Mother?
fiction by Blake Kinnett
My mother, dead now for two and half years, unfolds herself from my open dresser drawer and stands at the foot of my bed. I almost sleep through her resurrection, but the sound of her heels clicking against the hardwood floor shakes me awake. When she came to wake me as a child, I’d always heard her coming, looked forward to the gentle hand pressing against my shoulder. See, that’s how I know that the woman standing in front of me is only a vision. My apartment’s carpeted.
“Reilly.” Although I see her lips moving, my mother’s voice sounds distant, as though she’s speaking to me from inside a tunnel. Death has made her coarser, as if she’s finally found the words she’s been meaning to say all along. “Get your ass up out of this bed and get to feeding my chickens. I didn’t raise no lazy daughter.” I can’t bear to tell her that she hadn’t raised a daughter at all.
The clock at my bedside table reads nine minutes past midnight. I turn back to my mother to tell her that there are no chickens, that there haven’t been any chickens since she’s been gone, but she’s disappeared, perhaps folded herself back into my drawer. A familiar anxiety wraps its fingers around the pit of my stomach. I massage small circles into my cheeks until they bloom red, to remind myself that my body’s still here. Visions have a way of unbodying you, making you as though you’re floating behind your own back.
The only light that filters into my room comes from the streetlamp outside, and a blue hue from the living room television. My roommate must still be awake. He’s been sick. Some kind of nasty cold, or maybe a sinus infection. I ought to check up on him. I shuck the blankets from my body and change into my day clothes, still knotted into a pile on the floor. I don’t like being in my night clothes around my roommate, don’t like being caught without a binder on. I’ve got a presentation to maintain, and it’s a much harder masquerade for me to keep up than it is for him. It’s not like he minds; he knows the deal just as well as I do. It’s more of a personal thing; I don’t like being perceived as a feminine body. My roommate knows what I mean, knows how the wrong clothes can trigger the dysphoria, if we’re not careful. He’s been on his man-meds for a lot longer than I have, and if he had good insurance he’d be on his way to the big chop. For now, though, the two of us are stuck splitting binders and his prescription for testosterone. He takes it one week and I the next. Already the hairs on my legs are growing thicker, darker. But I don’t take time to admire them as I hike my pants around my hips. Fully clothed, I emerge from the bedroom and into the living room, the binder a familiar grip around my chest.
He’s sitting up on the couch. The television casts blue light over the TV tray set up in front of him, littered with the crusty remains of broken saltines. His face is the color of unbuttered grits and his labored breath expels the bitter smell of vomit and bile. Next to the couch sits a wastebasket; I peer inside and find the plastic bag lining coated with slime. White knuckles grip the edges of a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. Sickness took hold of him sometime the night before, and he’s only gotten worse since then. He tosses some loose change out onto the TV tray, straightens out a few dollar bills he fishes from his back pocket.
“Could you get me a 7-Up from Reeds?” Half convenience store, half bait-n-tackle, Reeds is a late-night staple in our lives, our main source of midnight Snickers bars or 3 a.m. Orange Crush. “And maybe some Tylenol, too. If you’re headed out.” When he speaks, it’s like there’s gravel stuck in his throat.
I haven’t decided if I’m going out, but I swipe up the change and the bills anyway, cram them into my jacket pocket. He’s a good roommate, although some nights I suspect he wants to crack open my skull and touch my brain with sharp things. He studied biology, after all. Otherwise, he keeps a steady job, managed to graduate college with a degree some might consider valuable. He could’ve found work in a lab, or gone off to graduate school, or taught high school in the city. I don’t know why he returned to this nothing town. Me, I’ve got nowhere else to be but here.
I’ll do this for him. His lips form a thank you and he slumps back against the arm of the couch, lets his eyes slide shut. I pull his old college sweatshirt over my head and grab my keys off of the plastic storage box we keep around as a coffee table.
“My mother wants me to feed the chickens, so I might be a little while,” I tell him.
He groans like the dying. “Tell your mother to fuck off.”
“She never hears me.”
“Of course she doesn’t.” He tucks his chin into the hollow of his collarbone and hugs the blanket around his body. “Can’t you be like the other psychos and schizoids and self-medicate?” I don’t consider myself any kind of psychotic, but he’s the one with a college degree and I don’t feel like starting an argument tonight. Besides, weed makes me nervous and booze decenters me, makes it impossible to tell a vision apart from the material world. Our conversation over, I tuck my keys into his sweatshirt’s pocket and head outside, bumping open the screen door with my hip.
