Tell Me Dorothy Knight
If she had asked how little prepared I was to be her mother, I’d have told her how she screamed when I touched her neck, tucked her chin, wouldn’t let me wash it, and summer sweat would ring. I’d have told her how long it took for the bite mark on her thigh to fade, how she cried when sunlight hit her face,
riding in the backseat, and I only turned up the radio. I’d have mentioned I taught her to duck at the name on her birth certificate, an epithet, and she loved dehydrated space ice cream I brought home from a class field trip. I’d have told her I locked her on the porch when she woke at night, screaming, hands balled into fists, pistoning her Barney blanket to the end of the bed with the heels of her feet. I never set the cordless phone down. I carried her planked body outside and wouldn’t let her back in until I heard her quiet through the door. She had a walker ringed in an aluminum bumper, hard little wheels that crushed my feet, zwieback teething cookies smashed in her seat, her hands that reached for me. She smelled like WIC gifted Simulac, vitamin D milk that was never the same after the freeze. If she had asked, I’d have told her I was the only girl on the block drinking Juicy Juicy from the can all summer break, lying with my face pressed to the floor vent grate, while a pillow tilted the milk in her bottle down to her lips. But she didn’t, and she was waiting. I told her she’d been a fat baby, a Michelin man, a caterpillar floating ass up in the garden tub, that she was beautiful, that I could tell we were related, that she looked just like me.