The first time I saw it happen we were unpacking our weekly food bank donations. The usual—Spam, pasta, Ragu sauce Mom stretched with water, salt, and sugar, and some limp carrots, two of which we used as mics, singing to the crackle and rush of Mom’s record player.
Mom was putting the cans up when she gasped.
Something slid free of her and hit the counter with a cranberry sauce glop. Even looked like cranberry sauce, glistening in a pool of scarlet. A pulsing fist-sized cylinder with a thin layer on top the color of Mom’s skin.
Wait.
I screamed. It was Mom’s skin.
“Just hand it to me, will you?”
I looked up to see a hole gaping in her shoulder and picked up the blob gingerly, with both hands, leaving gouges in the congealed blood beneath. She took it without ceremony and shoved it back in; the angry red seams dissolved like sugar in pasta sauce.
“Are you okay?” I asked with my carrot mic.
She ignored me, leaned in, and continued singing.
Years later, Mom said, “Everyone falls apart,” brushing off my questions as she plugged a flesh cube into her socket, eyeball, nerves, and all. “But it’s a private thing. Okay?” We’d been playing Scrabble and we didn’t find the missing ‘E’ until her eye fell out again.
In Star Market, Mom taught me the art of the coupon—on saving now for my future—when her foot came off at the ankle. The paintbrush sinew of its stump drew a long streak before we realized. She balanced against the cart as I brought her foot back.
“Could you…?”
I’d grown used to covering for her. Once, on the bus, Mom’s hand detached and I had to brandish it as a Halloween prank to calm those watching. Usually I had wipes available, but I’d forgotten them in the car.
So instead I snicked open a Ragu bottle, dumped the sauce over the blood, then shattered the jar. When “Clean up on Aisle 6” blared over the speakers I whispered in frustration, “None of my friend’s parents fall apart like you do.”
Something nasty awakened in her eyes. I saw it climb down to crawl out of her mouth, but she swallowed it. We picked through the discount bins in silence.
At thirteen, my neck was fractured in an accident after Mom’s knee popped off and she lost control of the car. The doctor was examining me, listening to Mom recount our medical history, when her jaw fell off. Right there. Wet smack atop the exam table.
The three of us stared at it, then the doctor searched our faces for answers that we, in our silent pact, refused to give even if the secret nearly broke me. Mom groped for her jaw, squelched it back with a wince, and continued as she always did, like nothing happened.
The doctor cut in. “I’m referring you to Necrology. Now.”
Mom clenched her teeth and I saw the bulge beneath the smear on her cheek. Until now, falling apart was just a thing that happened between us. The doctor’s referral made it real. This was a Thing that was Happening.
Down two floors and the necrologist asked for a “disintegration history,” handing us a sheet with a sketched human body: front, back, both sides, like an autopsy report. We were to circle where disintegration had occurred. Mom marked maybe a third of them, not even her ankle. I snatched it away before she could turn it in and filled in the rest.
“The doctors could help you!” I said. And help me, too went unsaid.
“I’m fine,” Mom said flatly.
Her ear had fallen off during a concert at the beach and a seagull swooped it up before I saw it. She wasn’t fine; music was her everything.
The necrologist used phrases like “early onset” and “rapid decline,” but as a high school sophomore all I heard was “extra responsibility.” In practice, that meant everywhere she went I went, and if I missed a disintegrated piece, it was my fault.
“I’ll pull off here, while we still have time,” I said, gripping the wheel at 10 and 2, like I did in driver’s ed. I watched the red trickle down her neck, thinking about pieces she’d already sacrificed for me. Two jobs. Her love life. Her pride when she asked for help. How she used her own fire to fuel mine.
I opened the kit suggested by the necrologist—our ‘extreme recovery measures’—and pulled out lidocaine, a pocket knife, a lighter, alcohol wipes, and courage, which was a leather strap I bit down on.
There, in a gravel pit, off the highway shoulder, amidst the roar of traffic, the world went half quiet as I numbed my ear…and lopped it off. When I gave it to mom, my scream still rattled inside so I didn’t hear what she said.
It could’ve been “Thank you.”
It could’ve been “Sorry.”
The following year, disintegration ate us up, in small bites and big ones.
Chunks taken from my back left behind raised scars, shallow graves I ran fingers over when distracted in class.
A pinky toe, gone. Still, I wasn’t enough.
On a joyride to the mountains, music blowing snakes through our hair, mom lost a whole arm out the window, feeling the breeze through those fingers one final time.
Marketing letters from colleges piled up on the table. We didn’t know if I would go. I placed the Scrabble board atop them to play, but Mom pulled out a brochure and traced a finger across its promises.
Trembling with a question, I placed my first word: F-U-T-U-R-E.
An infinite pause.
Then she placed hers. C-H-O-I-C joining my ‘E’—the one still rust-stained from years ago.
We looked up; Mom with one arm, me with one ear, two wan smiles and one gaze, old as my lifetime. In it, we wondered how long we could stay like this, with her halfway alive and me halfway living.
Content warning(s): Body horror
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