It had rained only a few hours ago, and the air still smells like wet asphalt and drenched earth. Overhead, heat lightning blinks behind the clouds. It’s muggy out because of the rain and already condensation pools behind the fabric of my binder. I wouldn’t need the sweatshirt if it weren’t for the gnats buzzing in clusters. I hate when they rest on my skin, little black dots that smear all over whenever you try to flick them off of your wrist. Lightning bugs wink like flickering candles and I wish I knew Morse code. You never know when the universe is trying to tell you something.
My neighbor’s passed out in a rocking chair on his front porch, his fingers hooked around a can of beer. At his side, a small radio spits nothing but static, probably having lost its signal to the station in the storm. His breath hisses through the gaps in his teeth and I cut through his yard to get to the road. I guess he isn’t a bad neighbor. He went to school with my father, although he looks about twenty years too old to even know him. Says my father was a good man, used to let him bum cigarettes when they were teenagers that had nothing better to do but hang out in the Pizza Hut parking lot. Sometimes he moseys up to our door, asks for cigarettes, or booze, or money, but I always tell him I’m fresh out, sorry, my bad, not as good as my father.
I don’t really want to fool around with anyone who calls my father a “good man.” He was prone to outbursts of emotion that threatened to become violent but never quite crossed the line, at least, not with us; “mercurial,” my mother called him. He wasn’t an addict; I’d never seen him touch alcohol, not even once. He didn’t have the excuses typical of the other fathers in our area; he didn’t need meth or Bud Light to drive him crazy.
When I was somewhere on the cusp between child and teenager, my father came home from his job at the lumber yard to find that my mother’s chickens had scratched up the strawberries he’d planted only the week before. They were meant to be harvestable by summer; he’d been looking forward to them. It began as it always did; my father stewed in silence, perhaps attempting to distract himself by watching television or heating up a frozen pizza in our oven. I always knew he was locked into one of his moods by the unusually soft cadence of his footsteps. My father was normally a stomper, but when he was on one of his turns, he’d step softly, as though he were suddenly aware of his body and was fighting to keep it contained. His mood climaxed once my mother got home from her shift at the dollar store; from my bedroom I could hear them struggle to keep their argument hushed. Your damn chickens…Well, what’d you expect from hens, honestly…no, no, don’t blame them, it’s my fault, I shoulda kept them up for the day…
I heard my father’s quiet footsteps pause in front of my parents’ bedroom, saw him rummage through the drawer of his bedside table through the crack of my door. He emerged from the bedroom with a pistol and walked out onto the back porch, leaving the door wide open. One shot. Two. Three. I heard panicked squawking and knew what he’d done.
That night he resigned himself to the couch, and when he finally passed out underneath the quilt his mother gifted my parents on the day of their wedding, my mother and I went outside to bury the chicken. The ground was soft from the afternoon’s rain and my mother shucked sludgy mud from the shovel to the side, digging a hole two feet deep and one foot wide. I held the hen in my hands, wrapped in two grocery bags, felt the life cool from its body. Blood smeared the plastic. We laid the hen to rest and my mother threw aside the shovel after she’d covered the bird up with dirt.
“I’m glad,” she said, “that I raised a daughter. Girls are just more level-headed.” She smiled only with her top row of teeth. Later that night my mother would coo soft reassurances at my father, who grieved his rash behavior with a clenched fist pressed against his forehead. He always eventually regretted his outbursts; I’ll give him that.
Perhaps it was silly to bury the hen. But I suppose to my mother, it would’ve seemed too cruel to put the thing into the stewpot after all it’d been through.
“That’s a snipe hunt if I ever did hear of one. You ain’t catching nothing but death out here.” My mother’s voice emerges from the radio, startles me into stopping in the middle of my neighbor’s yard. “You better head home, sweetheart. You just better head on home.”
But that’s the problem, isn’t it, Mama? There’s no home for me to head back to. The radio fumbles back into static, and I hurry toward the main road before my neighbor has a chance to wake up.
