WHAT IF THE          What if the ransom’s set too high?
RANSOM'S               If they made you pawn your future
SET TOO                  and your past,
HIGH?                      if you lost the ticket
                                and have no way, in any case,
                                of redeeming it.

                                What if the door they hid from you
                                slams shut.
                                No handle, and you’ve sold your fingernails.

                                They take you into one more empty room,
                                tell you one more time,
                                not to fool yourself with hope.

                                What if, in odd unguarded moments,
                                you too make plans to bury him,
                                reject them angrily at first,
                                then out of habit,
                                clinging on.

                                They stripped you bare,
                                made you burn the furniture,
                                the chairs you no longer
                                remember him making,

                                One by one, you tear pages
                                from albums to feed the fire
                                that does not make you warm.

                                And what if
                                then,
                                they give him back,
                                bundled from the car
                                you thought was just another siren
                                in the night.

                                He’s blank-eyed, bloodied,
                                needing you.

                                What then?

Rosie Garner

MOTHER, DEAR MOTHER

‘Would you like to follow me?’ He was wearing a wig, like a crown on the head of a tired monarch. Made him look comical. 
    ‘Your dear mother already has a visitor.’ He consulted his watch. ‘An old friend I believe. She’s been here a while. Her second visit today if I’m not mistaken.’ His hands joined together to form a spire. ‘No matter, the room can easily accommodate the three of you. Follow me please.’ He fluttered a white handkerchief in my direction. ‘The Magnolia suite is one of our better facilities, as you will see.’ 
    My mother and I had not known each other long. We’d only met five years ago. My doing. She’d managed to live without me for thirty three years. We got on well, but we weren’t close. To be alone in her company was not essential. I had come a long way to do my duty. Nothing more. At least that’s what I told myself. 
    Lying in her coffin, she had no choice but to listen to a shrivelled old woman sitting on a wooden chair by her side. She hugged a shopping basket, the solid whicker type, domed by a bowed handle, threaded red, the kind that scratches you on market day if you are not careful. The bearded leeks poking out of a bunch of vegetable medley smelled of winter soup. My stomach rumbled. It was late afternoon, mid drizzly November, and I was hungry. 
    With a brief pause the visitor acknowledged my presence, then resumed her monologue. ‘I told you,’ she said to the face inches from hers, ‘I didn’t think you’d make it. Saw it in your eyes last time I went to see you in hospital. Terrible that place, a real maze, and as for the noise, I don’t know how you put up with it.’ 
    The undertaker coughed behind his opened hand. ‘Good evening…’ He stretched the syllables, stopped himself short, and a rush of pink from flabby neck to over-fed jowls betrayed his intention to add a ‘ladies’ to include the unfortunate woman lying dead in an elegant wooden box. 
    Mother’s friend droned on. ‘…And no wonder you wouldn’t eat, you’d have thought they’d know how to mash potatoes, or cook a piece of meat. Beef, pork, lamb, I’m sure it all tasted the same. It looked revolting.’ She sat back, chuckling. ‘I never got a chance to tell you, did I? I got stuck in the lift on the way down. Had to wait ages to be let out.’ Then she noticed a few facial hairs on my mother’s chin. ‘I suppose it keeps growing long after you’re dead.’ She paused. ‘Can’t have you look untidy, now, can we?’ She bent forwards and I saw a pair of tweezers disappear in her coat pocket. 
    ‘I think this lady would rather be alone with her dear mother,’ suggested Monsieur Lamarre – his name quivered in gothic print on a rectangular tag pinned to his lapel as he bent down to speak to the visitor. He reached out towards the wicker basket, picked it up. ‘Let me help you,’ he said, offering the woman his arm, ‘if you don’t mind…,’ and he accompanied the offending mourner to the door. 
