Page 201 of Where Your Scars Meet Mine
Only slightly. No broad smile. No dramatic shift. Just a deepening in the eyes, an old satisfaction lifting beneath the surface, as if this is the line he has been waiting for, the exact point where the room finally becomes the shape he prefers. Me bound to a chair. Silas bleeding. Fear thick enough to stain the air. His answer poised above it all like some private gospel.
He rolls the knife once in his palm, yellow motel light skimming along the edge.
“For your debts to be paid,” he says, calm as a clerk reading off a balance. “Or else you’ll end up like Momma.”
The word lands in me like filth.
Too familiar. Too small for the woman who spent years killing herself in plain sight while I learned to read danger from the other side of cheap doors. My stomach tightens so hard it nearly turns inside out.
Silas jerks against the chair with enough force to make the legs scrape. “Don’t you fucking say that to her.”
The Handler ignores him completely, moving toward the bathroom door instead.
One hard kick sends it flying open. The knob punches the wall with a crack that rings through the room like a shot. The sound is so sudden, so violent, that for one suspended second my mind blanks, refusing to follow what my eyes are about to find.
The bathroom light is already on.
Harsh white fluorescence spills across cracked tile, over a curtain hanging half-open in the middle as if a hand left it there on purpose. The hem is yellowed. The rod is rusted. Something dark streaks one side of the tub where moisture has run for too long. At first there is no shape, only fragments. A pair of bare legs jutting awkwardly over the edge. Skin wrong in color, wrong in texture, drawn tight in some places, collapsed in others. One foot still trapped in a heel. Toenails painted a chipped red so familiar my body recognizes it before my mind does.
Then the rest resolves.
Not fresh. Not recent. Not sleeping, not passed out, not the old childhood maybe of a woman who might still wake if someone shook her hard enough.
Long dead.
Too long.
Time has already worked on her. Skin darkened, slippage beginning at the softer places, the face caved in just enough to make recognition arrive in sick, lurching pieces rather than all at once. Hair clings in lank strings to a cheek gone waxy and sunken. One arm is twisted beneath the body at an impossible angle, the joints loose with the wrong kind of surrender. The mouth has fallen partly open, but no apology lives there now, no excuse, no lie about tomorrow being different. Decay has stripped all of that away. What remains is only the fact of her. The blunt, hideous certainty of a mother turned into evidence.
My mother in a tub.
My mother dug up from whatever dark corner of the earth was supposed to keep her out of reach.
My mother brought here, rotting, arranged, displayed.
The air leaves my body so fast it hurts.
Then my stomach turns itself inside out.
Vomiting comes in a violent rush, acid and bile splashing onto the carpet, the front of my dress, my own knees. It feels asif my body is trying to purge memory itself, trying to throw out the entire sight before it can root. Another convulsion follows, then another. There is almost nothing in me after the first heave, but still my ribs lock up, my throat burns, spit strings from my mouth while tears flood so hard the bathroom blurs into a smear of white light and ruined flesh.
Nothing stops it.
Not the tape burning at my wrists, not the chair digging into my back, not the Handler standing there watching as if this reaction belongs to him too.
My mother in a tub.
Not the old terror of wondering whether she would wake.
Not the childish prayer of listening outside a bathroom door for movement.
Not the limbo of overdose, that hideous maybe-space where a body looks dead until it lurches back into itself.
This is final in a way my childhood never let me trust.
No flushed skin.
No shallow breaths.
