This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [121]
When I pulled her up, her face was covered with dirt mixed with snot. She was wearing a hand-me-down light blue sweatshirt that said BERMUDA, but we called it her MUD shirt because it was so dirty the only letters you could read were the ones in the middle.
I pointed at her chest.
“M-U-D, mud,” I spelled. She looked down so her scarred chin lay on her neck, and some snot from her face drooled onto her shirt.
“Mud,” she said, sniffling. “Mama. Mud.”
“No, just mud,” I said.
After a while she took my hand, and we went inside.
When Mama finally came back, she reheated the leftover oatmeal for lunch and sat, hands holding her head, hair greasy and face blurry, as we ate. The oatmeal was not too hot this time, so we wouldn’t get bad breath, and was perfect for slurping.
“Slurp,” I said.
“Slurp.” Clara imitated me.
Mama got up and went into the back room. We could hear the sounds of her lying down on the bed and pulling up the covers as we slurped.
A bright flickering and sighing consumed the darkness. I was standing in the doorway of the bedroom addition as flames raced across a spill of kerosene on the floor and walls.
“Get back, get back!” Mama shouted at me from where she stood before the fire. “Get back.” But there was nowhere to go that you couldn’t see and hear the spark and hum of the flames as they ate into the floor, the rug, the walls.
A minute or so earlier, I’d been sitting at the table reading as the last glow of orange sank over the tips of the firs above Heidi’s grave. The whirring of the kerosene lantern filled the cabin, its special domed wick glowing with a blue flame. Lighting the lanterns at night always reminded me of Papa, and there was a big space of him missing. The other lantern in the addition was the older kind with the wick and bare flame that you didn’t want to knock over because the kerosene would spill out. Papa said not to pour water onto a kerosene fire, it would mix with the kerosene and burn even more. Mama had been in the back room doing yoga, Clara asleep on the bed. There had been the noises of Mama getting up, moving around, and then something knocking over.
“Oh shit,” Mama had said. “Oh shit!” I didn’t turn around. Everything was always, “Oh shit.”
Now she was screaming, “Water, I need water!”
I stared at the flames as Mama ran outside the back door.
“Mama, Mama,” Clara sobbed from the bed. “Don’t go.”
The walls were streaming with flame, reaching up to the ceiling, when Mama returned with a bucket in her hands, water splashing over the edges.
“No, Mama,” I said. “Papa said not to put water on it.”
“Fuck him!” she said, pouring the bucket on the fire. It slowed the flames on the floor at first, but not the ones climbing the walls. She came back with another bucket and splashed it on the walls, but the water just slid to the floor and the flames kept climbing.
“Mama, no, no more water,” I cried. “Papa said no water.” I wanted to grab her and pull her away, run from this place, never return. But Mama kept pouring the water on the fire, splashing it on the walls. Finally she grabbed a soaking rug and used it to smother the flames on the floor and wall. And then, as suddenly as it had started, it was over. The walls and floor were wet and smoking, but there were no more tongues of red.
Mama stood in the middle of the burned space, her body shaking, the skin of her face and hands smudged black as her eyes.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” she said to the smoldering walls.
Shiva showed up on a silent and gray morning as I sat at the table playing with a cornhusk maiden someone had showed me how to make.
“You are the most beautiful maiden in all the world, you must be very lonely,” I said.
“The beautiful are never lonely,