I’m not expecting it when my mother eats the bus driver.
My surprise comes mostly because I thought I’d gotten her under control. The bus ride—two AM on a Tuesday, servicing the night shift paycheck-to-paycheck workers at the meat factory a few miles out of town, predictably empty between the Turnpike Mall and Cedar Park stops (its last of the route)—is about as isolated as you can get. I wasn’t taking any chances with tottering old grannies in the accessible seats or teens who think they’re too cool to grab a handhold.
I’d worked her up to it, of course. First, I played workout videos on the TV—plenty of bare skin on display, but more comfortable than having her watch porn—and measured her salivation levels. She knew the people on the screen were fake (which was a comforting thought, as I’d seen her mental faculties decline drastically since she’d gotten sick). If she thought they were real, there would’ve been an active response of some kind, like when she killed Laika, our husky. But when she watched the TV, she was so still it worried me, her dull eyes tracking the movements of the smiling Zumba body gods with delayed flicks and intermittent blinking.
She salivated incessantly when I first started getting her to watch the videos. The saliva steadily eased over the next two weeks, until it was no longer clinging to and dribbling off her jowls in sloppy, stringy threads. Once we got to the point that most of the spit was staying in her mouth—nobody’s perfect—I transitioned to live bait.
I started with a goldfish and a ruler, smacking her hand every time it darted out towards the fishbowl. Eventually, she stopped reaching, though her eyes still lit up every time Goldie flicked its tail. Then I moved onward and upward to mammals. First, the small ones I could easily obtain from pet stores (paid in cash, of course, at different PetSmarts throughout the city, as near untraceable as you can get these days on a budget). A gerbil, a hamster, a guinea pig. Next, an upgrade in size: a ferret. The ferret took longer—I think she was especially drawn by its scent—but eventually her reaction had dulled from pure want to … exaggerated interest. I called that a win.
Meat was the only thing she’d eat, though I attempted a few vegetarian alternatives. She turned up her nose at beans, spat out tofu, and gave me such baleful looks when I encouraged her to try a few different flavors of protein bar that I caved. Eventually, I switched from actual cuts of meat to smoothies, ground up in our industrial-strength NutriBullet. I reasoned that the less it looked like a part of a human or an animal, the better.
She didn’t care if the meat that went in the blender was raw, cooked, or charred to resemble the color of a Sharpie. She slurped those smoothies down just the same, three times a day. I had her take them over top of four layers of newspaper laid on the kitchen floor linoleum in case of spills, though her motor skills, if anything, had temporarily improved. She did not shamble, did not moan; she just acted like she very strongly wanted to kill and consume anything with a beating heart.
And yeah, that sucked, but she was my mom. She’d read me Dr. Seuss when I got sick as a kid, doing all the voices with as much fervor as she brought to her community theatre Shakespeare performances. We shared an inside joke about Pop-Tarts and tooth fairies, from when she’d panicked on my third lost molar when she couldn’t find any coins and stuck a fully wrapped s’mores pastry under my pillow instead. We used to end up throwing microwave popcorn into each other’s mouths from across the couch every time we tried to watch a scary movie and I inevitably made her turn it off, fingers splayed over my eyes in fright.
Single momhood was no cakewalk, and she and I knew that better than anyone. She’d been a shoulder to cry on for every breakup, bad grade, and rejection letter; for every middle school concert, junior varsity semifinal, and job offer, she’d been waiting on the sidelines to kick off a round of applause. No matter how tired she was each evening, she’d always taken the time to kiss me good night, to whisper, “Sweet dreams, Janey.”
So when the bus creaked to a halt, settling down with a whine as it eased lower on its wheels; when my docile, potentially man-eating mother stepped on with my hand at her back; when the bus driver gazed at us in the rearview mirror with a stare that spelled boredom; when we made it one stop before she ripped her leash out of my hands and made for his jugular; and when his scream was cut off by a fifty-three-year-old’s teeth around his neck …
I tugged her off him, assessed the damage, and went about the long and laborious task of getting rid of the body.
