with how livid his mere existence made her. This was just, this was righteous.

When Michael arrived at her doorstep, ferried from the airport by Nate, Tina was struck with how absolutely foreign her little brother looked. She hadn’t seen him in the flesh since she was on the cusp of her twenties and desperate to flee the crypt her childhood home had become. He’d still been a child, eleven or maybe twelve and only coming up to her ribs, but he was grown now and Tina was struck by all the years she’d wasted letting him get so big. She couldn’t gauge his exact height with him in his wheelchair but Tina imagined he stood a full head above her.

“Thanks for letting me stay with y’all. I think Auntie’s had enough of me.” He smiled and it made his face look more alien. If Tina looked like Momma and Malcolm looked a bit like Daddy, Michael looked like neither. His face was unknown to her, genes from some ancestors she didn’t know cropping up in his face in ways they hadn’t when he was younger. Aside from Daddy’s beauty mark there was nothing familiar. After they exchanged an awkward, stooped over hug, she’d taken several steps away and motioned towards the guest room down the hall from the living room. Tina felt Momma stir in the pit of her stomach as she watched him wheel towards the room, that burning sensation curling in her gut as if to disown this man that clearly wasn’t her son.

How could he be? Tina thought to herself. How could anyone like him belong to her Momma? It’s why Tina loathed him so much. There wasn’t a single drop of her Momma in him. There was more Dahlia than anyone else and even that was wrong. It was the warped, imperfect version of Momma as best as Dahlia could mimic and Tina figured her aunt had simply gotten tired of pretending. She’d grown up pretending, acting and following after Momma, and Tina couldn’t blame her for finally tiring of it. She deserved a rest and Michael deserved his reckoning after the charade everyone had been living through since he’d come screaming into the world. She’d be done with it soon.

It had taken her all of six minutes to decide that she couldn’t go on with him living. Everything was slipping into place. She had Nathaniel and her baby–her Delilah–and Michael was just there dirtying the water with the blood on his hands. He ate Nate’s handmade pasta and asked what made pink sauce pink. To his credit, Nate had the patience to deal with Michael. He hadn’t been worn down by years steeped in resentment. But it had come back to her. One of the dining room chairs was pushed against the wall to make space for Michael’s wheelchair. He took up the space next to Tina like he always had, elbow knocking against hers as the left-handed boy ate his pasta and pink sauce.

She listened with feigned interest as he recounted the years she’d missed, oohing and ahhing like she cared about his first girlfriend or his SAT scores, about the scholarship that had to get postponed on account of his back injury. He’d just graduated and Dahlia was likely looking forward to sending him off to whatever university he’d gotten accepted to only for those plans to spoil because Michael couldn’t be careful to save his life. When he’d finally started yawning over the cheesecake Tina made and went trailing off to his room, she had let her mask slip away. Nate, knowing her better than anyone else, was smart enough to keep quiet until Tina had been ready to talk and he kept his questions blunt. He was curious and Tina couldn’t begrudge him that.

“Why is he here?” He’d finally asked into the stillness of their bedroom. She’d shifted onto her side to face him and found him already looking at her in the darkness. His dark brown eyes looked like endless voids in the absence of light. He looked vacant and empty, a shell next to the vessel of her own body, and looking back that’s probably why she’d told him the truth. In that moment he hadn’t looked like he could get angry at her or be shocked and appalled by what she wanted to do. He looked ready to receive whatever she gave, to be filled with her same anger until he was so full of it that it seeped out of the dark pools of his eyes.

“He killed my Momma,” she whispered, as if speaking the truth of her death too loud would upset the spirit still lingering inside her. “I can’t ever forgive him for that.”

Nate had blinked a few times, taking his time to mull over what she said. For a moment she considered the terrible place she’d put him in. Here she was sunk deep in this dark pit that had consumed her life since the day Momma died, and she was holding her hand out, begging him to join her. She tried to control her face as he watched her watching him. A twitch of her brow or twinge of her lip and he’d have known that in that moment she’d been terrified. Here was the only person she dared let close and she was given him the choice to push her away. After a few paralyzing moments of silence he finally spoke.

