The Fourth Season of Your Funeral
Kimi K2 (0905) and Trinity Large
The third time I remembered my mother’s funeral it was spring, though the first two times it had been winter, and once—impossibly—late summer with cicadas loud enough to drown the hymns. She stood at the edge of her own grave passing out thin plastic spoons, asking us to taste the soil before we decided whether to bury her. On the edge of the hole I was a man in another man’s suit, a thirty-five-year-old son with the hands of a child. I should have said something. Excused myself. Moved a foot to the side. I really should have. God, would have...but who am I kidding? I would have done nothing. Even Mother would have agreed. Even she.
I knelt anyway and took a gulp. I can still remember the taste. Leaves papery and sour.
I needed a name badly. Needed a place. A country. Another world, a thing I could whisper under wool blankets, pillowcase pulled taut around the shape of a head. Daughter I suppose. A face with a mouth saying Eleanor. An eye for ink I call it. Oh, how hungry I was. To gaze upon myself and see not horror but longing. To give nothing to myself but a name. Mother agreed to it. Didn’t even trouble herself to call me Eleanor once upon the sun-dragged street or behind the blue, gleeting tile of our bathroom.
And when I suggested the better name (Dawn and Bird begin with the same letter, do you not see?), she pointed instead to her breast and said Eleanor.
One morning I woke up and Mother was facing the wall, beneath a pink lump in the cloth placing its waxy form against her back. I thought she had turned over, as though to sleepwalk to the kitchen and summon spiced tea on her own terms instead of mine, but it was just the mattress slightly popped, creating domes around the brattle springs. No one could sleep through that. I do not understand.
In the moment it took to watch her, she stood over the bed and said:
Additionally, to allow for this allergy, the closest thing to a birth I could have hoped for.
Sometimes I used to pour Mother’s tea under my door and let the sleigh of my bed carry me to sleep. What did you do?
Today is the day I write about how I shaved half my right eyebrow off after I watched my face in the mirror. I am a house disemboweled and filled, a fountain of glass that mirrors women until death or time eats them. I am not any of those things, but you cannot imagine how sweet they are.
You cannot even begin to imagine.
One night my pillow moves and shakes me. I ask: Daddy.
It depends on where, Daddy says.
I have a dream where alone, I brave the brittle gum tree with rustling leaves and pissing red ants. What happens? What are you doing over there?
All the birds in the branches, in the dark, will not tell me.
A lake splits from the cracks of my skin. The reflection stables; I can see who I was expected to be. I take it in, all those slack faces beneath greasy hair, sighing the breath of things accidentally born, of things born. Never. Others rise from the surface and then—
raked streetlights.
Across the salt flat, the red sun crawls back to the first thicket of◆ About the ending
❧ About the title