Tucked In | Mubanga Kalimamukwento
My son watches Bambi for the first time today. An hour and ten minutes of decadent silence – no banging toys, no merry-go-rounds of questions and requests. I welcome this quiet for the gift that it is: rare solitude for my mind.
After, his afternoon continues as always – Legos, Pokémon, Beyblade, a loud, imaginary world that turns the house upside down, until supper.
Then, as I bend over to tuck him in at bedtime, he says, “Mom, I have a question.”
I smile. “Oh?” Usually, his questions just spill out, no preamble or room to answer before the next one comes, for as long as he can stave off my inevitable Goodnight. I tap his nose with my finger. “And what’s that question?”
“Will you die?”
He is eight. So far, our big talk has been about why daily showers are important, even when he doesn’t get any mulch in his socks. I was expecting the birds and the bees before the life-and-death conversation. My heart cracks right open as I tell him, “One day, yes, I will die.”
The silence returns, the one from Bambi, no longer a gift, as my mind tries to squirrel away from his inquisitiveness. His eyes, which were once my mother’s eyes, dark and wide, seem to take a long screenshot of my face, memorizing the routes of the lines on my skin as the understanding sinks into him. The silence blooms – a minute stretched to the verge of breaking until he asks, “When?”
“Not for a very long time,” I promise, planting too many wet kisses on his cheeks.
Prone to ticklishness, usually, my son would laugh. Instead, he shifts from me, this new wisdom already tugging him out of childhood, making him a little less my baby. “But your mom, she died when you were little, like Bambi’s mom?”
I spot a quiet terror in his expression, the math he must be computing. I was ten when mine died, and he will be ten in two years. I have told him as many stories as my mind has been able to restore, rebuilding my mother the way he does the Lego castles whenever they fall apart – how he has the gravel in her voice, the exact cadence of her laughter, her sneaky sense of humor.
A quiver sits in my throat, waiting to mutate into tears over a glass of wine later. I nod, frantically hoping his next question will be something I can answer – How many deer are there in the world? Can I go to the park tomorrow? How are animations made? I cup the duvet around his shoulders and lift it to his chin. I fix his mohawk, which doesn’t need any fixing, anything to avoid the question building in his eyes.
Instead, he asks, “Who tucked you in, then?”
About the Author:
Mubanga is a Zambian writer. She is the winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize (2024), the Tusculum Review Poetry Chapbook Contest (2022), the Dinaane Debut Fiction Award (2019) & Kalemba Short Story Prize (2019). Her work appears or is forthcoming in Contemporary Verse 2, adda, Overland, Menelique, on Netflix, and elsewhere.