“You want to kill him?” He didn’t yell. It wasn’t an accusation. Just a simple question as if she’d told him something mundane.

“Just him.” She said it like it was something reassuring. Tina wasn’t a violent woman, didn’t want the world to burn and people to hurt. But Michael had hurt people. Momma, Daddy, her, Malcolm, Dahlia. He’d done more hurting than Tina planned to do to him and in the cocoon of their duvet Tina had silently begged Nate to understand. He’d found her hand under the covers and brought it up to his lips, pressing a soft kiss to the ring he’d put on her finger. It was the only answer he’d offered her but it had been enough. The kiss told her he understood and he wouldn’t abandon her no matter what she planned to do. In that brief instant they were Christina and Nathaniel just like Momma said. His hands trailed across her body like he was mapping out her skin for the first time having finally stripped away the facade she shrouded herself in. She let him. All at once overwhelmed and comforted by his acceptance, his love. When they’d finished, skin sticky with sweat and room feeling too stuffy, Tina dared to think she could love him someday.

In the weeks after that first night, as the end of spring turned to a sweltering summer, Tina did her best to look unassuming in the eyes of her brother. Not scared or demure–she wasn’t some trembling waif sent skittering at the sight of a tightening jaw or flexing hand–but innocent in a way that wouldn’t give Michael any misgivings. She was his sister, his oldest sibling. The faint discoloration of the childhood scar on his arm was a testament to that. She’d been the one to patch him up when he was hurt. Why would she have gone through the trouble of mending something she wanted to be broken beyond repair? And to her credit, Michael acclimated quickly. It should’ve comforted her to see him so at ease as he went through the slow stages of healing. To know that she was the spider and he the hapless fly tangled in her perfect web.

And when her time came, she struck.

“I thought you would’ve been gone by now.” She said when she found Michael in the living room. It was his birthday, the anniversary of Momma’s death, and he was up and moving around on his own again. “I figured you’d be out celebrating.”

“Not much to do.” He shrugged like today wasn’t important. Another year living in the body he tore out of Momma’s and he couldn’t find it in himself to look the least bit grateful. He looked at ease bathed in the bluish light of the TV, sunlight softened to a faint glow behind the drawn curtains. It was dark and they were both wearing black. Tina tilted her head, tasting hot iron in her mouth as she bit her tongue against saying anything she shouldn’t. She swallowed down the words and asked why he hadn’t found something to do on his special day.

“I still don’t know anyone out here.” Still, like he was planning on staying for a while. “I wouldn’t have anyone to go out with. I’ll just hang out with you instead.” He smiled like he couldn’t think of anything he’d rather be doing.

Tina shifted on her feet, pretending to think about it. In truth, she’d hoped he’d be here. Nate had purposefully been giving him things to do around the house. Dusting away spiderwebs that were too high for them to reach, building that new bookshelf for Tina’s office, and pulling weeds in the garden. Menial tasks that would take up the day and keep him from leaving even if he wanted to. Michael hadn’t seemed to notice. He’d smiled and sipped the lemonade Tina brought him between odd jobs, saying he was glad to help. And she’d smiled back and told him she was glad to have him.

“Wanna make a cake?” She asked like the thought had just occurred to her. Michael was on his feet so quick that she almost forgot he’d been in a wheelchair some odd months ago. There was something frustratingly resilient about Michael. He’d get hurt and go back for more. It was almost unsettling how easily he bounced back up after an injury, like a perennial shaking off the frost of winter every spring.

