The bed cramped small and dirty; the air above her suffocating. The mother in her nightgown, tight, worn ratty where she rubbed her fingers in worry circles. She got up and left her husband crimped with his back toward her on the mattress and went downstairs. She went through the kitchen stuffed full of flowers, long rotten, stinking. She went into the son’s room where plastic sheeting covered the holes the fire had burned. The pinned laminate tacked in short sheets over the studs to keep the outside out or inside in. There was no wind. Outside, the earth lay parched and cracking. The trees enfolding over black lawns. The sky only ever one dumb color. The mother stood in the exact center of the son’s room, or what remained of it. The room could be divided into halves: here, from the window to the far corner, where the walls were smudged and plaster dappled and the scorching sat upon the air; and here, past the window to the closet, where much of her son’s stuff sat untouched: the shirt he’d slept in every night since he was ten; the blanket the mother had sewn for him while he was still inside her; the trombone he begged for and never played.
