mother

Chris O’Brien
Mother

I carry it in both hands so I don’t drop it – this box. A shoebox. The lid is closed tight but I know what is inside. Or rather, I know how to describe what is inside but I can’t name it.
Description: Hairless. Pink. Skin so thin veins pulse in a blue network just below the surface. It looks like a salamander but it is not reptilian. It is mammalian, human, in that it is vulnerable in its pink hairlessness and I have been assigned to its care. I feel inadequate. The box is dry and I can hear the pink flesh of my charge rubbing against it, sticking if it sits too long in one place, as it rolls with the impulsion of even my gentlest movement. I cannot put this box down – where would I put it? I cannot take this fragile vulnerable creature out of the box – what would encase it? So I continue to carry it – failing just by enacting the duty I have been charged with. There is no protecting something this unprotected. I fail before I have even begun.

I open my eyes. But it isn’t the dream that has awakened me. A warm rush of fluid has drenched my thighs, soaked the bed in a puddle beneath my hips down to my knees. Too soon, I think. But the cramping has already started. Around me the house is dark and still and warm and quiet. Like a womb.
I want to stay here, I suddenly realize.
In this warm dark silence forever. I want to freeze this moment – the dog asleep in her crate. I can hear her toenails scratching the sides as she dreams, of running in the corner park? Joe next to me. He disappears as he sleeps. The presence that is so unmistakable in the daytime – the tension he can bring to a room – his ever-vigilant watchfulness – the raw and rugged exposure of his nerves to the world. Everything hurts him. In sleep he finds the peace that eludes him in wakefulness. I can barely sense him next to me. He is like a deer frozen in the woods when hikers past without seeing.
Cramping again.
I will have to wake him. This cramping is a pebble thrown into a pond – the ripples will spread until everything I see now will be ruffled and changed. Nothing will ever be this again.
Low and hot, the burn spreads in a thick wash from my stomach connecting through my lower spine to light up my back. I moan with it. My hand reaches out almost a part of the wave of it, a slow motion whiplash, my arm the last whip of the rope. It lands on his stomach, his gut, exactly where, in my own, the radiating pain has just ceased for the moment.

Hospital: I am lost in the waves of hot wet undulating searing. My insides are being scraped by children at Halloween carving out the pulpy seedy entrails of a pumpkin.
I am traveling in a desert, hot, scorched sand, I cross boundary after boundary. This must be it, the last line to cross of agony. I have reached the outskirts of pain, of sanity. But still there is another desert, another line just out of reach.

In a moment of respite I think of the cool dark night left forever behind in my bedroom. How will I not mourn? Then I remember the box. My duty, failing or succeeding: To carry it, in all its impossible vulnerability, for as long as I am.