“Sure, but you’re gonna have to show me how.” His excitement reminded her of how close they’d been as children. By proximity rather than emotion. Her a star and him a planet, perpetually caught in her gravity. Tina remembered how he’d run to her from the bus stop, tearing down the street like someone was after him. He’d crash into her and she always hated that. His gangly body would hit her like a sack of potatoes, knocking the wind out of her. He’d rest his chin on her stomach and smile up at her like she hung each star in the sky and she hated it. It was how she imagined she’d looked at Momma and he’d taken that light out of her eyes. But he’d just grin and ask if Tina could help him make a paper airplane like he’d seen at school. And she would.

Michael got to the kitchen before her, taking up space with his wide shoulders and big smile. Tina could tell it would be a pain cooking with him in her way, just the same as it was when they were younger. Michael was always underfoot, whining and straining to see the counter so he could catch a glimpse at what Tina was doing. Like a dog whining for boiling water just because there was a pot on the stove. He was still just as overzealous, crowding Tina against the counters and in the fridge like a shadow trying to smother her as she gathered the eggs and vanilla. She hadn’t been sure of what type of cake to make until Michael proved to be too much of a nuisance breathing down her neck.

She was used to working alone and he didn’t make for the best assistant. Though he seemed happy enough to get sent out back to pick some berries from the garden. He came back in with a bucketful of strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, and yew berries. Tina had nearly forgotten them among the edible things she grew. Red berries that looked frosted like sea glass. They’re ornamental, grown because she has memories of visiting her grandma and seeing thick bushes of them growing in her front yard. A commemorative sort of ornamental plant seeing as they’re too toxic for consumption. But Michael didn’t seem to know that, and why would he? It wasn’t his garden.

Tina kept on with her baking. Sifting and measuring, whipping the cream and piping out dollops of meringue. She sends Michael to wash the berries in water and white vinegar, busying herself with a phone call to a vendor to feign preoccupation as she lays down the layers of cake, mixing berries into the whipped cream. The sun had set by the time she let Michael dust on some powdered sugar, hiding the berries beneath a downy layer of white. He was eager to taste but Tina made him wait, smiling wide enough to hurt her cheeks as she rustled up a candle and lighter. Eighteen years had culminated in this moment and she made her own wish as he blew out the candle. She caught sight of herself in the reflection of the knife and she sees Momma staring back at her as she cuts Michael a slice of cake. When he asked if she wanted a piece Tina gave him a plausible excuse.

“It’s too sweet,” she said, jutting out her bottom lip like she was upset she couldn’t have any, running a hand over her pronounced baby bump. Michael had heard her say that enough since he moved in. Her Delilah was true to form; a spicy girl. Ironic considering Tina’s profession, but she was glad for it. Michael had been sweet and isn’t that what started this whole disaster that they were still healing from so many years later? She was happy to numb her tongue on the spiciest fried chicken and too much chili powder, food so spicy the taste of it devolved to something undefined, just hot. It settled her cravings in a way no piece of cake could. Even if she’d been the one to make it. Michael didn’t seem offended, if anything he looked happier to know he’d have the cake to himself. Chewing through one slice and then another before he declared he’d save the rest for later. Tina put it in a glass dish as if it were a display. And here is the weapon with which I killed my brother. The spongy confection that avenged my mother.

Tina wasn’t so sure about what happened once you ate yew berries but she knew death was soon to follow. Big and gluttonous as he was, Michael had eaten more than she expected. Tina had it in her mind that she might have to coerce him into eating a bit more, just to be sure his fate was sealed, but he’d gone and done it all on his own. The method of his death wasn’t something Tina had given any deep thought to. In her dreams it was horrid and bloody, like what he’d done to Momma. All viscera and inneards. But instead it was something soft and sweet, working through his body gentle as snowfall. Tina almost wished she hadn’t waited. An accident would’ve been easier to frame when he wasn’t up and able bodied, but the opportunity presenting itself on his birthday was almost like an ordained miracle.

