67

Her mother’s voice was strangely low and rumbling, a lowing moose, an insistent washing machine, and it suddenly surrounded her.

“you can smell the chemicals all through the house and the backyard and you know I don’t like you staying up anyways, you need your beauty sleep.”

These things that her mother said. Beauty sleep. Pocketbook. Diddly darn it. Fuddy Duddy. In reference to herself, to others, she made them a part of her thoughts about them, made them believe that they would be beautiful if they slept, made them believe that she was old-fashioned but principled and so they must listen to her, made them believe that profanity should be softened into something ludicrous, something so foolish that it would hurt nobody’s feelings, as tender and slimed as oysters.

“Ma, I need to finish this”

She shut the door. On her mother. Adolescent.

Many insects had perished in this room. Her sloppiness had attributed to three deaths that very night. A paint drip that charted its course from ceiling to floor covered a tiny jumping spider who was attempting to crawl away from the fumes and the light, and her.