There wasn’t much to say. Your mother was Peter Banning in Hook, on an extended stay of metaphorically on all fours, rooting around for her globes of sand and soda-lime. The marbles had been swallowed by Big Pharma at this point. Scotch-taped notes with the blue scrawl of words with loops tilting like eagles’ wings rippled in the bedroom fan’s breeze. Snatches of poetry, samplings of a mind bent in on itself, badly. You thought of the way spiders made inverses of themselves in death and then transposed it with an image of a twitching, blackened brain. Your mother’s words were great misfires of misplaced boldness. Everything awry, everything awful.
You were utterly useless and everyone knew it, so you fetched a ten dollar bouquet of orange flowers that held the pretense of daisies and studied art history in the empty, mid-90’s waiting room. It sat deep in its dimness on the left side of the back of the hospital. It felt like something leftover from a yesterday that’d been preserved in the muted colors of small-town medicine, similar to the Unabara Dentetsu Sea Train in Spirited Away. Looking up from your book once you half-glimpsed a shade of a figure, soft and male and filled with the satiation of time. Past sadnesses lived in these walls–bandaged, broken for eternity–but they sat calm in their fate, still as passengers. Rarely did you pass anyone in the stark white hallways, but that made things gentler, somehow, like the place Mo been put for a few days was liminal, snatched from a time of less fuss and floridness. Maybe this drowsy liminality was what you needed–Mom was on her own vehicle, now, situated in a place where life was uncertain at best, but the most paramount thing around.
She was speaking to two separate entities in opposing corners in the room: left, right, right, left, head swiveling at dangerous angles. Her hair tousled on the pillow and her eyes were dark, dilated, spherical with hysteria. A complete loss of control was what you were witnessing in those moments of seized hospital visitations. A holy trinity to the day: morning, afternoon, evening. Each time, full of shouts, accusations, a brand of paranoia you’d always failed at conquering for her when crushed up against the ocean of Mother. The only thing to do was to listen, offer up your time in twenty minute quantities that felt feeble and staged.
That evening, you hear a thump on the roof. Your third floor apartment was lit with sundown. You’d closed the blinds to it all and were lying on the top of the unmade bed, smelling of hospital. The thump sounded like the clumsy landing of some heavy beast. There was movement again—a readjustment, maybe, or redistribution of weight. Roof shingles all shined by the sun. You imagined golden talons, the head of some terrible renaissance lion. But maybe it was nothing, maybe the last snatch of days were adding up to this solar flaring of imagination. Your mind felt brittle and you closed your eyes once again to the July light. A second thump, then scraping on the side of your patio balcony. You raised yourself up on two elbows and waited for a new noise. No energy to move yet, only a bare sort of frightened that scared you more for its shallowness. When self-preservation goes, you’re in real trouble. The expected sound never came and after twenty minutes you got up to run a bath, determined to rinse off any lingering strangeness. Scene change—expedited by the urgent need to feel the pressure of water against your thighs. Things like this didn’t exist anymore. You told this to yourself in the bathroom mirror, straining your mouth open into long, abstracted O’s. Let’s forget, let’s forget, you said to the steam.
Mary Buchanan is a born and bred southerner from Mississippi whose writing flirts with topics centered on mental health, fabulist fiction, and family. She is a writer, educator, and occasional tarot card puller. She received her BA in English from The University of Mississippi Honors College and her MFA in fiction from Louisiana State University, where she served as editorial assistant for The Southern Review. Her hybrid thesis, Rapunzel Has Insomnia, was a finalist for the New Orleans Publishing Lab Prize. Buchanan is founder of the mental health based literature & arts magazine, Libre. Her fiction and nonfiction appears or is forthcoming in: Brilliant Flash Fiction, Hobart, Flash Fiction Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, Gotham Writers' The Razor, Psychopomp Magazine, Permafrost Magazine, Maudlin House, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Erato, Tiny Molecules, and Suburban Witchcraft Magazine.