Faith Shearin

Go north a dozen years on a road overgrown with vines to find the days after you were born. Flowers remembered their colors and trees were frothy and the hospital was behind us now, its brick indifference forgotten by our car mirrors. You were revealed to me: tiny, delicate, your head smelling of some other world. Turn right after the circular room where I kept my books and right again past the crib where you did not sleep and you will find the window where I held you that June morning when you opened your eyes. They were blue, tentative, not the deep chocolate they would later become. You were gazing into the world: at our walls, my red cup, my sleepless hair and though I'm told you could not focus, and you no longer remember, we were seeing one another after seasons of darkness.

He was a surprise of white: his teeth like knives, his face a triangle of albino dislike. I had seen him before, on our back porch, where my father sometimes left watermelon rinds, and he dipped his tongue into them, his skin glowing beneath our lights, like some four-legged relative of the moon. I knew him as a citizen of the night: a fainting, ghostly presence with a tail so naked it was embarrassed to drag behind him. But that morning, terrified and violent, he was different: a hissing fury at the bottom of the garbage can, a vampire bathed in light.

During the weeks when we all believed my mother was likely to die she began to plan her funeral and she wanted us, her children, to consider the music we would play there. We remembered the soundtrack of my mother’s life: the years when she swept the floors to the tunes of an eight track cassette called Feelings, the Christmas when she bought a Bing Crosby album about a Bright Hawaiian Christmas Day. She got Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring stuck in the tape deck of her car and for months each errand was accompanied by some kind of dramatic movement. After my brother was born, there was a period during which she wore a muumuu and devoted herself to King Sunny Ade and his African beats. She ironed and wept to Evita, painted to Italian opera. Then, older and heavier, she refused to fasten her seatbelt and there was the music of an automated bell going off every few minutes, which annoyed the rest of us but did not seem to matter to my mother who ignored its relentless disapproval, its insistence that someone was unsafe.