Mother
Mother, you came home from the hospital holding me in your big-knuckled hands white like ghosts against your black batwing blouse, photos show. You held me close. I was the first in our family of six sons to inherit your twitching black hair and bright blue eyes. When I was older, Mother, a Kool stabbed in your mouth, smoke drifting up into nothing your bright blue eyes like lasers I’d watch you stand in the dim foyer of our pink brick house those paintings of yours behind and around you seeming to nod, to hover near your shoulders like birds of prey. Those paintings of yours spoke of stale hay wagons, our convicted Christ on a stumpy cross, fussy still life’s with dead ducks on white linen. You had fame and fortune, Mother, and you would hover there by the heavy front door surrounded by dead light. You’d stand like a black-garbed angel in pause-mode, frowning at your paintings that were necessary remainders of the darkness people can inflict, each painting like a life-lesson taught. Then you’d go out the front door, spilling regretfully into the bright daylight, dark glasses dragged from your skirt pocket and plunged to your face. You were a commanding figure, a black-clad paranoid successful painter going about your business. When you’d return, you’d stand in front of that treasure trove of your odd-sized, dark paintings with their crevices of dim light emanating from Christ’s arms or from the tiny smear of white on a wine goblet, then glance through into the house, to us, momentarily puzzled, it seemed, by the fact you were our mother. From your paintings dim and dreary of subject, from us your accidental offspring, you took in darkness, took the false white linens and dead still life ducks into your mind and at your easel you continued to fashion exquisite paintings until the day of your death when the six of us, your sons, inherit your darkness.
AJ Atwater’s fiction is published or forthcoming in Gargoyle, Gravel, Green Mountains Review, PANK, Vestal Review, Literary Orphans, The Gravity of the Thing and others.