Mother, Teresa

Kristina Markovska

It seemed the clouds hung themselves, with their long, limp bodies leaking down to the geosphere. Terry is driving under these dark bodies, watching the humid pre-rain air condense itself. The setting sun through the droplets made the road look like a funhouse mirror. The ground groaned, the car creaked, Terry kept on.

There was a time in non-human history when the Earth was a planetesimal. And sometime before that, everything that Ever Will Be was still Hydrogen and Helium colliding and crashing and coalescing in a protosun. Akin to an egg becoming a zygote, it hardens itself into something that will continue dividing and splitting.

The droplets thickened. They heavied themselves, and the clouds got lighter. Do you have a lighter? Do you have a smoke? Terry’s mother is a smoker. Terry has never read the Bible. Terry knows the term my brother’s keeper. Terry knows the term is actually “Am I my brother’s keeper?” The term, taken from somewhere in the Bible, is: “Then the Lord said to Cain, ‘Where is Abel your brother?’ He said, ‘I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?’” Here is something to keep: billions of years of coalescence and crashes and cracks and crack pipes and shared heroin needles and collapsed veins and a placenta like a protosun. For some, the umbilical cord, the great string of fate, strings them up.

Picture the difference between a mid-morning glance that seems to say I wish you could be my mom and not just my mother, I wish I could be your kid and not just your daughter, I wish I could say this, I wish you could know–and a midnight glance that seems to say I wish that you will wake up dead, I will not even have a mom to mourn, I wish I could engrave your tombstone myself, I wish I could bury you with everything that I will never have to say. The scene is all the same. All this to say, she takes the highway for a third of the way and spends triple the amount of time taking backroads. The ones where no speed feels slow enough to avoid bounce. Ones where it doesn’t feel right to speed, and not even because of the bounce. Arrives.

Plays with a stick in the mud. Traces outlines of the bank parallel to where it really is. Sniffs the wet air into her sinus cavity past her unpierced nostrils. Inches closer to the creek, stick in hand, where the water is slowly pooling. Uses her boot as an embankment. Saves the less wet mud from a temporary flood. Soon, the water pools around her boot. Her jeans are mostly brown now, from splatter and mud and creek. She drops her stick in the sticky mud and sighs. Her pants are soaked. Her stick is sinking.

Her mom is at home, asleep. Ages ago, in an emergency room, Terry’s mother learned that the infant’s umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck. The infant body was nearing its eighth month, floating in amniotic fluid, turning blue before it could even pink up. There were two options. Allow the body to regulate itself, pick its own fate, unravel and breathe, grow up and together. Allow the body to regulate itself, pick its own fate, carry what cannot breathe, carry the thought of carrying, return when ready, excise, get a jar full of ash back, move on and forward.

Terry’s mother left the building with her hand on her still-full stomach. She was eight months clean. She was doing well. She was going to be a mom. And here a question is posed: when does a person become a parent? At conception? At birth? At the moment they create a zygote? At their child’s birth? When they decide to stick around? To stop sticking third-hand needles in their arm? And here a question is posed: what is the closest point of entry to the uterus that still avoids it? Terry’s mother thought for a moment. Reached into her glove compartment. Took a breath. Stuck a 9mm just distal to something that needs 9 months. Ten months, really. Shot herself right in the right hip. Limped back into the emergency room, saying my daughter, save my daughter. And collapsed on the floor.

Terry’s mother woke up a mother and hooked up to machines and hooked on the painkillers they put her on. She was eight months clean. The hospital did not care. Nor did they know.

Terry has tomato tattoos on her hips. They were left a deep red after she didn’t pay her mother’s dealer. The man had no choice but to beat her. Terry’s tomatoes, now, are green. Funny how they unripened. The Cambrian Explosion was 540 million years ago.

How can you assign time? How can we assign terms? If you exchange the w in we with an H then you get He. He, like the previously mentioned Helium or the previously mentioned Lord that says where is Abel. Consider how the previous statement changes meaning if it becomes a question, a swirl added above a dot.