    Left alone with Albertine - my tongue still has difficulties climbing over the mother word, be it aloud or in silence - I wondered what was expected of me. 
    Although crying over a spent life has always been the done thing for family members, I could not oblige. I could not do tears, not with our shared past wearing nothing but adult features and smiles to match. If our lips had quivered in pain they had done so in private. I couldn’t even ask mine to smile with indulgence at reclaimed independence; death had not freed me from my mother, I had never belonged to her in the first place. 
    I didn’t know if I was supposed to stand, or sit by her side and talk to her face plumped up by the artistry of the mortician who, when tidying up her hair had relocated the side parting to the left and revealed an old scar on the right temple. I was surprised that the babbling visitor had not set my mother right with a comb. Maybe she would have had my presence not robbed her of the opportunity. 
    I didn’t know if kissing the dead was compulsory, if my mother’s skin would feel as warm as my living flesh, or taste of chemicals, or if the plugged-in deodorizer was competing for a purpose with the scent of fresh flowers crowding the room. I would not put my lips to her cheek. Instead I rested my hand on her forehead. 
    I looked around. Every available surface had been used to display floral tributes: milky lilies spotted with pink in tall glass vases, long-stemmed chrysanthemums, their yellow petals barely unfurled, and potted cyclamens balanced on the window ledge. 
    There were red roses, ribboned and wrapped in cellophane, pink ones carved in stone, and on a small table a bunch caught in plaster for a short eternity. 
    The room had been turned into a saintly shrine. 
    My mother had certainly been loved, more so perhaps in death with her imperfections quickly receding, than in life, and I wondered how long it would take her to reach the shores of near perfection in the memory of those who had cared for her and made abstraction of her failings. 
    I was tired from my five-hour train journey from Paris, in an overcrowded carriage with its recycled air soured by the heat and the smells of bodies huddled together on the coarse fabric of dirty burgundy seats. I unbuttoned my coat, folded it, lining up, placed it on the back of the chair, let my body sag on the soft padded seat still warm from the last visitor. I stretched out my legs, bumped my knees against the highly polished coffin – it looked like oak – inches from the over ornate guilt handles, and sought a suitable topic for a silent soliloquy. 
    My left foot alerted me to the presence of an object. I feared at once a protuberance linked to the boxed up corpse, reasoned with myself, and knelt down. 
    Curious to see what I had dislodged I let my fingers craw under the wooden casket: bits of fluff and an apple, waxy red, an overflow no doubt from my predecessor’s shopping expedition to the market. 
    The smell of the fruit turned to taste, sweet and sour when I pierced the skin with my teeth. I was forced into memories, taught or real I was not sure, but by now, through my mother’s retelling they belonged to me. 
    Images skipped in front of my eyes: I followed the young child in a pale blue dress, saw the crepe soles of her shoes as she ran to the greengrocer’s. I heard the shop bell tinkle, watched the shop keeper’s belly undulate underneath his stained overall, waited for her to rest the ruby fruit on my outstretched palm. 
    I remembered the house. ‘That one,’ my mother had said when we undertook our pilgrimage to the past, ‘we lived there for over a year, until you went to….’ She’d left the sentence unfinished. ‘Orphanage’ wasn’t a place where a mother should have taken her child. ‘We slept in that room,’ and she pointed to a green shuttered window on the first floor. ‘At the back there’s an orchard. That’s where you used to play when you were not running round the village in search of company.’ 
    We spent a whole day in Mirepoix, a pretty village nestling at the foot of the Pyrenees. It made sense that we should turn to the past and share details as fine as grains of sand because it was all we had to build on. Maybe it would be enough, maybe not. I still don’t have an answer. 
    I had forgotten the half-timbered house huddled against each other, roofs at odd angles and the walls of different shades of green and blue. Forgotten too the faces of sad women carved out of beams above the covered walkway, and the dragon’s head caught in a silent roar while old men sat on metal chairs, sipped their wine, and called out their cards at café tables. 
