[short] Like A Black Hole
Like A Black Hole
Note: Written sometime during 2005. I think. *thinks*
“Someday, the sun is going to stop rising,” she said.
Her hands were shaking as they hung over the rail of her chair, limp, like a dead thing waiting to decompose. She was hardly breathing and I wondered for the slightest moment if she really were dead and I was speaking to a ghost, to a memory of a time trapped in the broken bottles and snapped six-pack rings stranded around us.
The waves of the river whispered in my ear. Laughing at the absurdity…
I shook my head, and glanced up at the sky. “Why?”
“Because.” She shrugs, and one of her dead arms wave loosely, caught in a sudden breeze. “It’s gotta be sick and tired of this shit. Up and down and up and down… it’s like a seesaw, only nobody’s on the other end, ’cause nobody wants to play. It’s just work, every fucking day, and I’m tired, so tired, I just want it stop. Your father, all he does is drink, and you, you just sit there, and–”
I tone it out. I’ve heard it all before. I stare outward, playing with my fishing pole, wincing when the pitch rises into a screech and she scares all the fish away. She could shatter glass if she tried hard enough. I grip my glasses worriedly then, and I have to shake myself, but she doesn’t notice. Her face is bathed in light despite the darkness in her eyes, and the moon peeks from beyond to clouds to smile down at us. Not that she notices. It’s full tonight, too. Maybe I should grow fangs and howl like a dog, and see she what she does then.
“…and I’m just damned sick if it.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Ma.”
“Hunh?” She looks over her shoulder at me, surprised to hear my voice, or perhaps just perplexed as to my meaning. I look beyond her to the end of the fishing pole dipping into the river, one hooked worm rolling under the moonlit waves though all the good catches have swum away. The tide is so high, I’m almost sure the water itself is trying to reach heaven. If heaven were on the moon…
She turns away again, and that deceased arm comes to life, decayed hands digging into her jean pockets for her half-gone pack of cigarettes. She pulls it out with her forefingers and flicks the butt with her thumb, her other hand rustling in the second pocket for a lighter. There’s a snick and a little burst of light, explosions in the dark–my eyes are drawn to it like the eyes of a moth as the flame floats higher and higher, toward her mouth… is she going to kiss it? I imagine her lips burning, her tongue brown-red and roasted, like good pork, but no, the cigarette is there and the flame stops at its tip, burning the embers of the tobacco in a coal orange light. She inhales deeply, holds, and then releases with a great puff of exhaustion. The smoke makes me cough, and she flicks the end of the cigarette to send ashes into the air that fade fast as they are formed. Her hand collapses, dead again as the smoke still rises from still burning embers resting in her forefingers.
The smell is a poison that makes me cough, but I love it. I love the smell of a cigarette. I inhale deeply, and she snorts back at me with derision. “I don’t understand you,” she says.
“That’s not true,” I bite back.
No response. She doesn’t even look at me.
I glare at her. “You’ll see the sun tomorrow, I assure you.”
A snort. “Whatever.”
Whatever.
She takes another drag of her cigarette, and I cast stones into the roaring waves to cover the stretched silence between us. It should bother me, but it doesn’t. I don’t even know why it bothers her. How can you let anything bother you, out in nature, under the moon?
The river laughs, clawing toward heaven, and I reel in my line. I bury the worm in the soft dirt on the shore.
“It’s going to stop,” she says again, shifting in her chair.
I just shake my head. I know better. There will be other suns, other rises. Other moons to chase them back around again.