Terry decides she has had enough of pondering and gets to thinking, takes a last look at the stick, and walks away from it. There is more mud on her boot than her car. She grins at this, gets in the car and gets going. Her mother was a geology student before she was anything else.

Everything we know ever started with the Big Bang. The Milky Way Galaxy is spiral. Milky Ways are a swirl of milk chocolate and caramel and nougat. Know that. There is nothing to know. There, is nothing to know. Where are you?

East of the backward L, there is a crater. It is northwest of where Terry is. Terry is heading to Odessa, to the Odessa Meteor Crater. At its deepest, the OMC was 100 feet. Now, after years and years and winds and rains, it is 15 feet. This means that the lowest point now is only 15% of the way down. What says more about the state of being?

Some loose math: if the OMC is roughly 15 feet deep and has a diameter of 550 feet, we can say its volume is roughly 1,134,375 cubic feet. Of these calculated one million and something feet, not all of them actually make up the crater. This is because we used the formula for the volume of a sphere. But the crater is not a sphere, not really. What does proximity mean for meaning?

Terry is about halfway between where she was and where she was going. She was always going to make her way back. Back in time for coffee with her mother. But the bumps in the road knocked the car battery’s heart out of rhythm, and it stopped. Died. The battery is dead. The car is dead.

Here we impose terms, assume them. We cannot reach into Terry to think the way she would. We cannot feel what she would. Her ribs turning russet, she glances at the rearview.

Full term is 40 weeks. 77% of a calendar year. Terry’s term was 33 weeks. This term is termed premature. If we round down and guesstimate and say the OMC is one million, one hundred thirty-two thousand cubic feet, and we were to fill it with something, how much of the something would fit? If you were to attempt filling the crater with anything, it would effectively destroy it. It would effectively destroy the 15% of itself it has left. Did Terry enter the world 82.5% herself?

Terry was in Little League. The team won. Went out to celebrate. Terry’s mother excused herself to the bathroom twice. Once to piss, once to take a handful of pills. She was almost equally relieved on both trips. The kids had their chicken tenders and fries, their cheese pizza, and their pepperoni pizza with the pepperonis picked off. They drank their orange juice and off-brand cola, and water, and chewed up the ice in the cups. Terry’s mother could not stomach anything. Her not-eating did not stick out amongst the other not-eating mothers.

Terry has two numbers saved on her cell. There were two options. Her mother, who is 19 years older than her. Her mother’s dealer, who is 4 years older than she is.

Terry calls her mother’s dealer. Promises him a seat for coffee if he makes sure they can make it back in time. Promises him the money, the brownies she makes, the shoes she’s wearing, her lighter he always borrows for too long, a tattoo in his honor, a star, a wish, a poem. He is not a bad man, Terry knows this. Terry knows without knowing: just the brownies will suffice.

He arrives right when the night starts warming back up. Terry is shivering when he gets there. Her muddied jeans take up the seat next to her. Her mother’s dealer says hello, glad you are where you said you would be, and takes the jumper cables out of his trunk. Terry says hello, thank you for getting here.

He puts red to dead, and Terry walks to his car. Red to donor, she opens the door. Black to donor, she gets in the car. Black to metal, and she starts it. Turns the heating on. Stops shivering just as her car begins to. The man gives a double thumbs up. Takes the black off the metal, and Terry opens the car door. Black off the donor, and she gets out. Red off the donor, and walks to her own car. Red off undead, and she says thank you. She says I am sorry for leaving your car door open. She says thank you for coming this way, I will meet you at the house. He says you’re welcome, goodbye.

The car becomes a moving object again. Terry drives with the windows down, without rain this time. She hoses mud off her jeans once she gets to her driveway. Wrings as much water as she can out of them, and enters the house. Throws the jeans into the hamper, now mostly mudless. There will always be atomic mud between the blue.