~
A psych once called it schizophrenia, before slapping me with a prescription I couldn’t afford to fill and sending me off to a therapist whose voice had so much vibrato, I could feel it beneath my skin, like ants marching. But I don’t call it schizo-whatever. I call it “the sensitivity.” I call them “visions.” I call it “one of my turns.” And that’s just it. I keep turning over and turning over until eventually I turn right side up, for a little while. Everybody has good days and bad days.
Besides, I am, at best, only half certain that the person who came crawling out of my dresser tonight was a vision and not really my mother. It’d be just like her, to haunt me. Make sure my father and I are getting along, remind me to call my grandmother on her birthday, things like that. She must be upset with me, because I haven’t spoken to any of those people since she passed. My mother believed that we had an obligation to the family. So, when my father was on one of his turns, smashing plates against the dinner table or tossing photographs into a fire pit he’d made out of an empty oil barrel, my mother only ever gritted her teeth, quietly swept up the broken clay and the ashes, got rid of the evidence. When my mother died, he let the hawks pick off her chickens, sold the home, moved to the next county over.
Carrender Road jams into South Main Street, and I move to the sidewalk, careful to avoid the cracks in the pavement. I’m not worried about breaking my mother’s back. The accident took care of that. I just don’t want to disrupt the lines. The fissures splinter through the concrete, little rivulets creeping across the sidewalk. I would rather they take shape as naturally as possible, and don’t like contributing to their formation. I prefer to minimize my impact on the physical world. A butterfly beats its wings and spins up a typhoon in Cambodia. I don’t need any more guilt resting on my conscience.
I was born “out in the county,” as we call it, in the foothills where the foliage grows so dense a bobcat can hardly squeeze through the underbrush. You don’t see many bobcats hanging around town, but we
do get a lot of homeless drifters, breezing into town like the white
seeds on dandelion puffs and taking up shelter in one of the many abandoned buildings downtown.
On Main Street there are streetlamps, dim and flickering just in case you forget that you’re still on the rough side of town. This is the side of town I live on, but it’s not where I come from. I was born “out in the county,” as we call it, in the foothills where the foliage grows so dense a bobcat can hardly squeeze through the underbrush. You don’t see many bobcats hanging around town, but we do get a lot of homeless drifters, breezing into town like the white seeds on dandelion puffs and taking up shelter in one of the many abandoned buildings downtown. I see them some nights, peering down into the streets from broken windows on condemned second stories, or else tucked into tight back alleys, huddled underneath one of those metallic blankets. Or, at least, I think I see them – I can never be sure what’s real and what’s a vision, these days, although I don’t suppose the difference matters.
Reeds is on the north side of Main Street, so I make my way past the buildings, empty save for squatters and follow the streetlamps’ illuminated path. There’s a figure standing just ahead on the sidewalk, and at first I assume it’s a homeless person, out scouring the dumpsters for pawnables. But then I blink, and they’re close enough for me to notice the knee high black rubber boots that she always wore.
She looks good for a woman whose skull was split in a car accident, whose chest hit the steering wheel with such force that it turned her ribcage into a valley. At her funeral, she’d looked so much like a wax doll that it’d been easy for me to imagine that the body in the casket belonged to anyone but her. Her muck boots are slathered in dried mud and her black tank top is tucked into a pair of jeans so dark you can’t see the grass stains on the knees. She keeps her dark hair pinned back with a tortoiseshell hair clip. Just as she’d always been. Strange, that it’s been all this time and she hasn’t changed at all. The dead must not change the way the living do.
She says, “What’re you doing out here, little girl? When you hear a woman’s voice in the night, you know better than to leave your bed. It’s not a woman.” Her face breaks into a smile too wide for her jaw and she no longer looks like my mother. I want to scream but can’t summon the sound.
“The chickens are long gone, Mama,” I tell her. She just stands there, a smile like a splitting seam widening across her face. I escape across the street, not bothering to check the road for oncoming traffic. Resting my weight against a streetlamp, I turn back to check for her, but there’s nothing but air where she stood on the sidewalk.
She says, “What’re you doing out here, little girl? When you hear a woman’s voice in the night, you know better than to leave your bed. It’s not a woman.” Her face breaks into a smile too wide for her jaw and she no longer looks like my mother. I want to scream but can’t summon the sound.
