Sorry, I Left It at My Mom’s House ~Sophia Yevoli~ At 11:30 on a Wednesday, the night was so cold and blustery umbrellas shut inside-out. His mom lay on a cot in a room with beige walls and died once. God watched from the west window, moon a spotlight on a 50¢ pen advertising an investment firm. His mom came alive and his dad cried and God smiled at what was left of her stomach, split in half. No wind slunk in but the clipboard shifted and revealed a name: Cameron, it said, but the ink ran out around the ‘e’ so it read Cam. In preschool his dad called him Cam so we did too. Only his mom called him Cameron and it stuck, not the way memories stuck--like sounds of screaming and his dad leaving out the back window-but it stuck like too-tight collars do, like a uniform he can’t take off, Cameron monogrammed script on his school collar. So Cam used a sticky note to cover the ‘eron’ on his uniform. Only his mom called him Cameron, so at school just Cam was okay. One day Cam didn’t show up. I was playing GoGos in the corner where I pretended I was a piece of furniture on the alphabet carpet; A storm raged until the windows shuddered and I wondered if Cam got stolen by the wind, flown off on a Mary Poppins umbrella. Then he wobbled in like a zombie who’d been torn in half; he sat on the letter ‘s,’ sighed the letter ‘o,’ and didn’t flick his GoGo very hard, so it stayed right there on the letter ‘s’ with him. He tugged at his collar, buttoned all the way up to his chin and said his dad wouldn’t be picking him up anymore, so if I could please call him Cameron instead.
38
