My mother died.
I found her slight, naked body collapsed upon the bathroom floor, with limbs at final rest at uncomfortably unnatural angles, and dried vomit on her face and in her thinning hair.
Her wrinkled eyelids were wide open.
She was eighty-seven.
Her body was cold to touch, but this did not surprise me because she had always been cold.
Never had she said a single word of praise to me, except sarcastically, or in the backhanded way of Why, my dear, for once you look presentable. Perhaps some man shall want you still.
Yet I didn’t marry.
I lived instead alone with my mother, caring for her until the day she died, motivated not by love so much as by duty and a suffocating fear of guilt.
There were times it felt like caring for a vat of acid.
She possessed nothing but the house, so left to me nothing in her will except instructions about how she wished to be buried. These I didn’t follow for the simple reason I couldn’t afford to, and I chose instead to have her cremated.
I still vividly remember the cremation chamber swallowing her coffin as I imagined, inside, her body burning away.
It was February.
It snowed.
Her ashes I kept in an urn on a shelf beside the television, and for a time I lived in quietness and peace.
For a time…
—awoken from a dream of being smothered, by hissing from beyond the bedroom, I crept—rubbing sleep-filled eyes—to the living room, where the television had turned on (static) and beside which, on its shelf, the urn was shaking.
I took it down. Opened it:
revealing a vortex of ash.
I closed it.
But its hypnotic effect on me I could not escape. My peace, I knew, was broken.
That day I went to a pet store and bought mice, claiming I needed them to feed a snake, and perhaps in some metaphorical way that was true, for when I opened the urn and—holding the screeching rodent by its tail—placed it inside: then trapped it—its screams and scratchings coming to an end only after several brutal minutes—I felt myself blemished by original sin.
When next I opened the urn, the ashes were still and all that remained of the mouse: a skeleton.
We coexisted this way, the ashes and I, for months.
I fed them all manner of flesh.
Whenever I tried to stop, the urn would rattle on its shelf at night in frigid anger, preventing me from sleep.
And sleep I must.
However, it is only very recently that I have understood what my mother’s ashes truly want—whose flesh they crave above all else…
To her desire, I acquiesce.
Piece by piece, shall I now sever myself from myself and feed me to her.
Flesh of my flesh. Blood of my blood.
Dust to dust.
As in life, in death she consumes me—until, in peace, I shall in her be nothing left.