“The chickens are long gone, Mama,” I tell her. She just stands there, a smile like a splitting seam widening across her face. I escape across the street, not bothering to check the road for oncoming traffic. Resting my weight against a streetlamp, I turn back to check for her, but there’s nothing but air where she stood on the sidewalk.
~
I was too young to have memories of the Christmas Eve when the chicken vomited. What I do remember are the images my mother crafted as she relayed the story, again and again. My mother could be a sick woman. It was one of her favorite stories to tell.
It begins with my mother pulling black muck boots over dirt-encrusted jeans, a butcher’s knife sharpened by a whetstone in her apron’s wide front pocket. She had to get up early that morning, wanted to surprise the hens while they were still sleeping. We had five hens and one rooster, and my mother was sacrificing two of her girls for that night’s dinner. She was giving that way. (“We were having a lot of family over that night – Brittney had just had cousin Joshua. Most everyone was going to be there.”) The two hens were old, tired things that had long stopped reliably laying. (“They’d had their days in the sun. Better that we eat ‘em over some hawk or coyote. It’s a more respectable death.”) My mother stepped into the coop, her intrusion met only by the flapping of wings and some irritable coos. She took the first hen by the neck and slapped it onto the platform next to the door that she always called “the cutting table.” (“You feed ‘em from the palm of your hand, they come to trust you.”) She separated the head from the body; the creature’s muscles seized, then released. (“They can’t all run headless.”) And the other hen, watching from the corner of the coop with a wide amber eye cocked toward my mother, spewed a white, glossy mess from its beak, like a melted marble.
“Poor thing.” My mother would cluck her tongue. “It knew what was coming.”
“Poor thing.” My mother would cluck her tongue. “It knew what was coming.”
~
The north side of town has a better reputation than the south side; here you’ll find cute little boutiques with names like “Southern Comfort” and “Country at Heart.” They’re all owned by blonde church ladies, they all close on Sundays, and they all sell novelty glass angels and scented candles. This is the side of town where the tourists gather once they come in off the lake, flushed with sunburn despite their wide-brimmed hats. They come from Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, searching for that peaceful, nature-bound, authentic hillbilly way of life. Me, I’ve lived here all my life and never managed to find it. I’ve certainly never found it in the Country at Heart.
I run my hand against the cool glass storefronts, watching the oil from my fingertips smear my prints across the windows. In the glass I examine myself. I’d never had the most feminine face: an edge of a jawline that ends in my chin’s sharp point, thick, dark eyebrows that I never bother to pluck, lips too big to fit comfortably on my face. The more doses of testosterone I take, the close I am to becoming someone my mother might not recognize. So how does she know to haunt me? I feel her presence behind me as though she were bidden by the mere thought. I turn to face her.
Her own thick eyebrows have come together in the middle of her forehead. There’s pain in the tightness of her mouth, pain in her slumped shoulders, pain in every part of her body, and I know – I have broken her heart. When I was a child she would take my thick curls into her palm and smooth them into manageable waves, the only person who could touch my hair without causing any hurt. Now it’s just barely long enough to wrap around my index finger, curls around the back of my ear. She only ever knew me as a daughter; the person before her, the man in front of her, must look like a stranger to her. My mother looks at me as though I’ve become a monster, and I feel shame blighting my cheeks.
“I’m sorry, Mama.” I tell her. “I’m sorry. I killed your little girl.”
~
Minnows float belly up in the bait box that sits outside of Reeds. I stick my finger into the water, swirl it around, wonder if it was the cold that killed the fish, or maybe boredom, or maybe sickness. Already a white fog ghosts the eyes of the dead – they’ve been gone longer than they were ever alive. The few survivors whip their little silver bodies back and forth as they swim in circles. Do minnows eat other minnows? The baitfish serve their purpose even in death. It’s almost beautiful.
I leave the box behind and enter the store, trying to remember what it is I came here for. My roommate. He needs Tylenol, and ginger ale. No – he doesn’t like ginger ale. He wants 7-Up. Tylenol and 7-Up. The cure-all that has never let us down before. He and I aren’t partial to doctors. We can never afford the antibiotics they prescribe and can’t stand the inevitable eyebrow arch when our health charts betray our bodies’ genders. What’s a freak like you doing in a place like this? And I don’t know. I don’t know.