She’d been there for me, after all, and goodness knows I was no angel.
I scrub the inside of the bus scrupulously clean, my mom locked safely back in the house with a smoothie from the fridge. And as I pull the wires of the bus camera and get behind the wheel, heading for the river, I push down my roiling stomach and remind myself that being there for your mom is what good daughters do.
It’s not contagious, let’s get that straight. I figured that one out when I came home from my shift at Gerry’s Sports last month. I jangled my keys into the lock, wiggling the handle upwards like you have to for our old two-bedroom to keep the door from jamming. The screen door had barely swung shut behind me when she came hurtling out of the main bedroom and latched onto my arm.
I screamed, falling back, and she recoiled like she’d been struck, jaw springing open. We stood there for a few moments, me cradling my arm as blood trickled down my fingers and onto my Tweety Bird light-up keychain, and she blinked dazedly at me, confusion carved in her features. Recognition seeped back into her eyes.
Still shaking, I shut the cheap hollow-core door behind me and locked it, hoping none of the neighbors had heard me cry out. I tried to hold my arm away from me, avoiding damage to my work uniform. “Mom,” I said, “what the hell?”
“Sorry,” she stammered. “Janey, sorry, sorry, baby. Stranger.” This was back when she was still verbal, though her grammar had all but dissipated. I knew what she meant; I’d grown used to translating. I’m sorry, Janey baby, I didn’t mean to hurt you. I thought it was a stranger.
She’d been getting paranoid. Sometimes I even caught her cutting glances at me as she drank her smoothies, curved over them like they were precious gems.
I knew what the bite might mean. She had, after all, broken skin, and I was sure the wound had been contaminated, even if I headed straight for the claw-footed porcelain bathtub and scrubbed the bite out so hard it stung, then bathed it in bubbling hydrogen peroxide, then slathered it in antibacterial gel. (It didn’t feel like overkill at the time.)
The wound reddened and scabbed over, and I woke up a few nights later to it leaking yellow-green pus. But despite all that, my careful monitoring of my cravings left me with no new desire for steak, medium rare. No urge to chomp down on my coworkers’ innards, even when Clive the manager was being punishingly annoying. All I was left with was a scar in the shape of my mother’s teeth.
I wondered if this meant that she couldn’t hurt me. If I was unique in my resistance, if my blood recognized hers and refused to let me suffer under her illness.
I wondered, too, if the sickness was less absent than dormant, lying in wait beneath the surface of my skin for my immune system to weaken with age. If, perhaps, it had been waiting all along, another layer in my body, crammed somewhere between skeleton and muscle.
After that incident, I started cracking the door and calling out before I came in. It gave her time to acclimate, to recognize, to calm.
She didn’t bite me again.
I will acknowledge that the bus driver incident marks a failure. On my part more than hers—I’ve been so focused on reintroducing her to society that I let my guard down. Thought that a month or two training her reactions away would dull her hunger.
Part of it was the in-between moments. Sometimes, lucidity slammed into her like a truck, and she’d shamble out to the living room and sit in her floral-patterned easy chair just like she used to. Her gaze would cut to me, smoking on the sofa, and even if she didn’t talk, I could tell she knew me in a way she didn’t when the sickness coated her brain like a black mold. She had one of those moments the day before I took her on the bus, a breath of fresh air after two weeks of half-open mouth and clouded eyes. The clarity hadn’t come for so long that I’d started to wonder if those moments were gone for good.
“Mom?” I asked, tilting forward on the cushions. Her corneas were fogged, eyes bloodshot, but the smooth grey of her irises when she looked at me held a spark. “You there?”
She swallowed, a painful judder of her throat, and nodded. I fought the urge to fetch her a glass of water, my own fear holding me in place. What was to say she’d have more than a few seconds of lucidity? I didn’t want to bring her a cup only for her to spill the contents all over the blouse I’d helped her pull on that morning.
