On the night her mother died she found herself feigning sleep in the room where the woman had sighed away forty years of solitude, an absent husband reduced to the slicing of moonlight through the blinds, to the scuttle of mice in walls that clung hard to nicotine and unfulfilled promises. Squatter’s rights, the didgeridoo rattle of a smoker’s hack in those final years, the way the creation myth her mother had shared with her as a child always started with a patient woman and ended with despair, a plea she had come to recognize as the trepanning of tedium, as the harried beating of wings that had come to mistrust gravity.
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