Free It Will End with Us by Sam Savage

now. I can’t explain this.
    Memories also. It is impossible, I think, for anyone to have memories like mine now.
    She dwelled in the wreckage of her poems, sat in the house in one or another of her lavender dresses and fantasized about a life that fate, my father, and the South had denied her but that she could not let go of, that she mourned the loss of, while the only real life she possessed slipped past her almostunobserved, her husband and children grew away from her, became actually frightened of her.
    As if a foreign body had invaded the family. It could not be expelled, so we isolated it within the system, gave her wide berth when we passed her in the kitchen or hall and avoided looking directly at her, into her eyes, as if the system had formed a protective cyst around her.
    I want to say that the foreign body was my mother’s soul, dwelling among us like a spirit of the dead, not resting, not able to find any peace, wandering the house, distraught.
    If only I knew what I meant by soul .
    The world seems to me such a poor and barren place, I can’t imagine what a soul would find to live on here.
    The times she came into a room and the conversation faded and then resumed as a pretend conversation, stiff or animated in a false way, sounding rehearsed and wooden.
    We were puppets, my mother said. We were little wooden dolls. She said she could see the strings.
    I remember “Why don’t you shoot me, Stanley, the way you shoot dogs?” one night at supper, looking across the table at my father.
    We acted as if she hadn’t spoken.
    Birds flew to the feeders, and, finding no food there, flew away, and in time they forgot why they had ever come. We still saw them in the bushes and trees, and heard them all around us, but none came to the feeders.
    The time Thornton tossed a handful of seed on one of the feeders just as we were getting in thecar, so he could tell Mama that he was taking care of the birds.
    I didn’t see my father take the notebooks, though I saw the splintered drawer where she had kept them.
    I don’t remember when I learned that he had burned them. I have an image of him flinging the notebooks into the incinerator but it doesn’t feel like a real memory. It is perhaps only an imaginary picture that I invented to illustrate the remembered fact that he burned the notebooks, so it is not evidence that he burned them, standing there flinging them in one by one.
    Though I know he did in fact burn them.
    It was not as if she had forgotten the notebooks on a park bench somewhere, or left them in a taxi, as someone did just recently with a Stradivarius violin,I saw on television, in which case she would have had only herself to blame.
    If she had left them on a bench or in a taxi it would be possible that one day in the future somebody would find them and be devastated.
    The afternoon she came home I was on the front porch. Gracie heard them first. She lifted her head from her paws, pricked her ears, and padded down the steps to the yard, where she stood listening, and then I heard the car turning in from the highway. It had rained hard in the night, and when they came to a puddle Papa gunned the engine so as not to get bogged down in the middle. The car went into a huge puddle and tipped and wallowed, and the engine roared and it climbed out, I could tell just by the sound of it. The dogs ran barking down the road to greet them and escorted them back, racing in circles around the car, nipping at the tires. Papa stopped the car in front of the houseand got out. “Goddamn dogs,” he said, kicking them away.
    I came down the steps. I didn’t say anything or look directly at her.
    She was thinner. Never buxom, she had melted away. Her hair, which was beginning to grow out again, was standing up in spikes. She looked like a little old man.
    She knelt and let the dogs come around her, wriggling and wet.
    She stood up. She said, “What dog is this?”
    It was jumping up against her, it was nearly as tall as