Big Sky
Instilled understanding, she is not a whore nor the soul of a whore, but a mother, pallid, but a versioned mother.
The lady passes in and out of Roundup mid-April, without the man this time, sleeps at the Big Sky and orders pots of coffee straight to the room which she drinks from dixie cups like espresso shots. She fills the car’s tank with one hand pressed, one folded in the small of her back, never messes with the trigger lock so one’d assume she’s from the area; below bulky sunglasses, the whites of her eyes spackled with husk-hued nevi. She eats mostly the oily beans in her niçoise, stopped eating eggs, apparently, since the last trip around — allergies were reflux, what an EPI to the thigh could give her then versus now, she wonders if she should be scared at the hotel without the man.
Her daughter’s letters are folded in threes and fours between forty pairs of rotting panties, moved from case to drawer to air out, unwashed, polyester blended. They’re pulled out when a vacation family unit moves across the hog rump wintered halls of the motel, in the off-chance they glance through her wispy blinds and wonder. Instilled understanding, she is not a whore nor the soul of a whore, but a mother, pallid, but a versioned mother. In one letter,
They realize I’m allergic to penicillin. County hospitals are for dejected people, right? The crabapples are poison to the horses, so they say, so I’m collecting a few for the ghost of Lexi’s boyfriend. He sits at the end of her bed each night and strokes the base of her feet. If he drops to my bed I’ll have to poison him.
She never received a call about an overnew penicillin allergy. Her daughter is a liar. She refers to the stolen diary, removing grafted hairs and fibers of her own, rifling in assumption. The Centre is expensive, but the divorce is only defamation, so she maintains her candied apple luxuries in Western anonymity.
The diary is blackened with shame, albeit counterfeit shame, and it must be closed before her eyes. It cannot be true, for if it were, there should be police barricades lining the Big Sky and a battering at her door. A lady, a mother, should know to call this person and that person when the child pleas this pain and that suffering. The coffee is flaccid in the cup. A mother is observational and obsessive and intentional and beautiful. A daughter is her new breast. The diary reeks of pink skin and pack-aways.
The hall is lit a burnished aqua and her arms appear picket white, thin. If she were to hold her body more than a moment in the light, she was certain she’d be able to witness her cells splitting and mingling below the skin. That was a haunted thought. The opaque ice was for her blistered palms, gripped to bubbles on the steering wheel, pin-pricked to drain and ooze over the side of the bed. She took fifty-odd photos to upload to her Facebook wall, but was waiting for day to break on the East Coast. In that same morning, she was to eat very little and cough very timely and drive with ace-bandaged fingers to abduct her daughter.
She’d arrived in Roundup near two weeks ago, initially with urgency, her daughter having knocked a chair and dangled a bit too long. Rope burn gave a nasty infection, she’d been informed, and the hospital bill was forwarded not to the man but the lady. The man was not privy to such information since the separation, and for that he was a designed fathead. She hadn’t returned any calls from the Centre in a few days. Her daughter’s letters were faxed, censored, forlorn. She was frozen in machine time, young and puckish, sulfitic, dying. The lady carried with her an EPI pen and a credit card with a dead name. Her hands were healing too fast. She’d have to grip harder next time.
There were no photos taken of the hanging, and had there been, she’d have asked to store them for medical records. She was the granddaughter of a Montessori nurse and it did not show as out-and-out as she so desired. A swollen cat with a chunk taken out of its head licked its underbelly outside her room. She skidded a clump of ice toward it, keeping her machine jerky close to the chest. The cat, offended by the cold, retreated between the rail wirings. She was a-bulge with a pregnancy, or a tumor, her wrists thin and quaking. Drink it soon, if you’re so thirsty, the lady kicked the ice at the cat, her curved grip on the railing faltered, and down she fell. Her hands flew to her mouth, and once the silence and security was confirmed, they fell again to palm pockets for the room key, slack-faced she re-entered and chewed flaccid beef in front of the television.
The drive was protracted by design. A jelly bean factory. Hash browns. Apothecary. Hand soap. Pepsi cola. Cat cafe. University supply. Raptor carcass. She wanted not for her daughter to die. This was out of the question. Fifteen years ago, with a sagging belly and perforated anus, she wanted for her to dissolve. Then came handprints and sandwich crusts and leotards and mirrored hair patterns. She was better surviving. It was better for her. She urinated with every sneeze and the man purchased blackout curtains for intimacy, then found intimacy with a cesarian woman, so she punched her gut for a decade until it hollowed and burst with stones. Her daughter cut her own bangs and she considered suicide.
The Centre was off a rusted desire path, trotted and heeled in, equine musked, half-hollow. Peachleaf willow, chitalpa, juniper, chaste. A porch swing, a tree swing, an orange dog, a straitjacketed teenager, a woman named after Salisbury steak, a mormon, a free-willed tampon string. Her daughter, somewhere under Pottery Barn Teen duvets, restrained. She pulled her suitcase to the passenger seat and put together a hospitality basket. Once-used DKNY panties, Poland Spring, plastic-tubed jelly beans, TUMS, clear nail polish. EPI pen. She sprayed the seat with essential oils and water. She flossed her front teeth with a strand of hair. She puckered her lips in the rearview mirror and pulled her shirt collar from her neck, folding it inward to highlight her rashed clavicle. She noted the waning desert bloom. This would be her panorama of saliency. When asking for her daughter, she would use the words succor, privation, guts and honor. When touching her, she would apologize. When touching her, she was to feel no atonement.