A Record of Events on May 12, 2024
by Salena Casha
For Mother’s Day, we get takeout from Dumpling House: bao buns with crab and leek, Singapore-style noodles, and wonton soup for you, even though you cannot feed yourself. In your apartment, we lay the kitchen table with our backs to your hospital bed. The couch you used to sit on divides the living from the dying. You cannot lift your head, and we realize we didn’t anticipate this: a Mother’s Day spent waiting.
We didn’t anticipate how strange this plasticine bed would look in a room that you once used for watching Wimbledon and doing Italian crosswords in pen. We didn’t anticipate the hollow sounds we would make as we slurp reheated noodles.
You can’t hear us because your hearing has gone, and you can’t see us because your back is to us, and it’s probably for the best because it’s an unworthy scene of carrion glutton and black crow whispers. It is then that your granddaughter appears above you — you called her angel once when she found you on the bathroom floor — and she has soup in her hand. She blows on the liquid, and you take the spoon between your lips so she can say to her own children some future day you won’t wake in that she fed you your last meal, just as you fed her one of her first.
You do not say I love you, but you do. She knows you do.
About the Author:
Salena Casha’s work has appeared in over 180 publications in the last decade. She survives New England winters on good beer and black coffee. Subscribe to her Substack at salenacasha.substack.com and buy her sci-fi novella at https://elj-editions.com/a-way-back/