Mother?

by Heather D. Haigh

Worst are the mornings.  They start with slipping and sliding and make her breasts—hard as boulders—weep. She clings to the mattress edge. Below her, cracks in the floorboards gape wider; above her, cracks in the ceiling spider into the corners; crumbling plaster pitters her brow like a thousand accusing fingers, tap-tap-tapping. What kind of mother are you?/are you?/are you?

Yesterday, the cellar won—sucking her down into a darkness thick as quicksand, a hole where granite walls lean in and leer, where shadows hide the clawing and gaping of grasping hands and hungry, hungry, always hungry mouths. Cobwebs twist themselves into binding ropes. Treacling air carries a wet metallic tang and the scrape of knives on stone—blades honed to slice and slice—to fillet her away to nothing.

Image credit: Brice Cooper on Unsplash

Friday… or was it Thursday… or some other day, the attic enticed her with silver threads that glimmered and glittered and made her shiver as she grasped at them and jumped and danced. She was a fairy mote in a sunbeam / a cabbage white / a firework / a song. She floated higher, she floated thinner, she floated wider and wider, until her molecules forgot where they belonged, and she wondered… did I ever exist at all?

Today, she grasps the duvet tight between scrunched fists and forces herself to breathe.

Slower.

Slower.

Slower still.

Somewhere there's a door, there are rooms… scarcely remembered… but somewhere… somewhere, the smell of toast, the scent of a head—sweet and powdery, minuscule fingers and a thumb, a thumb as small as a rice-grain, tiny tiny feet—tissue-paper translucent, fragile as moth wings, precious as linnet eggs.

In another time, another dimension, there'd been walks amongst the barley, there'd been skylarks, there'd been rain. And all the while, she'd been swelling—swelling—swelling. Till she burst. Somewhere between a sky that arched forever and a land that had been plundered and mauled till it lay flat and empty, somewhere out there, she lost herself.

Clenching her teeth, she scrabbles to her feet and circles the room, searching for that door, spinning/somewhere the door/around/the room spinning around around/the room spinning/the walls spinning/spinning spinning around—

—light—

— a window.

Beyond the pane, calling her to heave the paint-splintering sash, beyond the gaping frame, calling her to scramble, calling her—the apple tree—with rain-slick branches, with leaves like jewels, with roots thrusting deep into the ground. A bridge to somewhere… somewhere she almost knows.

The sweetness of chlorophyll, the tang of petrichor, the earthy odour of bark, the slap of air and air and air. She settles on a soggy branch, pressing her back into the roughness of the trunk, lets her skin relish the scratches, plucks a heavy ripe fruit and bites.

Sharp. Acidic. Real.

She sniffs the tree.

Green. Woody. Peppery.

She cups damp hands to her mouth and inhales.

Flesh. Earth. Fruit. Earth.

Air. Earth.

Mother Earth.

Mother.

Mother.

***

Heather D. Haigh

Heather is a disabled, working-class writer from Yorkshire, published previously by redrosethorns, also published by Oxford Flash Fiction, Fictive Dream, Bath Flash Fiction, and numerous others. She has won or been placed in several competitions and is Pushcart and BOTN-nominated. She loves the sea and is addicted to cheese.