Warning: the following story shows a workshop accident that involves blood. If you're afraid of blood, it might not be the best pick. Try your luck with another story!
Jennie rubbed the sandpape
...
[+]
The kitchen looks just like I remember it. Green walls peeling in all the right places, battered wood floors. And the sagging cabinets, painted white, with their doors that never quite close right.
It's morning, early enough that the sun hasn't quite touched the windows still shrink-wrapped against the Minnesota winter wind. I know I am dead because I know this cannot exist. I imagined this, once, and it is so long gone it hurts to touch. Somewhere a mourning dove coos and my whole body is the sound, the feather peal of it slipping into the walls.
I am six years old and I am twenty and I am forty one. I am not me but I am myself, once, now, and forever. Someone is sitting across from me, her legs crossed in the farmhouse chair I stood gap-toothed on to hold up my sugar cookie, freshly frosted, for a photo once. She's my sixth grade science teacher. I watch her sighing into a mug of coffee, the steam curling around her face as she brings it to her lips. When she pulls it away, satisfied, she is my mother. It's the one I knew too briefly, lines faint on her skin and her hair still vibrantly red.
"Do you drink coffee?" she asks. Her voice is low and leathered, the bottom string of a viola being bowed. The radiator hums beneath the sink. I used to sit with my back against it until the skin could take no more. The feeling of hot flesh against my cool knuckles and her voice, asking what day of the week it is. "I thought you did." She pushes a full mug across the chipped table and leans back. The corners of her mouth turn down as she smiles. I've never, ever, seen a thing so beautiful.
"Are you God?" I hold the mug between my palms.
She laughs. "You don't believe in God."
The silence between us lies like a cat purring between my legs. The yard outside the window over my shoulder is beginning to gather sun, the tips of the fence slats only barely tasting the light. I think it's October. The leaves on the ground are crusted in frost and a lump in my throat grows because through the glass and saran wrap I can smell it, that decaying sillage of wood rot and grass and hot metal. A wind vane turning just a little.
When I turn back to God she's my sister, wide blue eyes and the point of my chin cradled in her hand as she leans forward.
"Are you God?" I ask again.
She thinks a minute, looks out the window. "Sure." Maybe she was my principal once, or someone that rang me up at Walgreens when I was fifteen and miserable. "I'm everything. Whatever you want me to be."
God that isn't God is looking back at me now, and again she's someone I don't know. She's pretty enough to be a model, high cheekbones and a thick fern of a scar across her left cheek. Stacks of bracelets rattle and clack as she reaches forward for the cup.
"Is this heaven?" I say it and she studies me for a long moment.
"No."
"I want to go home."
"This is home. You know that."
"No, I mean..." Again she's different. "I'm trying to make sense of this," I sigh. "I want to know what comes next."
"Well, you're going home."
I look at the mug in front of me, the steam still pouring into the air. I used to get out of bed in the night to run to my mother. "I don't want to die," I cried. "I don't want to be dead."
"So this is it?" I ask quietly.
She considers this, considers me. God that isn't God sits back in her chair. "No. Not unless you want it to be. There's a lot to do."
"To do?" My worst fear when I was four was that death was just laying in the ground. Nothing. This should feel more relieving.
"You've done a lot. I want you to know it. The people that meant the most to you- they're waiting- and the people you touched. The kisses, the fights, the times
you got drunk," she lays her cheek in her hand. She looks like a shadow, all rounded edges and soft descents. "Everyone you punched, everyone you lied to, everyone you hurt and who hurt you, everyone you mattered to. The bus drivers and babies you waved at."
"Seems like a lot to get through." I say. She holds up a finger to shush me. "The good sex and bad food," she continues, "the bad sex and good food, the people you fell in love with, the people you lusted after- there is a difference."
She looks pointedly at me. My cheeks, or whatever they are with a body made of molars and dust bunnies, grow hot. I can't defend myself to God. "The time waiting at the bus stop, the cigarettes with strangers, the art, and movies and books and music, all of the music-" this she says as if it were like doing paperwork.
"-And the trips, broken bones and animals that lived a few more days because of you-"
"Okay." I stop her, my hands batting at hers. "I get it."
And she does stop. She's different again, now about twenty with red hair and a gap in her teeth. The sun is halfway across the yard now, and it looks warm. I watch as a squirrel runs across the branches of the tree over the garage and a barrage of acorns fall.
"It sounds good. And I want to go home." I say.
She says nothing. Only sips from her mug again, looking guilty, or at least regretful.
"I know." she says. "But it's not that simple."
"How? You're God."
"I'm not."
"Fine, then, you're- what, the universe?"
She looks up at the ceiling quizzically, and opens her mouth like one does when there are not enough words in a lifetime to say what is simple. "In a sense." She's my mom again. I watch her fiddle with the bakelite bangle around her wrist, turning it like a secret combination. I miss her.
"It's not a matter of going anywhere. You want to be five again and you are. You want to bleed again and you can't."
"I want an answer." I push the mug in her hands down to the table as she brings it to her face. When it spills over the rim in Rohrschach patterns, she glances back at me.
"You want an answer." She's different again. Older, with weathered brown skin and henna staining her fingertips in rusty loops and swirls. "There's no answer."
"That's not fair."
"Life's not fair."
"Then death should be."
This makes her smile, a grin eating into the deep grooves of her face. "That's true."
We're silent. The morning laps at the windows around us, casting crescent-shaped beams across the beaten floorboards. I used to lay on my stomach and try to catch them with my tongue.
"I know you." She sets the mug down.
"What?"
"You want to understand love and pain and understand death, you want it so much that you're putting off divinity, I mean-Joan of Arc and seeing your first cat again- to lay it all out with me.
"You want to be five again and you want to lose your virginity a hundred times over and it'll never be enough. You want to beat the ending of everything until it's bloody. You won't listen to me when I say, you can't keep this. You want to go home, but you mean home, once."
I want to say something but I can think of nothing. I feel ashamed and relieved and so, so tired.
"I don't understand."
"You were never meant to."
There's nothing more she can say. There's nothing I want to hear. It's for the better.
When we speak again, the coffee in front of me is cold. She pulls it toward her, empties her cup into mine. She's my mom again, this time when I was seventeen and she'd just gotten divorced and was full to the brim with freedom and sorrow.
"I love you." She says. "I made you."
"I know." I say.
"I'm sorry."
"I know."
The sun is up now. The room is full with it. We watch the dust catch the light in every particle and I'm home. The universe breathes next to me and we finish our coffee together.
When we're done, I am four years old and she picks me up. The dishes can wait until later.
"It was good, wasn't it?" she whispers to me, my head on her shoulder.
We walk together towards the kitchen door.