My mom died two years ago. It was a long, excruciating process that ended up with her being in the ICU for a month on a ventilator, slowly drowning to death in lungs that were too withered and tired to carry on. The whole experience was God-awful traumatic: heartbreaking, agonizing, ghoulish.
After two years I have found that grief doesn’t recede, it just got molded into my life like a fitted sheet. I sometimes take it for granted, but I have to take it out once in a while, give it a shake and wash it. I can go for days without thinking about it, but it’s always there. I’ll always have it in my life, and it will always be king-sized.
It was universally acknowledged, amongst their friends and family, that Sophia and Drew were one of the world’s more elusive creatures; a perfectly happy couple.
Married for three years, second marriages both, they had skipped past the brutal stages of life. It wasn’t that they hadn’t done the hard yards, Sophia was careful to explain to those interested, it was that they hadn’t had to do them together. Drew had never borne witness to the appalling moment when Sophia had slapped the beetroot red face of her squalling newborn. Sophia had never been abandoned to cope with three children under three by a younger Drew off on a dirtbike weekend. It was by tacit agreement that they shared these snippets of their former lives; God knows the guilt I feel, but I was pushed to the limit, and Jeez I was selfish, I can see that now, but only so they could hold them up as mirrors to the new, untarnished people they now were to each other.…
In the room, they talked – just the two of them – in total darkness, harrowing through the losses, the hurts, the threats.
The room – thick, black walls, cement floor – came with the house. Its usage shifted over the years, from bomb shelter to darkroom to wine cellar. They left it empty when they first moved in. But one night, standing in the room, deciding how it could be used – maybe laundry, maybe storage – they began to speak in the dark – about memories and dreams, shards of images arising from within. She told him her nightmare of a horse on fire. He told her of a cockroach he’d once found on his pillow that crawled into his sleep, night after night.…
The streets were empty, eerie even. No children played in their yards, no laughter filled the air, nothing. Things are not like they used to be. But as I roll down the road, bass bumping and the volume on high, the neighborhood fades away and I find myself elsewhere.
I’m still in my car, but the outside world has all but disappeared, drowned out by the noise of my past. I clutch the steering wheel as memories flicker by like frames on a film reel, unable to comprehend the blur of years past. Deep breaths. Count to ten. My hand instinctively reaches for the radio, nothing a little music won’t cure.
Country. A twangy guitar comes over the stereo, accompanied by a sad story sung by a hurt man.…
Mama, you’ve been in this bed— the covers molding to your chin—for weeks and brother wants a bottle but I can’t reach the cups and your face flushes when I stand on the kitchen counter and your tears are up to the ceiling and I don’t want to drown.
Papa has left again with the wallet from your purse and the last-standing television and I’ve wept for weeks and can’t swallow anymore. And I wonder if the ceiling changes the longer you stare at it—if you’re lifting yourself up and out from here, far over
the broken furnace, the empty fridge, the pawnshop wedding rings and into a city where the sun always hits the backs of your arms, transforms you into someone worth saving, a golden girl. …
I’ve never told anybody about those kids before. Probably because if they asked questions I might break down and blab the whole story and that would just start trouble, knowing my family. Isn’t it weird how people think they know their own mother when she’s carried this secret for over seventy years?
My daughter-in-law spends time with me now and then when my son, Georgie, brings her down from Pennsylvania where their house is. He runs a business here in New Jersey and stays with me during the week while she’s usually alone at home in the mountains with woods all around and a lake in front. They have bears and coyotes and fisher-cats and all kinds of critters there, but she says she isn’t scared when Georgie is gone.…
Ellen Birkett Morris is the author of Lost Girls, a collection of short stories. Her fiction has appeared in Shenandoah, Antioch Review, Notre Dame Review, South Carolina Review, and Santa Fe Literary Review, among other journals. She is a winner of the Bevel Summers Prize for short fiction, as well as a recipient of an Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council.
In this episode of ‘Cover to Cover with . . .,’ Morris speaks with Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum about the inspirations, processes, and reception of her books, as well as modern feminism, the impact of COVID-19, and more!
