Chrishelle Puvinayagam

It is summer and the bedroom bastes her through a carousel of dreams.  

I awake, wrestling with weeds of clothes piled up on my floor.  

Sunlight burns through thick glass; the carpet begins to smoke— 

I try to leave, but the doorknob faints under the pressure. So, I left her loose, dangling, unhinged. When I slam the door she rolls under my bed, left to wait with a headless cockroach and a capless pen.  

Outside this room, familiar arrogant sounds cloud the hallway: the gags and coughs of a man who spits out my mother’s bones.  

Appa travelled through cracks, bricks, stairs, and hardwood floors, this house hears all. He finds new hands through toilet brushes, rolling pins, and belts. He used her walls, her stairs, her doors.  

Don’t think this house isn’t listening. She cries if you walk on the wrong tiles, shrieks at her broken pipes, and screams when I open the door to cold bristly nights.  

The wind shoots in under doors, cutting Amma's crinkly feet, her knees dark and mouldy from dragging through church aisles.  

I watch Amma cook, steam blooming in her face like a chemical vat, eyes wide and bulging. She stirs the dahl with her wooden spoon; the yellow mixture is up to its neck.  

She thought of her brother, her dad, their gentle voices, their gentle hands—the way Dad ran his bony finger across an envelope seal, and her brother's cheeks, plump like lychees when he smiled. They were huddled up together; in the place she still called home. 

The lentils crowd and clump against the pot, the mixture thickens, her wrists strain.  

She asks me to bring two curry leaves from the backyard tree. I hand them over. Palm in palm, I stare back at her.  

Not looking up, she smiles and says 

“do not worry”  

She says “patience is bigger than the ocean”  

She says “patience is the virtue of a true woman”  

She says “wait and you will see” there is a smirk in her eye, a spark glistening like some grand plan was folded up in one of her mildewed Bibles.  

I go back to my room, pick the doorknob off the carpet by her porcelain head, and push her into the latch.  

I let my mattress sink me, and outside, the clouds faded, streetlights flicked on one by one.  

It is quiet, past the kitchen and down the hall. My father snores, his belly rises and falls with his hard, hard breath. Beside him, my mother’s bright white eyes glow. 

Tomorrow my mother will forgive you, you will be reborn as if night could stir you sinless. On the start of a new day the sun will eclipse over the lawn, creep up the staircase, and sweep under doors like cholera.