mothers

Crack

There were a load of cracks all over the field behind our house. They weren’t there yesterday. They were only there today.

The biggest one of them was so deep you could put your arm down it and never reach the end. This worked whether you had a short arm, like me, or a long arm, like my dad, or a leg, like my mum, who refused to lie down, like we were doing, and just sat on the side and dangled a leg down there instead.

“What are they, though?” I said.

“Mouths,” said my dad.

“Mouths?” I said, uncertainly.

“Yep, mouths,” said my dad. I could see my mother shaking her head and putting a finger to her lips but he carried on regardless. “It’s been so dry all summer that the ground needs to get water from somewhere. So it’s opened up some of its mouths in the hope of gulping down a child or two.”

“A child?” I whimpered.

“Children are full of water,” my dad said, and laughed and made to push me down the hole but he didn’t push me down the hole.

I jumped to my feet and thought of mouths and began to cry and my mother said, “Christ!” but not at me at my dad. My dad just shrugged his shoulders somehow even though he was lying on the floor and then rolled over onto his back and looked up at the sky.

“He needs to grow up,” he said, bitterly.

“You need to grow up,” said my mum to my dad, while hugging me and assuring me everything was okay, everything was all right, they weren’t really mouths, they weren’t going to eat me at all. And she made it all better and I stopped crying and I really love my mum I do.

A little while later we went off to the shop to get some ice creams, and when we got back my dad was asleep on the blanket. My mum smiled at me and put a finger to her lips and then exaggeratedly sneaked over to my dad and rolled him up in the blanket and pushed him down into the crack.

You’d never believe how much water there is inside a person, how thick and dark and endless it all is.

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Notes:

1. Written on August 3rd, 2018

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My Mother

My mother died last week, which was sad, I suppose. She was a hard person to love, my mother, though, so in many ways it was a relief.

Anyway, for a week or so after I sort of wandered around in a daze. Shock, I expect, and also that I wasn’t really sure what to do or how to do it. I spent so long on the phone telling everyone she was dead that for awhile it seemed like this was it now, for me, forever. Just sitting here at my desk ringing people up and going, “Do you remember [mother]? Well, she’s dead, I’m afraid. Sorry about that. Did you know her well? Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah, I know. I know. Sorry. Yeah she was, she really was. But still she’s my mother, and, well… I just thought you should know.”

I’m not sure even the vicar bothered to attempt to console me, to express in any way a sense of regret.

Anyway, I thought yesterday that it was over, after the funeral was done and she was safely buried and I’d cleared away all the uneaten buffet stuff from the table I’d set up in the living room and everyone had gone home and there was no need for them to ever think about her again.

But this morning I came down stairs and there she was, sat at the kitchen table, eating some toast and marmite, biting through it toothlessly with her dry papery lips.

“I thought you were dead,” I said.

“I was,” she said. “I spent the last week in heaven,” she said. “Nice place, really, except for all the cats.”

“The cats?” I said.

My mother didn’t like cats.

“Yes, the cats. Cats everywhere there was. Every cat that ever lived. Millions of them, sitting around. Sitting on everything,” she said. “Well, every cat that ever died, I suppose.”

“And…?”

“And what?”

“Why are you here, mother? You’re supposed to be dead.”

“Well, you know how I feel about cats.”

Everyone knew how she felt about cats.

“So I left. Told God it was either the cats or me. He chose the cats.” She took another bite of her toast. “He reminded me a bit of your father, really.”

“Who did?”

“God.”

“Are you sure you were in heaven, mother?”

“Well, where else would I have fucking been?”

So, anyway, now I expect I’ll have to spend the rest of the week on the phone again, telling everyone that I told that she was dead that she’s alive again now. I’m really not looking forward to having to explain this to the council. Or the inland revenue, or whatever they’re called now.

Actually, she’s going to be bloody furious when she finds out they’ve cancelled her pension. And how few people turned up at her funeral. How no-one even ate the sandwiches I’d made and that they’d all ended up in the bin.

Maybe I should let her call everyone.

__________

Notes:

1. Written on June 30th, 2016

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Support An Accumulation Of Things

If you like the things you've read here please consider subscribing to my patreon or my ko-fi.

Patreon subscribers get not just early access to content and also the occasional gift, but also my eternal gratitude. Which I'm not sure is very useful, but is certainly very real.

(Ko-fi contributors probably only get the gratitude I'm afraid, but please get in touch if you want more).

Thank you!