VICTORIA STITT maternal dreamscape

I fed her a spoonful of lukewarm soup. She swallowed most of it, the rest dribbling from her dry lips. “And you remember our spring equinoxes.” People had come to the house then, after the sun was gone, circling our backyard and singing something without words, tonal and low. Everyone held a single candle, and their faces were lit with a dark, flickering gold. Mom passed out the crowns of green spring growth she’d spent days making and then she’d join their circle, singing with them loudly at first and then softer until her voice was just another sound swallowed up by the choir. Me and my brothers would huddle together in the kitchen watching this all through the screen door. Dad would be gone on a job, or if he was home either passed out drunk or on his way there. And one by one each candle would go out, until all we could see was shadowy figures, licked by moonlight, rising out of that sea of deep, rhythmic song. She believed everything was connected, that everything was in some constant, cosmic cycle—that death was only the beginning of a new journey. But whatever journey she thought she’d go on when she passed, she thought she could only start it through fire. “Don’t put me in the ground,” she’d said, her hand like a gnarled claw gripping the soft meat of my arm. She coughed, her gray eyes watering, her mouth puckered into a tight, chapped hole. “Please, Corinne, don’t let them put me in the ground. In the deep, in the dark—where there’s nothing, where you’ll never see the sky again. You can’t do that to your mamma, baby, you can’t trap me there.” She pulled me closer, our faces nearly touching. Her skin was dry, and her body was as thin and sharp as a blade. None of her clothes fit anymore, and all she wore was too-big nightgowns from her rag pile, starting to yellow from age. “Let me be free,” she said, her grip so tight now it hurt. “Let me go, Corinne; let me be free.” Her voice went low, and she was trembling. My face was wet and snotty, tears falling before I could stop them, and I wanted to pull away but she held fast, too tight and too close, refusing to let go. “You have to burn me,” she said in a whisper, the sound a chokehold around me. “You have to burn me and send all my ashes up to the sky.”

There only thing I could hear was the heavy rasp of my father’s labored breath as we walked along the rough path through the trees. He shuffled into a clearing and used the toe of his boot to move a pile of leaves. The underneath was damp and stuck together, a mass of dark plant matter mashed together into a blanket over the ground.

HANNAH MADONNA 53