I tipped back, letting my muscles relax, and watched the tip of my cigarette go ember-orange as I drew in a breath. She’d start getting stressed if she sensed I was tense, and for all I knew, that would be a trigger, and I’d lose her again. She looked very thin curled up in the other seat, wiry hair bursting from her scalp in wispy patches. And she looked very small.
Back when she was verbal, she’d ask me to tell her stories in her best moments, memories that she could focus on to try to hold herself steady instead of slipping back into bloodlust. I could see the same question in her eyes now, even if it slumbered, unarticulated. So I did my best.
“When I was twelve, I wanted this doll,” I started, and her eyes flared in recognition. Her face twisted into a familiar expression, a sort of good-natured craftiness. The craftiness I’d seen recently, when she tried to get into the locked animal room while I was in the garden—presumably to snarf down half the ferret before I noticed, which prompted me to clear out most of the critters when we finished training. But the half-smile she wore now was different. Softer.
“It was a thrift store doll,” I continued. “Absolutely disgusting. No clothes, hair a ratty mess, and the paint for one of her eyes—do you remember this? —was all gone. Someone had scratched it away, maybe with a key or something, so there was just an empty plastic hollow.
“But I said I wanted her, and you bought her for me—though they honestly should’ve paid you to take her off their hands—and we fixed her up. I combed out the hair, and you sewed her a little bag dress with some embroidery floss tied for a belt, and then together we made an eyepatch for her. I don’t know how many afternoons I spent with Pippi Pirate. Too many to count.”
“Rrrrr.”
I nearly jolted out of my seat, cigarette clenched tight in my fingers. Her eyes were on me, and at first, I’d thought the growl in her throat was one of aggression. It sent a trickle of fear straight down my throat. But her gaze was still steady, focused, and she tried again. “Arrrrr.”
The joy came almost as quick as the fear. “Yeah, Mom, that’s right! Arrrr, matey, a pirate’s life for me.” I sounded completely inane, but it was the most I’d gotten from her in weeks, and excitement crowded out my capacity for embarrassment.
“Rrrrr,” she said again, and my smile paused on my face, because the sound came out different. Deeper, more guttural. She wasn’t looking at me anymore; she was canting forwards off the chair, landing hard on her knees. I reached out on instinct to help her; the growl in her throat deepened.
“Oh,” I said. “Did I lose you, Mama?”
She didn’t respond.
She just dragged herself across the floor, uncoordinated and shuddering with animal need, towards the half-finished deli ham smoothie she’d left in the kitchen.
My mom was sixteen for most of her pregnancy, but she had me when she was seventeen, the day after her birthday. I couldn’t look less like her—she’s short and skinny, I’m tall and plump—but our birthdays have always tied us together, a connection by coincidence. The father was a military brat whose family moved before she found out she was preggers. When she tried to get in touch with him, he changed phone numbers. In those days, that was that.
Her parents were hardline Catholics who disowned her when she started to show. She got lucky with a distant aunt, a jet-setting corporate atheist with a spare room. Mom—and, eventually, I—stayed there for a couple years while she got her feet under her.
I don’t remember much about my childhood. It mostly comes in tastes—Kraft Mac and Cheese, hot dogs sliced up in dimes and dipped in ketchup from packets Mom stole from her McDonald’s job. She wasn’t secretive about our two-person family’s precarious relationship with food, but she didn’t draw my attention to it, either. I only found out most of our dinners came from the food bank when I was old enough to understand why I qualified for free and reduced lunch at school.
Mom was a high school dropout with a baby, and she always told me I could be anything I ever wanted except for that. I knew the ins and outs of condoms and birth control before I could do long division.
She helped me with math at the kitchen table, drove me to soccer and basketball and track, read my essays three times apiece with a red pen in hand as if she could summon good feedback by sheer force of will. On mornings of test days, she’d get up early to make me pancakes—what she called “brain food.”
Her love was spelled out in microwave instructions and wrapped up in the swirling wisps of steaming soups. I never went to bed hungry.
