What Momma Draws… Tawnysha Greene

FICTION Tawnysha Greene

What Momma Draws on Windows

Momma’s favorite book is Revelation and during Bible studies at night with her red marker, she draws on the sliding glass door, the same story each time—the antichrist, the four horsemen, beast with seven heads, ten horns.

She draws a map of the world, points to the king of the north, the east, fighting the lion, says this is happening now, in the news. She sketches the seven churches, the lamb that speaks like a dragon, the woman clothed with sun.

Before bed, we pray with Momma, so that if the rapture comes, we’ll be saved. She says God only takes the children who are blameless, pure. The rest burn in a lake of fire, and when we dream, the lake’s water is black.

One night, Grandma comes over and after dinner, Momma gets the Bibles and I let Grandma borrow mine, show her the highlighted verses, the pictures of dragons I’ve drawn in the margins like the ones Momma makes on the sliding glass door.

Grandma doesn’t listen to Momma, plays games with us when she isn’t looking, sits at attention when Momma turns around. It makes us

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laugh and Momma gets mad, takes our Bibles, sends us to bed.

Momma and Grandma talk late and we don’t say the sinner’s prayer before bed, don’t ask for God to make us clean. By morning, Grandma’s gone and Momma’s still asleep and we play in our room until mid‐day.

We go to Momma’s room to wake her up, but we can’t find her. Her clothes are in her bed under the blankets, laid out like she was sleeping, her watch on her pillow. We pull the covers off and find her socks at the bottom of the bed, underwear inside pajamas.

We run outside to find out who is gone, who else left behind, and we find Momma outside the door. She had been watching us through the windows. She is wearing her own clothes. Her Bible is in her hand. The Rapture never came.

Every night after that, we are serious during Momma’s Bible studies, sit away from Grandma and in the mornings, we get out of bed, sneak down the hall to see if Momma’s still there. She is and we open the sliding glass door, watch the sun rise over the trees. We pray to God, kneeling in the cold, look to heaven for the people Momma draws on the windows, for the angels, the woman of the sun, twelve stars around her head, the moon at her feet.

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POEM David Rigsbee

Masha

I’m listening to the violins shimmer, a cheap and self‐conscious attempt at emotional presentiment, like Wordsworth’s daffodils—only black. It’s perhaps only a composer’s joke (here, Rachmaninoff’s) so heavily does the music hover between the quotation marks of what it feels, of what in some way it must be, until it reaches a chromatic delta, then regroups into a swell of melody. To tell you the truth, it reminded me—in the multivalent way music does—of a time I drove to Montreal to marry a Russian girl, Masha, so that, like Auden’s wife, she could peel off immediately on crossing the border and go her way into civilization, as Wystan and Thomas Mann intended. I had been put up to this escapade by a friend, himself an émigré, and imagined its potential far into the future, for literary treatment. But what I found was a series of quizzical beings: a mother, a sullen ex‐husband, and some other persons identifiable only by grunts and movements in the background.

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When Masha appeared, I beheld a woman with a full mustache, a beauty marred in an atrocious and pitiless way not only by brutal politics, but by something more hostile in nature, something against which the mere barbarities of the materialist State were just buffetings of the otherwise inert. We went for tea, and after listening to my rehearsed entreaty, she told me in tenderness and with tact, why this was a fool’s errand, why Canada, even with an ex‐spouse in tow, ended her pilgrimage more appropriately than the States. I left as the sun eased into the lake, feeling empty and ashamed of using and also, of being used. I felt like an aide‐de‐camp who had screwed up at Yalta, having lost nuance and substance both, and the second‐to‐last thing he remembered was the swishing capes and the wheelchair’s crunch, as the principals exited the raised dais, and everyone turned and glimpsed the Black Sea, all swells and wheeling seagulls, one last time.

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