Mother

When my mother was younger, she had long brown hair and could list on two hands the number of boys she had kissed. When she got to her ring finger, she took it as a sign it was time to marry. My father was not so careful in his counting, and decided later he needed to add some more. What he didn’t know is that there is no counting backwards in love. His hands kept moving forward, fingers ticking off, a poor excuse for a wave goodbye. My mother took my hand and my sister’s hand. She took our hands in her hands, and she showed us how to make birds of them.

Once, my mother boiled water over an open flame to feed us. The spaghetti tasted of campfire, but my sister and I cleaned our bowls, love hunger rising in our bellies. We have never been without dinner, though there were days I could only chew apples on the driveway, throwing the cores down the road like they were some kind of charm against anyone else taking off.

In my dreams, my mother is a prophetess in the woods, foretelling a forest fire. She teaches the oaks how to grow legs and follow the deer to the clearing. Her eyes are that of an owl: large and brown and forward facing. But when my father left us, she didn’t see it coming, like a tornado with no funnel cloud, no weather channel warning. My mother told me about the tornadoes that tore over our home when I was a child, how they sounded like trains on the roof. In the morning, the lawn was littered with shingles and glass. But my mother, she has always been good with a hammer and nails. She patched our roof right up.

Laying of Hands

The boy she loves has been praying over cars since he was eight years old, palm on the dashboard, willing life into the transmission. She thinks about him after the crash, how, when they were together, he prayed over the red Volvo dead on the country road and it started. She loved the way he said Jesus, full of twang and honey. She wanted to plant him in her yard like a sugar maple, so he could give her sweetness when she needed it, but the thing about a car-praying boy is that his feet love the road.

Now, stranded on the street, she wants him to uncrumple the SUV, fill in the crater on the passenger door right behind where she was sitting when the truck plowed in. She wants him to touch her collarbones again, gently salving the bruises. This is the only way she knows how to heal. She puts one hand over her heart, the other on the hood of the Ford. Arms like jumper cables as she whispers Jesus.

Reconstruction

In the fourth grade, she knows what it is to be a body. Gloveless, she sifts mouse bones from an owl pellet. The assignment is to build a whole skeleton out of what has been swallowed and regurgitated, cocooned in its own tangled fur. She pulls out the ribs one-by-one with a pair of tweezers, trying to make a cage of them. She imagines the mouse’s heart howling when the owl hooked her, the sound overpowered by the heartbeat inside the larger bones. She imagines the acid breaking down the mouse’s skin, her heart pumping blood out of the wounds, that blood becoming lost blood, becoming the blood of the dead. She imagines the owl choking her body back up, the violent yawn of her skull resurfacing after he digested her meat. She imagines the pelleted mouse abandoned on the forest floor, heart left in the owl’s stomach. When she arranges the bones on the construction paper, she draws a red fist between the ribs.

Substitution

She’s never seen a sawhorse used for anything other than a balance beam. Summer of ’96 and the U.S. women’s gymnastics team takes home the gold. She watches every second, tumbling around the TV while her mother stirs Rice-A-Roni on the stovetop. She takes up her own version of the sport. In the garage, she cartwheels off the sawhorse her father left behind when he moved out. She headstands against the walls, uses tree limbs for uneven bars. Other girls learn somersaults at the gymnastics center, their fathers reading newspapers in the hallway, waiting to pick them up. These girls have hand guards and leotards and special chalk. The fatherless girl stays home, stretching around her mother’s ankles. She has learned how to dig out a splinter with a hot needle. She has learned how to tighten the screws when the wood shakes under her.