I get back from dumping the bus in the river as the first light of dawn is just pinking the sky. I left my phone in the house—you can never be too careful with location services when you’re cleaning up an accidental murder—and when I push open the front door, I see that the charger has been torn out of the outlet, the white cord stripped down to the wire.
Flakes of chewed sheathing are scattered across the carpet. My mom is curled up next to the couch, asleep. Her mouth is half-open, and I can see a glint of wire stuck between her teeth.
It’s too early to reason out what hoops she must’ve jumped through to decide that the cord was edible. Exhaustion pounds behind my temples, the first whispered promise of a migraine tapping insistent fingers against the inside of my skull. This mess is my fault, again—I should’ve pulled out another smoothie, made sure she had enough nutrients that she wouldn’t look for enrichment elsewhere.
I sit down next to her on the floor, limbs heavy. I need to get myself cleaned up and burn our clothes—hers are bloodier than mine, and it looks like she’s been chewing at the stains on her collar—but I’m tired, and right now, sitting next to her, I can almost pretend that she’s just my mom and nothing else.
She looks so normal, so peaceful. Her hair falls like down feathers against her cheek, light and soft, and one lock of grey flutters with each exhale. Her wrinkles are smoothed with sleep, her lashes brushing her cheeks, her body relaxed. I can even ignore her bad breath, the smell of plaque and rotting meat that accumulates if I don’t brush her teeth for her often enough.
I scrub my palms against my eyes, suppressing a yawn. I’ll only rest for a moment. Just one moment. “Sweet dreams, Janey,” I murmur to myself, giving her words my voice.
When my eyelids flutter open, Mom’s still asleep. Her face is twisting, caught in some quiet nightmare. However long I’ve dozed was enough to douse me in drowsiness, but not so long I’ve missed my next cashier shift.
I disentangle myself from the last threads of sleep and seek out my phone. I sequester myself in the bathroom, careful to keep my voice down, and call in sick to work. And then I go back out to the living room and try to pretend, just a little longer, that I can keep doing this. I sweep a strand of hair out of my mother’s open mouth, ignore the fuzz of something white and fungal clumped on her tongue, and insist to myself that she is still the same person she’s always been.
It’s been one week since the bus driver, and I’ve discovered I can distract my mom with coloring books. If I supply her with crayons and the sheets I print out for a couple cents at the local library, she can entertain herself for entire evenings. It’s a strange role reversal from my childhood—me, doing the laundry and cleaning out the sink drain; her, sitting at the kitchen table, hunched over, intense and focused on the exact shade of blue she wants for the sky.
She started to cough a few days ago. It began as an intermittent clearing of her throat, but it has grown into a dull, persistent hacking. Sometimes, she spits out bits of bloody meat, undefinable hunks that look like partial organs. I wipe the chunks away with paper towels and hope they aren’t anything critical.
She coughs now, right onto her coloring page, and I swoop in to clean up what looks like a stringy piece of fat. It leaves a wet pink stain on the page when I swipe it away. My mom doesn’t even look up. She just keeps coloring, crayon scratching right over the stain.
It’s only recently that I’ve begun to wonder if, all those times I didn’t go hungry as a kid, my mother did. If there were nights when I scooped pasta happily into my mouth, making chipmunk-cheeked funny faces, while she tallied up the costs of childcare and growth spurt Goodwill trips and listened to her own stomach rumble. If she spent so long with the dull ache of not enough that it built up in some sinister way, flipped some genetic marker, caused the switch from my conscientious, hardworking mother to a slavering fifty-three-year-old with a taste for flesh.
She used to be thin, the kind of reedy that makes you fret when a breeze comes along, frightened it will sweep your loved one into the sky like an unmoored kite. Still, she was nearly always healthy—or close enough that I didn’t notice the difference. She had apple cheeks and a ready smile. I only remember her getting sick once, so sick I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of her emptying her insides in the bathroom. Even then, she didn’t go to the doctor.
Was it me? Subsuming her needs under my own? A little parasite, a zombie in my own right? Am I the reason this is happening to her now?
