27

 

 

 

 

27

 

 

I won’t lie about what I do and don’t remember. The eye in my forehead flutters like a black moth caught in a bad dream, fetching the images that shadow the back of my mind. Because the cliff-edge dividing what was and what is…the ink dot that bleeds in place before the line changes course. It starts falling down right about here.

We made waffles and we burned them.

And then my mother told me about Uncle Steve.

***

Momma was wearing her tan-and-sheepskin jacket, the one with the broken zip and the collar that flipped up against her ears. Faded and stained. It smelled the same way old books smell. She wasn’t wearing any makeup except for her mouth—a darker shade than normal, the color like the inside of a wound. She looked young and pale and kind of still. Maybe it was the chill on her bare cheeks, the way her breath puffed in tight bursts of vapor. She was breathing like her jacket was too tight and she couldn’t take air in all th