THE STORY OF A STUNG GIRL

​

I stepped on a bee. 

It was midsummer.

I was barefoot.

My mother did not approve of my tendency to be incautious. 

The bee took the nuclear option, the only one available while he was dying.

My mother pulled the stinger out of my arch, his entrails pulsing.

My foot swelled then to fantastic roundness, spherical, a melon or a helium balloon.

The skin itched and burned and peeled.

I soaked my foot in a tub of warm water and Epsom salts all day for days, immobile in the sitting
room, where we had our one television, three channels, a set of rabbit ears.

Game shows in the morning, insufferable.

Local news at lunchtime. 

Then, at one o’clock, a movie.

Nearly always black and white; sometimes the Westerns were in color but I hated those; it was
noir I wanted.

We wanted, I should say, these were the films my mother saw when she was young, when only
the starlets were defeated.

Walter Neff, Holly Martins, Frank Chambers, Mildred Pierce, her daughter Veda.

These were characters we recognized from life.

My mother, her two-pack-a-day habit, my bouts of bronchitis and strep, correlation never
meaning causation in that single context, one atmosphere perpetually allowed to poison another
in proximity.

We reached an agreement, unspoken, a contract by implication, that I would go on being ill and
as I convalesced, we would consume each other.

Now it seems a little dull, our contretemps, my mugs of tea and saltine crackers.

Now I am the woman and the mother, a pastiche
                                                              of narratives I am convinced do not involve me.