TELL US WHERE YOU KEEP THE BREAD CRUMBS
Peter Markus
We are sitting side by side by the side of our mother’s bed, and we are saying things to our mother like sit up, get up, open your eyes, like tell us where you keep the bread crumbs, mother, and like, when you make tartar sauce, do you mix the mayonnaise with the relish or do you mix the relish in with the mayo, and how do you know, we sit and we ask this of our mother, when enough is enough. To all of this, us brothers, our asking, our mother, she doesn’t make a sound. She doesn’t even flinch or wince or turn her face to see us in our asking when we pinch at her skin to get her to give us some kind of an answer. So what us brothers do is, we press our ears down close to our mother’s mouth, and over by her nose, to see or maybe hear if she is even breathing. I hear something, I say it to Brother, but I can’t tell what it is, I say. I think she’s just sleeping, I say. What Brother says to this is, I think our mother is dead. We take turns holding onto our mother’s hands. Her hands, in our hands when we hold onto them, they make us brothers both think of dead fish. Our mother’s hands, I tell Brother: I tell Brother to hold them tight. I fish out the knife that we use when we gut and clean and cut off the heads of the fish that we catch out of the dirty river that rivers through this dirty river town, this town our mother never did like: not the fishy river, not the fishy river smells. There was too much mud here for our mother to love: too much rust. And not enough of a sky. Now, only the bone of our mother gives up a fight. After I am done, I take hold of our mother’s other hand and hand this knife over to Brother. Afterwards us brothers, we each take one of our mother’s hands and we go out back into the back of our back yard, back behind where our mother’s garden used to grow big—though it is mostly mud now—and we go over to that creosoted coated telephone pole that us brothers have turned into our back of the back yard fishing pole with fish heads hammered and nailed into its tarry black wood. You can go first this time, I say so to Brother, and so he takes our mother’s hand—I don’t know if it's her left or right—and he hammers the rusty, bent back nail right through. Our mother’s other hand—this hand that I am holding in my hand—what it feels like to me is it feels like it’s made out of wood. When I hammer and nail this hand in next to our mother’s other hand—and I mean hammer it in good: if you didn’t know better, if you were someone who was just walking by one night, you might look up and think, look, up there, there’s a pair of gloves up there on that telephone pole. You might wonder, how did they get up there. You might even think they look even beautiful—our mother’s hands, in the moon’s light, and up against so much other darkness—two stars sparking in the mudness of night.