daughter
by linda m. young

The baby fat seeps out of her as she leans over the yellow gladiolas. Only a mother can measure every pore, count every cell that conspires to drain the life from her child. My daughter slips away from me before my very eyes. She does not die from disease, she tells me, but from unrequited love. It is a process I watch, but cannot stop, that fills me completely with loathing for the perpetrator, that takes my breath away. I see her hand move to the buttered flower as though her arm has no will, then the growth is torn from the earth.

I never liked him, from the beginning to the end of my setting eyes on him. Too tall, too slim, too dark, too handsome, and somewhat driven. I called him lithe, like a young girl; not yet a man. But when I look back on him, I will make myself be truthful. I know it was true love, as true as any can be, truer than I had ever had. Aaron. He had to have such a name. The rod. I remember that snake, that biblical anomaly that made me immediately hostile towards him. Too many begats.

"Why must you gauge everyone I bring home, Mother?" she had laughed the words. "It's like you're measuring how much air they have in their bodies. You want to pump them up, don't you?"

We did the mother-daughter dance around the kitchen, slicing tomatoes, peeling potatoes, all nostrils flared, breaths coming fast. We jostled each other, moving this way and that, from sink to refrigerator, while the aroma of garlic and onions and basil and thyme pranced around the thick air. The shrill music of her times, not mine, assaulted me like chanting without praise.

"Where have all the litanies gone?" I asked.

"Oh, Mother the Obscure, what the hell is that supposed to mean?"

She ate well while I watched, as she had since babyhood, often going for three servings—a child consuming life.

And so this morning I find her rocking back and forth, arms pinioned around her legs, pink toes dangling over the side of the chenille spread, going to market. White puffs sprout from between her toes. She is wailing softly, an incessant plea o love, o love, like the low moan of a dying loon or a French horn in need of tuning. A single sunray swims through the window and lights her hair to golden sheen. I imagine a halo there. Until he came into her life, I had not hated for a very long time.

© L.M. Young

L.M. Young is the author of The Train to Port Arthur and other stories and Michael's Journal: Being the Journals of Michael Cooke Holt (Book One, 1917-1925) She is the winner of several wards, teaches and lectures, and is an international radio host on Book Crazy Radio Network (bookcrazy.net). "Daughter" is from The Train to Port Arthur and Other Stories. Her books may be purchased from amazon.com. Her email is linda.young35@verizon.net