In the worst moments, when hope fails me, a quiet voice tells me yes.
I ignore it and make her another smoothie for dinner, because that’s what good daughters do.
Two weeks after the bus driver, she jerks my cigarette out of my mouth. I can only guess she thought it was food. I shout, expecting her to drop it, but it’s down her throat before I can wrangle it back. She doesn’t show any signs of pain. When I check her hand, I find the burn, the angry red-black of charred flesh, but she doesn’t flinch even when I poke at it. She’s not immune to the fire. It’s just … like her pain receptors are gone.
The knowledge that she’s dying is the sun in eclipse. The land around me is darkening, the penumbral shadow wrapping around every facet of the world, but as long as I don’t look, the eclipse isn’t happening. As long as I keep the encroaching burn of black in my peripheral vision, its approach isn’t real. For now, she’s here. She’s alive.
I wash her hand and bandage it with care, resolving to temporarily kick my smoking habit.
I love my mother. For her, I’d swallow the moon, just to keep it from blotting out the sun.
“Hi, Janey!” Mom sounded cheery enough, but even over the phone, I could tell it was a mask—the kind she wore when she was putting on a brave front for the world about a problem that would have anyone else sobbing their eyes out. “I think I might be coming down with something.”
This was long before I moved back in to take care of her, long before workout videos and ferrets and bus drivers. More than a year ago, in fact. It was a tumultuous time for me, which was probably why she’d held off on bringing up her illness. I’d just gotten a raise and gone through a bad breakup, and I was burying my feelings about my ex’s cheating in the bustle of the store and at the humane society I volunteered at on the weekends. My goal was to be so busy I stopped thinking about how much it hurt.
I was multitasking, going through some mail and sorting it into piles while I had her on speaker. “Really?” I said, half-listening. “Like, the flu?”
“I don’t think so. I’ve been getting some … urges. About things I want to eat.” She sounded a little hesitant, tiptoeing around the edges of the conversation.
I frowned. “Like, that pica thing? Where you want to eat rocks and bark and stuff ‘cause you’re not getting enough minerals?”
The line crackled. Then she said, very quick and sure, “I’ve been wanting to eat Laika.”
My fingers paused in carding through my mail. I picked up the phone. “Say that again?”
My mom had gotten Laika about five years ago, after there was a rash of robberies in her neighborhood. She felt safer living as a single woman with a dog than a single woman alone. Laika was beautiful, with a black-white ruff and ice-blue eyes. My mom spent hours with her at the dog park after work; sometimes I would join her there with bad gas station coffee, and we would catch up as we watched Laika romp.
As I listened, my mom explained over the phone. How it had started with craving red meat over the past month; how she’d begun to cook it rarer and rarer to sate some fundamental urge she was developing. She’d started to find vegetables too bitter, fruit too sweet; she could still handle carbs, but she found herself working through a piece of toast like it was a chore, daydreaming about dropping by the grocery store after work to comb through the butchery’s bargain section.
Yesterday, she’d been watching Laika run at the dog park when she was hit by an intense, instinctual urge to run after her and sink her teeth into the meat of Laika’s haunches.
I was concerned. Of course I was concerned—I mean, damn. What daughter wouldn’t be?
But I was also positive that this was psychological. And more than positive that if she went to the doctor about it, they’d throw her somewhere padlocked and padded and I might never see her again, unless it was for thirty-minute increments during visiting hours. Plus: she had no insurance.
The offer came out easy. “Want me to come stay the night? Let you know if I notice anything weird?” It was as good a way to forget my ex as any, and I was, to say the least, worried. Besides: helping your mom when she gets sick is what good daughters do.
“Oh, honey,” she said, relief flooding her voice. “That would be just perfect.”
The bus driver should’ve been a wake-up call.
My goal was always to reintegrate Mom back into normal society. To get her trained up enough that she could safely go back to work, rejoin Community Center bingo nights, and catch up on her bimonthly book club. I’ve been bitter sometimes and sad often, but the idea of getting her to be self-sustaining was a light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. It helped me stave off fear and exhaustion alike.
