I am a calming cobalt blue.  A contradiction.  Really, I am a problem solver,  a gift
from my mother.  The ash she’d let grow so long on her cigarette, I thought it would
grow legs and walk away.  She had gifts like that.   She’d survey the wisdom of the
crowd and make proclamations that people tended not to believe, but I did.
She kept keys around her neck, deprived of the proper locks.  She’d tell me, free
yourself.    Her name was so long, my imaginary friends and I sang it like a chant, a
tribute.  The pink satin dress with the rosette’s accumulated dust along the
shoulders.   It looked so dejected, month after month hanging as if an executioner
stood right behind.   Not yet, she kept saying, though I longed to see the shimmer on
her form.  Maybe it was real.  A pin stuck in an alternative universe,  a thin
membrane peeled back like banana skin.  My mother, in that pink satin dress,
kneeling on a hardwood floor.  Somewhere, my father hummed a beer commercial
bathed in television glow.  A knife in her hands and she digs a piece of wood from
her thigh. She stabs and stabs.  There is no blood, just splinters multiplying in the
ruts of her skin. I hold the flashlight. I do my part.  Here, she hisses. Over here, on me.
Almost, but not quite.