The sleep is just beginning to wear off her mother. The door squeaks a hello to the dealer as he steps into the house. His car is parked in its designated spot by the curb. He welcomes himself into the kitchen and begins making breakfast. Terry takes a quick shower and dresses herself in clothes that are not her own. Her mother limps into the kitchen. Says hello to her dealer. Asks if Terry is awake yet. Asks can I have a hit before she walks in, please, can I have just a hit, just a bump just a bit of whatever you have? He says no, you can have eggs once they’re done.

Terry coughs at the doorway.

She does not say I don’t know how to be a daughter. She does not say I am afraid of becoming a mother. She does not say thank you for starting breakfast. Or thank you for starting my car. She just says excuse me and takes a trio of plates out from the cupboard. Sets them on the counter. Her mother does not say anything, just takes out a trio of mugs. Sets them on the table. Her mother opens the cutlery drawer and takes out two forks and a spoon. Sets them on the table. Says I know you like spoons better. Touches Terry’s cheek and says hey baby, hey honey, what happened?

The dealer laughs into the eggs he’s scrambling. His index and middle finger knuckles fit perfectly around Terry’s orbital bone. Terry puts her hand on her mother’s hand and says don’t worry mama, it was just the cold biting. Terry’s mother accepts this and takes the orange juice out of the fridge. A man, a woman, and a daughter stand together in a kitchen.

Terry’s car is nearing two hundred thousand miles. It has given out many times, but trucks on. The dealer splits the scrambled eggs between two plates and begins to make an omelet. Her mother moves the pair of plates to the table. Who cares more about Terry? Her mother, who regrets allowing Terry to have an addict for a mother, more than being an addict? Or her mother’s dealer, who makes eggs the way Terry likes them, the week after beating her to a pulp? Her mother pours pulpless orange juice into the mugs, and the omelet gets plated. Terry takes her plate to the table. The three eat.

The mud by the creek, and everywhere that is and has mud, will dry and crack. There are robins in the outside air. There is no instruction manual on how to decrease bone density to allow flight. If anything, all you can do is increase the density and build an iron shell of an exoskeleton, turn yourself into a rocket. If anything, all you can do is shoot yourself in the hip, tattoo tomatoes on it, kick a bruise into it, bite a bruise into it. If anything, Fig. 1 and the first fig are parallel.

Hold your breath, as Terry is now.

Mama, I think the world is an egg. Atoms came together in layers, and the outside one hardened like a shell. And the world came crashing down on itself before it was a world. And I think it’s the same for people, except our deepest layer hardens, not our outside one.

What about the callus you have on your thumb from picking at it? You’ve hardened yourself into something other than skin. When discussing what skin is, you have to begin from the inside out. But we are not discussing skin. Nor is Terry or her company. She and her mother can only talk to each other in hypotheticals, and in-betweens, like parentheticals. Personhood and parenthood. These two are parallel to each other.

The mud drying by the creek will have scrapes of the shore, traced by a stick, parallel to where it really is. In a few thousand years, this petrified stick will see the sun again, much closer now, and think to itself, I’ve been kept by mud for millennia and I will never know the tree I came from again.

Somewhere in Southeast Texas, eons and epochs from now, Terry’s bone density will not matter. Nor does it now, it just is. There will be a time in history when everything that Ever Was will be Hydrogen and Helium again. Implosion and explosion, the same pair that birthed a protosun, will allow it to swallow the world whole. A black hole will continue the process. Or start it. Depends on where it is. Wherever it may be. Whenever it may be. But for now, breakfast is being had.

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KRISTINA MARKOVSKA was born in Skopje, Macedonia and calls Houston, Texas home. She splits her time between studying human development and how language makes us human. She has many reasons to write, but her raison d’etre is her younger sister. You can find her in the back row of an open mic, working with Writers in the Schools, loving San Diego Writers, Ink, and serving as Executive Prose Editor of Glass Mountain.