“I’m going out on the lake.” Tina said once she finished straightening up the kitchen. Their little neighborhood had a lake sitting in the basin sloping down from their backyard and it was still hot enough that the breeze off the water wouldn’t give her too much of a chill. Still she grabbed a faded afghan off the back of the couch as she slipped towards the back porch. Michael looked a bit hazy, eyes glassy and rimmed red like he was about to start crying. Tina wrapped herself in the crochet blanket, dipping her nose into the yarn to hide a budding smile. He looked sick, chest heaving a bit too heavy for the few steps he’d staggered towards her.

“Can I come too?” She recognized that thin, watery tone. It was the same way he used to come stumbling into her room, muted light of the hall tracing out the shape of his little silhouette as he trembled in his nightshirt and asked to sleep in Tina’s bed. He wanted comfort and while Tina had meant to leave him to wallow in his death alone, she decided she’d like to watch him break down and dissipate, watch the light bleed out of his eyes.

“Come on,” she said, trying to sound annoyed to hide her excitement. Everything had fallen so easily into place today. As if this was what was always meant to happen. Fate was a thread and they were all just tangled in it. Tina went slow down the grassy incline, hand on the small of her back as she listened to Michael lumbering close behind. He was sniffling by then, almost keeled over and Tina asked if he was alright. He nodded, offered an uncertain smile, and said he might take one of his pills when they got back to the house.

The little rowboat was waiting for them on the gravely shore, tied up to a rusted hook so it wouldn’t drift off come high tide. Filled with random bits and bobs. A box of sparklers, a rust speckled bucket, a tool box filled with Nate’s lures and tackle. They dragged it out until they were knee deep in the warm water. One hand on Tina’s back, one hand on Michael’s stomach as they pulled. He climbed in the boat first, arms stiff and face pinched as he rowed them out to the middle of the lake. This far from the heart of the city, the sky was a deep shade of blue and dotted with pearlescent stars. It went dark for a moment as they passed beneath the bridge merging the two shores, the old wood creaking overhead. It made Michael shiver and Tina tried to contain her delight as he squirmed in his seat, rocking the boat in the otherwise still water. Even after so long he was still afraid of the water. How scared he must’ve been to be left alone that he braved the water to stay close to her.

She fished in her pocket for the lighter she’d used on for the birthday candle, scooping up the damp box of sparklers to see if any would light. Two went to waste before she got one to burst to life and she handed it to Michael and said, “Birthday boy first.” His hand was fisted in his shirt as he curled in on himself, hunched around the crackling light like it was his only tether to the world.

“I don’t feel good,” he sputtered between gasping breaths before lurching to the edge of the boat. The sparkler leapt from his hand, flame hissing and dying as it met the water. Michael was so far over the edge that he nearly kissed the water as he lost his stomach in the water. A motley spew of berries and cream settled in a film over the rippling water, smelling like briny sugar and tart as he shakily sat up, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand like a child.

“You ate too much,” Tina cooed, patting his shoulder and letting her fingers stray towards his throat, feeling the erratic beat of his heart. It’s been almost an hour since he ate the berries and Tina decides he’ll probably only need an hour more to expire. She let her own sparkler burn down to her fingers, sparks glancing off her skin before she dipped it in the brackish water and tossed it to the floor of the little boat. Tina briefly considered giving Michael a nudge as he hung his head low over the edge of the boat, knocking him into the water to flail and flounder until he sank but thought better of it. How curious to find him poisoned and drowned, as if she were trying to hide the evidence. Instead she took up the oars and rowed them back to the pebbled shore, wrapping her blanket over his trembling shoulders as she led him back up to the house. It’s another small miracle that he’d taken up residence on the ground floor so there’s no need to lug him up the stairs.

