I discover last summer’s journal packed beneath swimsuits and cutoffs. I open to find my mother on every page. I dreamt about her on May 30th. I wrote her an ode on June 4th. An aubade on June 17th. Elegies on July 2nd, July 3rd, July 6th. I find thirty-two elegies. I cannot recall writing them.
On July 8th, I had a great time at Brian Sweeny’s barbeque but when his mother passed around sparklers, I was no longer his 32 year-old coworker. I devolved back into a newly-motherless 10 year old, sniffling at the neighborhood Fourth of July party. I cry when Mrs. Sweeny hands me the sparkler, claiming a flame popped onto my fist. She fusses over me in the kitchen, holding my hand under the tap, offering an anit-bacterial bandaid. She shows no suspicion over my invisible wound. I transfer from her son’s department a week later.
On July 19th I called my father. He finished remodelling the upstairs bathroom. He is flying to Chicago to visit his brother next week. He has stopped eating eggs and red meat. He is avoiding silence, the space where my mother waits, like an auctioneer. I bid on every factoid and ancetode. He talks until I’m flat broke.
I read and reread the journal until I’m convinced it belongs to someone else. On July 20th she wrote, “I see mom in my face, settling in the strained dark under my eyes.” Now, I go look in the mirror and see nothing.
On July 21st she lists every childhood memory she can scrape up. On the hottest day of summer she realizes her mother was only a year older than her when she died. By September 1st she’s lost all language. The final pages are filled with sketches of her and her mother and how her mother may have looked if she had aged.
The next year, the journal owner is back, trapped in the margins of her grief.
(Thank you for reading my first fiction post on Hive. Photo by Hannah Olinger on Unsplash)
Welcome to the In Well community. Thank you for posting this moving story here. You capture in vivid detail the pain of grief.
Have you read and commented on the work of at least two other writers this week? (See The Ink Well community rules on our home page.) This helps our community thrive, and also makes you eligible to be chosen for a spotlight in our weekly highlights magazine. Thank you!
Thank you! And yup, I've read and commented on some of the lovely work other's have shared.
This story is very good. The story arc is not traditional, because the narrator is lost in an endless loop of grief. The cliche is that 'it gets better with time'. In the case of this narrator, time is like salt in the wound. As the years pass, grief over a lost mother grows almost pathological, so that the narrator must separate herself from all that reminds her of the loss. That separation even includes an alienation from self.
Very well written. Very moving. I hope to see more stories from you in the future.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read and comment!
Greetings, @gemmy. You write from a very intimate, usually hidden space. You achieve with the enumeration of the days a faithful reflection of the pain that remains and from which there seems to be no way out for this alienated character.
You make a strong statement:
it seems that the mother has become so deep in her that you can no longer separate yourself from her.
From there the third person voice changes to that of a third person. It is a very interesting text
Thank you so much for reading. I appreciate your insightful comment!
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STOPThank you for joining us in The Ink Well, @gemmy. This is an exceptional flash fiction piece. I hope you will bring us more of your writing!
Thank you so much for your encouragement!