edenjane
01-23-2009, 12:07 PM
--I wrote this a long time ago and recently edited it, but it still doesn't seem right. Does anyone have any ideas?--
I looked at the pale body with a lack of expression, an empty canvas without a desire to be painted; and I tried my best to feel nothing. She hadn't been my mother, after all. I allowed the tender flesh of my fingertips to grace the line of her forehead, the steady wrinkle set there because of one too many hard decisions; one too many children outcast for the good of the family, as I had been. I leaned my head to the side, burying my opened eyes into hers.
She had a look of calm about her, although her limbs were twisted
wretchedly. She had struggled against it, but she was still resigned, still appeared confident that in the end she had won.
There were police, of course. They had called me in the night, one of so very few nights when sleep had been offered from the heated air, and asked me to identify a person, a dead person. I had convinced myself at the word “dead” that it was one of the girls I had known growing up. Perhaps it was Lana, with her six month old child on her seventeen year old hip, who I walked with on the way to day care so she could turn tricks near a construction site, or Anne, the reason for a case marked fragile, who could not help but to forget that cars didn't always stop when you walked in front of them. Or even Cassandra, a girl whose mother knew what she would be and named her for it. She was the one of us I had decided would survive, since she was named for a prophet. I expected one of them, or someone else, a name with a two sentence story attached to it that grew weary in my mouth when repeated too many times. Maybe even a face. Just someone I had come into contact with once, someone who paid a little too well, who touched just a little bit differently.
But I hadn't expected this woman. Not the woman who softly explained to me at the age of twelve that there were too many children in the house, that the younger ones needed her more than I did. That everything would be alright. I nodded for verification purposes when a man in a uniform asked me again. “Alice Randall.” It was a statement, not a question. He had already known who she was, she carried ID, but I guess I was the last step in a process to make sure a corpse was really a person and that a person was really a corpse. There were more questions, as there always seemed to be, but I didn't hear any of them. I could almost feel the dead woman's voice warm in my ear, her intensely silencing lullabies that could once rid me of any problems, and that would make me forget that I had to think about the bad with the good.
“That's all we need, thanks for coming out.” the man said more with his flatly blue eyes than his thin lips. I nodded again, grinning slightly.
I went home, back to the apartment where the sunflowers outgrew the dirt and died in the window sills. Back to the lover who had been quite curious as to where I had been for the past few hours. I shrugged, crawling into bed, and closed my eyes on the entire existence of Alice Randall, my first foster mother.
I looked at the pale body with a lack of expression, an empty canvas without a desire to be painted; and I tried my best to feel nothing. She hadn't been my mother, after all. I allowed the tender flesh of my fingertips to grace the line of her forehead, the steady wrinkle set there because of one too many hard decisions; one too many children outcast for the good of the family, as I had been. I leaned my head to the side, burying my opened eyes into hers.
She had a look of calm about her, although her limbs were twisted
wretchedly. She had struggled against it, but she was still resigned, still appeared confident that in the end she had won.
There were police, of course. They had called me in the night, one of so very few nights when sleep had been offered from the heated air, and asked me to identify a person, a dead person. I had convinced myself at the word “dead” that it was one of the girls I had known growing up. Perhaps it was Lana, with her six month old child on her seventeen year old hip, who I walked with on the way to day care so she could turn tricks near a construction site, or Anne, the reason for a case marked fragile, who could not help but to forget that cars didn't always stop when you walked in front of them. Or even Cassandra, a girl whose mother knew what she would be and named her for it. She was the one of us I had decided would survive, since she was named for a prophet. I expected one of them, or someone else, a name with a two sentence story attached to it that grew weary in my mouth when repeated too many times. Maybe even a face. Just someone I had come into contact with once, someone who paid a little too well, who touched just a little bit differently.
But I hadn't expected this woman. Not the woman who softly explained to me at the age of twelve that there were too many children in the house, that the younger ones needed her more than I did. That everything would be alright. I nodded for verification purposes when a man in a uniform asked me again. “Alice Randall.” It was a statement, not a question. He had already known who she was, she carried ID, but I guess I was the last step in a process to make sure a corpse was really a person and that a person was really a corpse. There were more questions, as there always seemed to be, but I didn't hear any of them. I could almost feel the dead woman's voice warm in my ear, her intensely silencing lullabies that could once rid me of any problems, and that would make me forget that I had to think about the bad with the good.
“That's all we need, thanks for coming out.” the man said more with his flatly blue eyes than his thin lips. I nodded again, grinning slightly.
I went home, back to the apartment where the sunflowers outgrew the dirt and died in the window sills. Back to the lover who had been quite curious as to where I had been for the past few hours. I shrugged, crawling into bed, and closed my eyes on the entire existence of Alice Randall, my first foster mother.