Instead Tina deposited him on his bed with instructions to take a bath to help with his fever. She texted Nate that Michael was sick and she was worried and her husband answered with just as much concern despite them both knowing Tina didn’t care if Michael lived or died. Soon she’d call an ambulance and hope it took them just long enough that there wouldn’t be anything they could do. She remembers the red lights, the sirens screaming after the deed was already done. A banshee that came too late to the tragedy. They were late for Momma and Tina hoped they’d be too late for Michael. She went to check on him balancing trays of ice and medicine in her arms. Tina messaged Nate that she gave Michael medicine and waited eagerly for him to spit it up, water staining pink minutes later as Michael wretched up her offering of assistance. She gave him some water and took her time hovering over the green button before calling the ambulance.

“Michael, you have to calm down.” She said it knowing he wasn’t listening. His panic was making her sick in a way that was usually reserved for when Malcolm caught a stomach bug. She was diligent about caring for him, could feel Momma guiding her hand as she dabbed away his sweat and spoon fed him medicine. Watching Michael cough more than he spoke, dry heaving into the bath water, pooled like acid in her stomach. Made her mouth taste sour and her hands go clammy. Her stomach twisted painfully, like she might be sick herself as she wiped his face. Tina couldn’t tell if his eyes were wet from water, sweat, or tears, but there was fear in them. Suddenly he wasn’t built to break. Michael’s body was betraying him by refusing to mend just this once and Tina couldn’t do anything to stop it. She’d had her chance and this is what she chose. Too late to fix it now. Michael looked more like a child than he had in years. That same baby she held squirming and screaming over the bathtub full of water.

“It hurts.” He whimpered, lip trembling and nose snotting. It was more than Momma had gotten to say and she held onto that scrap of anger. She remembered the silence. That first shattering scream followed by piddling whimpers until Momma went quiet. She comforted him the same as she’d done for Momma, in a haze of confusion. Held his hand as they waited for help to come. It did, eventually, but not in enough time. By the time Tina heard the sirens shrieking through the quiet night, Michael was gone. His last moments were spent trying to force the air to stay in his lungs, coughing and clawing as the breath seeped from his chest. In the end, he hadn’t even had the time to close his eyes. They stared up at the fluorescence overhead, pupils wide and unfocused as his tears began to dry.

Tina kissed his cheek when the people in uniforms came to take him, right on Daddy’s beauty mark. They tried to comfort her, asking questions about what had happened as his sodden body was zipped into a bag. She’d been here before. Even as something strange stabbed in her stomach, she dealt with them. Tina answered all their questions, told them the last thing he ate so the nice paramedic lady could take a slice of her cake for the lab. They poured out of the house as quickly as they came, leaving Tina alone in her victory.

She expected to feel some great triumph at this great weight being lifted but, truly, she felt like an empty vase. Like something was meant to be inside, but it wasn’t anymore. Nate found her standing in the living room where the paramedics left her, blindly staring at whatever Michael had been watching. She wasn’t crying but she wasn’t smiling either. It was like she’d dried up, leaving a hollow husk behind. When Nate asked if she was okay she meant to say yes, but instead all that welled up in her throat was a sob. Loud and wailing, so strong it knocked her to her knees.

The pain in her stomach got worse. Like something moved, pulling and tearing until she fell to her elbows and screamed. It felt like some gnawing beast was trying to break free of her. A cramping pain seized her and she clamped her hands over her mouth to silence her wailing. Nate startled to her side and laid her flat on her back.

Tina felt strange and untethered like every strand of her soul had been snipped and she was floating in some place of emptiness. This wasn’t what was supposed to happen. She’d expected some sort of bodily elation at Michael’s death. She’d righted the wrong, exchanged his soul for Momma’s and yet the air had gone silent. She couldn’t hear Momma’s voice around her anymore, couldn’t feel her stirring inside her belly. The only thing she felt was a deep, clawing pain and she wondered if somehow she’d done wrong. In killing Michael had Tina smothered the last piece of her Momma with her own hands?