The door chimes when I enter and the cashier, a twenty-some year old with red acne blotting the skin in his patchy beard, hardly glances up from his phone as I make my way to the back of the store, where they keep their fridges. I pick out two bottles of 7-Up and approach the counter.
“Can I get some Tylenol? The little packets there?” I set the drinks on the counter and dick through my pockets for the money. The cashier glances at me, his eyes trailing down from my face to my chest. I fight the urge to cross my arms.
“Can I see your ID?” he asks.
“Do you need it? It’s just some fucking Tylenol.”
His grin can only be described as shit eating. “Just curious, man.” But he reaches behind him and grabs the medication anyway. I pay him, careful not to touch his sweat-glistening hands. I bag my things and leave the store.
This time, she doesn’t surprise me. She’s waiting by the bait box, and in the yellow convenience store light she casts no shadow. Her hands rest on the side of the bait box and she looks down into the water like an oracle. I join her.
This time, she doesn’t surprise me. She’s waiting by the bait box, and in the yellow convenience store light she casts no shadow. Her hands rest on the side of the bait box and she looks down into the water like an oracle. I join her.
“Your father wanted a boy,” she tells me. “But I was carrying too high for a boy. We never tried again after you.”
“It’s been two years, Mama.” I break the surface of the water with my finger, watch the ripples billow outwards. “I’m a different person. You don’t know me anymore.” A minnow mouths at the tip of my finger, and I withdraw from the water. “I’m not the daughter that you wanted.”
“You’re not ready.” Her lips don’t move but I hear her voice so clearly, as though she were speaking in my ear. “I left you too soon.”
This specter speaks in riddles. Is she a vision? Is she a ghost? Does it matter? She can’t – or won’t – answer my questions, can’t tell me the things that I want to hear. I loved you. I wanted you as you are. She’s not the mother I remember, the mother whose touch I crave on the mornings that I wake up forgetting that she’s gone. But she’s the closest thing that I have. So I stand there with the phantom that is not my mother, watch the living fish circle around the deceased. When I look up again, of course she’s already gone.
~
My neighbor still dozes on his front porch. The can of beer has spilt onto the wooden floorboards, staining them a dark brown. His radio has finally grasped the signal and wheezes country’s latest hits into the air. Again I cut through his yard, the dew seeping into my shoe’s fabric, dampening my socks. The screen door complains, and I begin negotiating with the key until the door finally swings open. The television’s off and my roommate rests on his back with his hands folded over his chest, still as a corpse in its casket.
I set the grocery bag on the TV tray, press my hand against his shoulder to wake him. “Hey,” I say, “I’ve got everything that you need.” He sits up, cracks open the 7-Up, slurps the contents down like his throat is dry as sand, takes a deep breath and levels his gaze at me, and I see the beads of sweat crowning his brow.
“Thanks,” he says. “I thought for a while there that you weren’t coming back. Muttering about your mother and shit. But you really came through for me tonight.” He gulps down some of the Tylenol and wipes his forehead with the back of his hand. “Any more news from your mother?”
“She’s been following me all night long, but I still don’t know if it’s really her. It would be nice, though, wouldn’t it? To be haunted.”
“You’re crazy as fuck.” He splits a smile, settles back into the couch cushions and shuts his eyes. “But, you know. It’s whatever you say.”
“Stranger things have happened than the dead rising.”
“Sure, maybe. But I don’t think most people would agree with you that it’d be nice.”
“It just means that someone loves you,” I tell him. “Loves you enough to come back from the dead. It can’t be easy, to come back from the dead.” But I can tell he’s getting tired again; his eyelids droop, and he rests his head against the arm of the couch again. I let him sleep.
I return to my bedroom, shed my clothes and my binder and slide naked into my bed. The sheets have cooled in my absence and siphon off the sheen of sweat that has collected across my chest, trapped between my skin and my binder. The digital clock reads three in the morning; the sun will rise in just a few hours.
I’ve almost sunk into a black sleep where I hear it: a scratching. Nails against hardwood. Coming from my dresser drawer. Hot fingers of anticipation wrap themselves around the pit of my stomach.
It’s my mother. She’s coming for me.
Blake Kinnett is a writer from southern Kentucky. They received their MFA from the University of Tennessee Knoxville and are progressing through a Ph.D. at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, where they currently live.