on estrangement

Once my mother broke her foot. It was a juice tin. She was carrying a tin of juice up the stairs in the first house I could remember, with the pale blue carpet. I stood watching as she keeled over, juice purpling up the split-level grout. In the weeks of crutches she pointed to things on the ground and we would hand them to her. I liked this game. A matryoshka, mommy’s arms. During my younger sister’s deliver, my mother hemorrhaged and clotted and blackened a piece of her lung. She showed us the contours on her belly, the skin like a rug hung over a balcony. This is where mommy got stapled back together, she said. This is how mommy almost went away. She had been gone for a month. I was scared to touch her. I handed her remotes, socks, books. My father is not in these experiences, therefore he makes no impression on memory. Even then he was a windmill.