Photo: SC Martinez

Published in The Blue Mountain Review, September 2023

My thirty-year-old son sits across from me in the neighborhood diner. His hair is thinning at the front, but too long. He needs a haircut. At six months, he had a head of hair so thick it looked like an old man’s toupee. 

I stumble into the emergency room, directed to a body strapped to a gurney, the face covered in blood, one leg splayed out at an unnatural angle. Who is this?

He smiles at a little joke he’s told me, and I see his straight even teeth, so different from his mouth as a two-year-old with milk teeth like a tiny comb. 

A bloody hand reaches out to me with the tapered fingers and long thumb of a pianist. I shrink away from its coldness, but I know this hand. 

He butters his toast and tells me about his week at work. His eyelashes are as long and dark as they were at birth, and they brush his cheeks when he smiles. 

A neck brace keeps his mouth from moving. But I hear a faint voice say, I’m okay mom. I’m okay, don’t cry. It’s as if it’s come from a ghost. 

I worry he works too much at his new job, striving to climb the rungs to the next level. As a toddler, he never sat down to eat. He always had an agenda, a project, a mission.

I need to cradle him. I need to count his fingers and toes and run my finger over his tiny ears, his nose, his mouth. But they take my baby away to the O.R. 

I take his grownup hand in mine, squeeze it gently, and let go before he does. As a boy, he never wanted to hold my hand to cross the street, but I held it anyway.

Artwork: © SC Martinez

Published in The Blue Mountain Review, September 2023

My father’s mother was crazy, but I loved her. She lived near the steel mills, and everything was covered with a flimsy grey blanket of silt that rose and fell when the wind stirred. She subsisted entirely on grapefruit. I think she was crazy. She tried to burn herself because she loved my father too much, my mother said. He was her only child, her only love. She called herself Dolly, dyed her hair red, and curled it. There was a mole near the corner of her mouth that danced when she spoke. Mystery paperbacks filled her house and birdseed from her parakeets. She would hold a seed in her lips and her bird would gently retrieve it. My mother said she pushed her blind mother down the steps. Dolly wore cloth flowers soaked in perfume that left a trail wherever she moved in her daylong battle against the dust. My mother told me half stories about her that led me to finish in my mind as terrible as I could imagine. She had no right to try to make me hate her too, to let me doubt her love. Dolly, let me sleep in the little room in the big brass bed by the window where the breeze spars with the curtains and the clock in the hall counts the seconds. She had a heavy iron elephant painted yellow that, by turning its tail, a single cigarette would drop from its belly. She broke her hip falling down the steps rushing to escape the fire. They took her to a nursing home, and we didn’t go to Indiana to visit her any more. When she died seven years later my mother didn’t tell me. I was away at school, and she didn’t tell me. I always wanted red hair.