Sea, Mother

It follows the click of your heels around the house, like a seashell pressed to your ear.

Window after window fly open to let it in: the cleansing sea-borne breeze. You imagine it has arms, long outstretched fingers to reach every corner of every room, to rid you of the musty smell of his presence.

His absence. They took him away six months ago, remember. Feet first.

The house hasn’t changed since you left.

In the living room, neatly arranged, trinkets from pilgrimages to dead saints’ houses. Rosaries in small enamelled boxes. Statuettes lined like sad-faced tin soldiers behind the shut doors of glass cabinets. Figurines pressed into every corner, demanding to be pitied.

Santa Caterina with her torture wheel.

Santa Lucia holding her eyes in her hand.

San Rocco, his brown robe raised, a finger pointing to the red open glossy wound on his tight. The patron saint of falsely accused people; he liked to wave this particular figurine in your face, at least once a day in your last months here.

They took him away six months ago, feet first, and the house has been shut since. Safe, since. Still you find yourself fearing his presence, or rather his absence, or rather the presence of something, for once, that’s not his body, which you know to be six feet beneath the ground and two above your mother’s.

In ten years, the statue of the Virgin Mary hasn’t moved an inch on the mantelpiece. She stares at you, like always, rather cross than strictly pious; but her eyes, once blue, have faded milky white. Small victories.

In your absence your old room has turned into a cupboard. You could have predicted this, but didn’t. Sleeping in the one bed left in the house—in their room—is no more an option than sleeping on the floor. Your skin itches unpleasantly at the thought of it. Yet you creep around the bedroom, collecting dust on the point of your finger from once-dark heavily worked furniture.

When you spy her in the corner of your eye, pale and dark-haired and worn, trapped in the age-spotted mirror over the dresser, your reflection makes you jump. You thought you saw your mother; but then she’d never particularly wanted to see you when she was alive. She wouldn’t bother coming back for you, not all the way from Hell.

Blaspheme.

A whisper. A sea-shell echo in your mind.

No, in your ear: a habit of the ear, like the sound of the waves, from a lifetime ago.

Miscreant the devil’s daughter your mother’s cross.

Before laying down on the sofa, you consider moving the statue of Mary from the mantelpiece: it towers over you, so close to your head: but you don’t want to touch it.

Your mother had this statue from her mother, and she had it from her mother, and who knows how far this went because every mother has had a mother—however fleetingly uselessly yes even unwillingly a mother nonetheless—and that mother perhaps had a mother with nothing to give her daughter but a statue of the Mother of God.

In the dark, you put a hand over your eyes to keep them shut.

Ave Maria piena di grazia

—old words, like memories, like sea-waves, seep into your mind unbidden.

Ave Maria che sei nei cieli sia santificato il tuo nome venga il tuo regno

—not even the right words. It’s not Mary’s name that’s supposed to be hollowed. Not hers the kingdom to come. You almost feel like laughing.

Santa Maria madre di dio

—think of something else. Anything else. A song.

Like a Virgin.

Psychokiller.

Spirit in my House.

madre di dio prega per noi peccatori

Once, in a town down the coast, a woman found a dead fish on the beach by her house.

It was a beautiful fish. Its skin shimmered like gold on the sand. Its eyes, open, were tiny mirrors in which the woman could see her own gaunt desperate reflection.

The woman’s husband was a sailor; so had been her father; so would be her son if the Virgin Mary had answered her prayers. But though the woman knew you aren’t supposed to eat anything you find dead on the beach, she decided to take the fish home with her, because it was so beautiful and because she had been hungry these many weeks.

First, the woman cut the fish’s side and searched for entrails. She could not find them. She tried to stuff the fish with a wedge of lemon, a stick of rosemary, like her mother had taught her. Again she failed: the fish seemed stuffed already, overripe like a persimmon with its own meat. The woman could almost see it, turn all white as she roasted the fish on the spits in the fireplace. The smell of it made her mouth water.

That evening, as she put the fish on her husband’s plate, the woman told him how it had leapt into her lap, alive, as she walked from a neighbour’s house that morning. She told him she’d had to kill it with a stone, black blood gushing over her hands, silently praying the Virgin Mary to forgive her that innocent lie.

But, as the woman told her tale, her husband had started cutting the fish; she saw, then, that the Virgin Mary had no mercy in her heart for her.

Inside the fire-touched pearl-white fish, there was a newborn newdead baby. Perfectly formed, from the tip of its fingers to its milky open staring eyes.

The woman saw then, that she had given her husband her baby to eat.

The woman screamed

You scream

you scream your eyes open and you see her there looming over you over your head doleful her eyes milky condemning like the day you left—the devil’s daughter your mother’s cross—and just like then you push her away but this time it’s different this time

she falls

and breaks

And in the darkness sudden silence

except your sobs.

Slowly, you step off the sofa. With your bare feet you try to avoid the spot where she has fallen. Touch the walls for the switch.

In the yellow comforting electric light, the mother of God lies in shards on the floor.