But now, I am scared. And more than anything, I’m tired, which scares me more. I’m not supposed to be tired of taking care of my mother. I’m supposed to be the ever-dutiful daughter, with her until what’s beginning to seem like the inevitable end.
And I try. I ignore my feelings. Three weeks after the bus, when Mom breaks into the animal room and dismembers the ferret (the only critter I haven’t yet rehomed), I clean up the remains without protest, on autopilot. I go to work the next day after an extra half hour checking myself over for bloodstains. I’m showered and fresh, and I leave two smoothies for Mom and the TV on a nature channel. They’re showing a documentary about whales when I leave; I hope she’s not in the mood for seafood.
Work is work, which is to say I’m counting the minutes ‘til I go home a few seconds after my shift begins. I’m a jack-of-all trades at Gerry’s Sports, splitting my time in inventory, at the register, and anywhere else Clive the manager needs me. Right now, I’m at the front, the mask of a cashier smooth on my face. My fingers find the bar codes of basketballs and fishing rods automatically, scanning through the current customer’s purchases with a bland smile pasted on.
Next in line is a mother and her tween daughter. I ring up a couple of sports bras and a pack of gum the mom adds in at the last moment. I fold the bras neatly, slide them into a plastic bag, and hand them over. “Thanks much,” the mom says, giving me the sort of smile that says she’s about to embarrass her kid. “You know how it is when puberty hits and they just,” she gestures at her chest, pantomiming growth. The girl groans, cheeks flushing.
It’s a comment my mom would’ve made. To my surprise, the urge to burst into tears hits like a tidal wave, full and fast. I choke out a congenial huff of fake laughter and a have a nice day, then throw a Counter Closed placard on my register and sink down, crouching below the eyeline of any customers. I’m breathing hard, hands braced on the floor. Hyperventilating? Even as I’m doing it, I’m dissociated enough that it feels trite.
It doesn’t feel like my mom is waiting for me at home, her smoothies digesting and her eyes glazed as she watches clusters of krill get sucked through baleen. It feels like I lost her a long time ago, and my brain is only just catching up.
“You don’t even know what I’m giving up for you,” I murmur. The bottom of the register doesn’t answer. It strikes like a knife when I realize that neither would she.
I stop by the grocery store before dinner. I go whole hog: I can practically hear my bank account whining as I swipe my card for the haul. When I arrive home, it takes three trips to bring in all the bags. By the time I’m on trip two, my mom has emerged from the living room, watching me with the contained excitement of someone unsure if the rug is about to be pulled out from beneath them.
The spread is a carnivore’s delight, a true smorgasbord of blood and fat and muscle. I cleared out the clearance section of the meat aisle indiscriminately; 20% off tags flash yellow from the plastic wrapping of blanching pork loin, day-old ribs, cheese-filled sausages. Hunks of fat-speckled steak are interspersed with lamb chops, hamburgers, the wormy red blocks of ground beef. The smell of blood is already beginning to sink into the kitchen, tangy and bright. A string of saliva slips out of the corner of Mom’s mouth; she doesn’t bother to suck it back in.
I stand in front of the wealth of meat, awkwardly shifting on my heels. “Hi Mom, it’s Janey.”
No hint of recognition in those eyes. I wonder if the disease has eaten away at the language centers of her brain. But as much as I’d like to say this little speech is for her, I suppose it matters less that she understands it, because it’s mostly for me.
“You were the best mom. You are the best, Mom. Look, I’m sorry. I’ve been trying to make you better, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. So, I’m going to stop.” My hands are trembling where they fall by my sides, so I clasp them in front of me instead, holding tight to myself. “It’s not working for either of us to fight this,” I finish, because I’ve never been one for monologuing. “So, I’m going to make you comfortable instead. I want you to be comfortable ‘til the moment your heart stops beating.”
