"She is the lone soul who will listen to my excurses on the word “bandicoot,” or why my boss did not use an exclamation point, or how I will someday name a cat “Staretz” for the holy wanderers of 19th-century Russia." |
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I bought a pearl tiara so I can face my mother on Fridays. I need one day a week when I do not blow-dry my bangs for anyone. My mother loves me even haggard and believes I am not yet too old for anything. I quarantine cowlicks so she will not worry. She says I look like the Childlike Empress from The Never-Ending Story.
She says I look younger since my divorce. She loses her faith when she tries to say his name. My mother believes in irresistible grace. My mother transfigures into a carnival gypsy with access to real curses at the sound of his syllable. I tell her I don’t regret closed doors. I know the hallway is long. I know it is too late for me to become an elite gymnast, or to learn to fold a fitted sheet. I blew these shut with my birthday candles. |
Photo by Razieh Bakhtom
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She shuffles her weight. It is the other doors that bother her, the ones I painted shut myself. I tell her I painted them hot pink. I admire my handiwork. I will never again scan the funhouse faces of men who could take me to Applebee’s. I will never again molt my sweatshirt cocoons to become an ornamental bird. I will never eat another teaspoon of egg salad. He said I took excessively large bites.
She cannot say his name. She will not buy my foreclosures. Her eyebrow twitches when I tell her I am reading a book about being “single at heart.” She indulges everything else, but she cannot abide this. She is the lone soul who will listen to my excurses on the word “bandicoot,” or why my boss did not use an exclamation point, or how I will someday name a cat “Staretz” for the holy wanderers of 19th-century Russia. But she gets up and begins making a smoothie when I say I will guard my mountain all my days.
“Never say never,” she exhales, and I hold my breath. I watch her liquefy spinach into a shaggy swamp, then serve it to my stepfather. They were forty-two and forty-eight when they met. I watched her do sun salutations on the back of his motorcycle.
I tell my mother that I would endanger a “good man.” I accept his theoretical existence, like riboflavin or the electron. He has been confirmed in the wild and in the self-checkout line. Good for him, I say. I will not give him the password. I will not engorge my adverbs to suckle his ego. I will not hide my music boxes under the bed again, afraid of his impulse purges of my “excess.”
I will not release my strands unless I am alone. I reassure my mother I am not alone. The Holy Spirit can blow through my bangs. The Holy Spirit can blow where the Holy Spirit chooses. I finally agree not to clutch the whole strand of pearls.
She cannot say his name. She will not buy my foreclosures. Her eyebrow twitches when I tell her I am reading a book about being “single at heart.” She indulges everything else, but she cannot abide this. She is the lone soul who will listen to my excurses on the word “bandicoot,” or why my boss did not use an exclamation point, or how I will someday name a cat “Staretz” for the holy wanderers of 19th-century Russia. But she gets up and begins making a smoothie when I say I will guard my mountain all my days.
“Never say never,” she exhales, and I hold my breath. I watch her liquefy spinach into a shaggy swamp, then serve it to my stepfather. They were forty-two and forty-eight when they met. I watched her do sun salutations on the back of his motorcycle.
I tell my mother that I would endanger a “good man.” I accept his theoretical existence, like riboflavin or the electron. He has been confirmed in the wild and in the self-checkout line. Good for him, I say. I will not give him the password. I will not engorge my adverbs to suckle his ego. I will not hide my music boxes under the bed again, afraid of his impulse purges of my “excess.”
I will not release my strands unless I am alone. I reassure my mother I am not alone. The Holy Spirit can blow through my bangs. The Holy Spirit can blow where the Holy Spirit chooses. I finally agree not to clutch the whole strand of pearls.
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Angela Townsend is an eleven-time Pushcart Prize nominee, twenty-one-time Best of the Net nominee, and the winner of The Iowa Review’s Tim McGinnis Award and West Trade Review's 704 Prize for Flash Fiction. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Blackbird, Five Points, Fourth Genre, JMWW, The Offing, SmokeLong Quarterly, trampset, and Witness. She graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary and Vassar College.
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