Free Open Me by SUNSHINE O'DONNELL Page A

love for her comes out and goes forward like a beacon that connects them, even though her mother seems far away and isn’t looking at Mem at all.
    Mem without her mother
.
    Mem feels her chest shudder and her face begin to cry.
    She loves her mother so much it hurts, it is a hole that can never be filled. Her mother is as big as the air around them; Mem gasps the air in, pulls at her hem, pulls everything in through her mouth, turns it into sound and lets it purge out.
You cannot be empty and cry at the same time
. This isn’t true, can’t be true, Mem’s emptiness is as large as her mother. If she could only have all of her mother. If she could only be enough for her mother to love. If only there were such thing as enough.
    Mem looks at her mother but she is engrossed in conversation with the other mothers; she starts to step toward Mem but her head is turned while she finishes a sentence.
    Your mother loves you
. Mem’s mother tells her this all the time, and Mem knows it is true. But she suspects what lies beneath this love: an unlove, just as strong. She sees it. She hears it. She feels it trying to get in.
    Lazyfilthyliar
    The idea of this unlove makes Mem panic, makes Mem sad, makes her wonder what horrible things she has done to deserve it. She looks down at the grass fringing the edges of her Mary Janes like a decorative border and knows with the everyday certainty and solidity of the grass and shoes that her mother’s unlove will always be there. She shifts her shoes in the green fur of the grass.
    Lazyfilthyliar
    Her mother suddenly looks at Mem and Mem feels it. She raises her head in time to see her mother smile and mouth
I love you baby
. Mem’s insides roil in a swamp of redness and humiliation.
Filthy liar. Lazy whore. Piece of shit
.
    No wonder
    No wonder
    No wonder your father left
.
    Mem’s mother smiles again and the swamp inside Mem gets hotter and surges. Irrepressible mudflows bring the red up to Mem eyes, nose, and mouth, her face becoming a ripe fruit bursting with acidy juice that can no longer be contained. Suddenly, without any of the pomp and prelude she has always imagined, Mem’s whole self is split open and weeping.
    At the moment when the mourners stop walking and turn to look at where the sound is coming from, Mem forgets how to breathe. She can only cry out. Nothing goes in. Where is her mother? She looks around, sobbing. The tears are made of boiled water and vinegar. They are too hot. They burn. They score Mem’s cheeks with sickle-shaped scars.
    There is no such thing as Mem without her mother.
    They’re going to bury Mem’s mother, but not yet. Mem reaches out to touch the cool face bright with stardust but her fingers don’t reach; they’re already lowering the coffin. In the middle of this pinwheel of mourners, in the strange light on her slack face in the coffin, Mem’s mother’s corpse is suddenly beautiful, even
her mouth beautiful, though Mem knows it is stitched closed and stuffed. The lips seem kissed by petals of moonlight, skin dusted with a fine, glowing powder, like the dust from moths’ wings
.
    “Don’t go!” shrieks Mem.
    Her mother’s coiled hair shines even brighter than the pink satin it rests upon. Her hands are folded over the belly. Mem sobs. Mem wails. Snot runs into her mouth
.
    “Don’t go!”
    It feels good to say it. It makes her cry harder. She says it again.
    And again.
    And again, rocking back and forth, the cloth of her doole stuffed between her pulling fingers.
    “No!”
    A handful of mourners clamber back up the hill and rush over to Mem, dropping things, falling onto knees to comfort her, to make her stop. They offer her handkerchiefs, candy, hugs. She twists away from them, turning around.
    “No!”
    And there is her mother. Smiling. Arms crossed. Watching, mouthing,
You are a good girl
.
    Now Mem wants to stop but she doesn’t know how. She’s supposed to stop by making herself feel something else, by remembering something happy