And even though I know it’s probably dangerous to get too close, and even though I realize it won’t really matter, I step forward and give my mom a hug. I haven’t been this close to her for longer than I realized. She smells terrible, redolent of earth and rot, and she feels frailer than I expected, like she’s full of hollow bones. Her skin is cold as a grave, and I tense up in momentary surprise.
She embraces me like it’s instinct, paths laid somewhere deep in her network of neurons that haven’t yet been touched by the disease. She holds me tight, and I hold her, and it takes me too long to realize that her eyes are open. That she’s looking over my shoulder, at the counter full of meat. She’s so cold. So unbelievably cold.
“Just a second, Mom,” I tell her, trying to keep my tone light—I don’t know how much of her is left, but I don’t want to spook her. She doesn’t resist as I set two fingers against her wrist, feeling for a pulse. Nor when I bring them to her neck, my own heartbeat stuttering in my chest. I let my fingers drop after too long searching, finding nothing.
“Oh, Mama,” I say, voice breaking just like my heart. “You’re already dead.”
She doesn’t protest. When was the last time I heard her voice?
I focus on the sharp stab of loss, because it helps drown out the wave of unwanted relief. The habits are still carrying her, the house still standing, but no one’s in there to keep the lights on. All this time I spent trying to save her, she was already gone.
I step aside and sweep out a hand towards the meat. She doesn’t hesitate; she falls on the feast like a lion on a carcass, ripping apart plastic and paper to get at the good stuff inside. She tears apart the meat barehanded, shoving chunks down her gullet whole. I’ve been keeping her to a diet with the smoothies, it seems; she doesn’t show any sign of slowing even after choking down a whole rib, bone and all.
“Oh, and Mom,” I tell her, watching her eat—my mind already whirring with what I’ll have to do. “I want you to know I loved you.”
I said it’s not contagious. I’m not positive that’s true. I know it’s not contagious to me, or at least, that I’m not showing any symptoms. For all I know, I’m a carrier, like poor infamous Typhoid Mary. Still, I take precautions. Later, I’ll wash all the clothes I kept at her house with a load of bleach. Later, I’ll scrub bars of soap against my skin until it’s chafed and raw. Later, I’ll shave my head and call it the New Me, partly because I want it to be and partly in case something crawled out of her silky locks and into mine.
As I pack, choosing only the essentials and the bits and bobs around the house that fill me with nostalgia, my mother chows down on sausage. As I throw my shoes into the trunk of my car, she finishes the steaks. As I take the photo albums from the bookcase in her bedroom, she slurps on the ground beef like spaghetti. Sometime during my drive to the hardware store, she sucks down the last piece of lamb, because when I arrive back, the counter is empty, save the abandoned plastic shells of the meat.
My mother is lying on the tile floor by the counter when I walk back in. Her limbs splay haphazardly around her, as if thrown with little disregard for their proper positioning. She is bloated, stomach distended; I’m still unsure how she fit it all in.
There’s a ghost of a smile at the corner of her lips. Her eyes are closed, and I hope she’s asleep.
I move around the house room by room, divesting the fire alarms of their batteries. Most of them are already dead, but I remove the double-As anyway, just to be safe. I grab the bags from the hardware store and empty the bottles I bought across the floor, trying to concentrate most of it near Mom’s slumbering form—though I can’t bring myself to cover her in the liquids. For good measure, I dump the bottle of vodka she keeps in the freezer.
I grab a candle from the bathroom (lavender scented) and dig out the wax with a butter knife, making sure the wick’s still intact. I lock all the doors. Vapors from the hardware store chemicals are seeping into the air, and I pull my shirt up over my mouth as I go back to the candle. I step out onto the front porch, setting the candle just inside the threshold.
From here, I can see just my mother’s head, poking out from behind the counter. I’d almost be able to pretend she is what she’s not, if it weren’t for the fresh blood painted over her mouth. She looks as happy as I’ve seen her, as happy as it might be possible for her to be.
“Sweet dreams, Mom,” I say, and I light the wick.