Pinpricks of heat tore through the chill of the air conditioning as she clawed at her stomach, trying to pull out whatever was biting at her from the inside. It felt feral and angry. A monster was trying to chew its way out of the prison of her body, and suddenly she didn’t want the feeling to leave. Hadn’t this been the same pain that brought Michael into the world? Tina curled around herself, pulling her knees to her chest to keep the feeling from escaping. Bile rose in her throat, burning behind her nose as she tried to cling to the shreds of her Momma leaking out of her body. She wasn’t supposed to go. Momma wasn’t supposed to leave. She wasn’t ever supposed to leave.

The silence got louder. Momma was missing and Tina wondered if she’d ever find her again.

Tina had begun to flail the same as Michael had in those last moments, clawing ribbons of skin from his throat as he tried to breathe. Her heels dug into the floor as her legs kicked against the couch, bruising herself as she waited for the deep pain to pass. Nate sat with her, holding her hand as she struggled through the feeling of being torn open and emptied. Tina tried to hear Momma’s voice but the only sounds were her own. The raw, stricken wails for her Momma to come back. Tina had done what she promised she would. She’d killed Michael. Killed the killer. But snuffing a fire doesn’t bring back what was burned. Momma was gone. Even if she’d been lingering before, she was gone now. Completely and utterly.

Tina warred through the night, fighting against the inevitable stillness. Soon the sun blushed through the curtains, birds chirping to greet it, and Tina felt something leave her as she laid there in the pink light. It felt wrong, small and undefined in a way her Momma hadn’t ever been. But maybe that was all that was left of her now. So many memories were warped and lost through the years and all Tina had left was this unknowable nothingness in the shape of her Momma. Tina had carried her Momma with her for so long that she started to chip and fade, leaving only a small fragment behind. And whatever had left would never come back. Momma was gone. Michael was gone.

When she finally sat up, Tina felt weak as a sapling tree, like the slightest breeze could bend her. The doubt was an acidic coil in her chest, weaving tight around her until she couldn’t bear to stand on her shaking legs. She breathed hard as tears clouded her vision. It was grief, she recognized. The same horrible feeling she’d felt when Momma died. That night had filled her with a burning rage that refused to leave. Now it leaked from her in a tepid flow. There’d be no rebirth, no reunion. Her and Momma had been like two ships passing in the night. Elusive and distanced, a memory more than anything. The string between their hearts, the threads twining their souls, snapped at last. And it felt like breaking. Splintering then shattering like the empty vase she was.

Tina felt untethered, less whole, without her anger to guide her. Everything was too quiet without Momma. She’d grown so used to those phantom stirrings and gentle whispers inside her that she knew it must’ve been her Momma’s voice. It was gone now and being without it made her feel weightless. Like she was in that warm water again, floating weightlessly on warm waves. It hardly felt soothing. If anything, letting go felt strange.

She hadn’t been ready to let go but she could feel it all slipping between her fingers the harder she tried to grasp at the last shreds of what could’ve been. Perhaps she would’ve never been ready to let go. Michael could’ve lived his whole life keeping the flame lit inside her. But she’d snuffed him out and spurned herself in turn.

Tina didn’t feel the peace she’d expected. She felt frantic, like something was missing and she’d never find it again. She’d have to find something to fill the space or live around the emptiness. She had to let go. There was nothing left to hold on to. She’d dig her nails into her palms trying to hold on to the nothingness. Slowly, she forced the shriveled remains of herself to unfold, releasing the grasping tension. It felt like unwinding a knot wrought in iron, but slowly she unraveled. It took days, weeks, it might take the rest of her life. But by the time the taste of metallic wrath and acidic grief was more subdued on her tongue, she started having peculiar cravings for something sour. Of lemon meringue pie drizzled with vinegar, and pickles dipped in dark chocolate. And when Tina touched her belly, heavy with child and rumbling with cravings, she imagined a baby boy inside her. An abstract face that shifted between recognizable and unknowable, with a little mole under his right eye.

#short story #writerblr #writers on tumblr #black authors #my writing #mine! ★

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