    The apple still sat in my hand, vibrant, a painful object. I thought I could feel the pips dancing their resentment at being trapped deep into its core. 
    I heard a noise. Footsteps. I dropped the fruit in the coffin, by the side of my mother’s hand, turned ivory, to match the magnolia sheet of artificial silk. I kept my head bowed in reflection when the door opened. 
    ‘Sorry to disturb you, but I must attend to a bereaved family. A suicide. So sad. A young man,’ whispered the undertaker, as if the body in the coffin had to be spared the knowledge of an untimely death. He stood by my side. ‘Let me give you the door code so that you can come back and spend a little more time with your dear mother.’ He ushered me out, closed the door behind us. On a numbered pad he tapped a modern Sesame, the releasing of the gate to eternal peace, and invited me to re-enter the room. 
    ‘Please stay as long as you like, and by the way,’ he whispered, ‘the….facilities are in the building next door. I left it unlocked, should you need to …You know…’ I worried that he might wink but he didn’t. 
    How troublesome I thought, for undertakers who have grown so accustomed to the compliance of the dead to have to contend with the needs of the living. 
    On the threshold he tugged at the white cuffs of his shirt, and further assured me that he understood how painful it is to say good bye to a loved one. 
    In my case the initial meeting had been a worse ordeal. On my first visit my mother, grey haired, given to plumpness, clutching a checked handkerchief had stood in front of me, waiting. 
    I had hoped a surge of emotions would carry me forth into her arms. I had rehearsed the hugs, the tears, the laughter, the words, the interruptions, more hugs and even joy. Yet when she held me I hardly felt the lapping of an emotional wave. The smell of her cologne caught at my throat, filtered through the thin wall dividing past and present, evaporated. I shouldn’t have averted my face when her mouth, crowded with teeth – front ones wired to side ones, for safety – came so close to my cheek I smelt peppermint on her breath. 
    She pretended not to notice my reluctance, placed both hands on my shoulders, pushed me back a little, and stared at me to sort out the features resembling hers. With the light behind her I could not see her clearly, but I doubt she could still find her child living in me. She had grown other babies, cared for them, nurtured the fragility of their lives, forced me to recede further into the past. Meanwhile I had survived, adapted, evolved, become another woman’s daughter, loved the father who’d become mine. 
    She dabbed at her eyes a few times. My cheeks remained dry. She did not make her disappointment obvious. I hid mine in a sudden hug. 
    ‘I forgot to tell you,’ the undertaker had crept back in, ‘it’s possible to arrange for a personal tribute, a plaque for the cemetery if you like. Just leave a note on the table over there by the red carnations.’ 
    I’ve always hated carnations. Sad flowers, scentless, their stems paralysed in metal calipers to force them to stand in Sunday vases. 
    I had counted forty eight long upwards stems topped by pink petals edged with white on the walls of the children’s ward. My eyes had ridden over them again and again as if they’d been anchored to the merry-go-round of pain. 
    Where had my mother been when the operation went wrong, when machines had to pump life back into me? Laughing on a beach near Biarritz perhaps, or preparing a picnic, or tending a bruised knee? 
    I played with our life together, furnished the room where we’d slept: a pine wardrobe with a squeaking door and on our bed the smell of sheets dried on freshly cut grass. For twenty eight months we had fitted into an intimate puzzle, mother and child, breathing in unison, yet no fingers clutching the side of her skirt, no crying in the dark because a nightmare had woken me, no nestling against her for comfort had bound her to me. 
    How could I hope to have reached her in absentia?
    And now all was left was a body, and so much we hadn’t said. I would never know who she truly was. 
    On my first visit I had tried to imagine myself living as her daughter, holding hands with my sisters on our way to school, playing hopscotch at break time, and chasing butterflies in the park. 
    My imagination betrayed me. I failed to see the daughter I could have been, failed to become a sibling, to take my place amongst what should have been my family. Instead I glimpsed the elegance of my parents’ home, sat at the dining table where the noise of knives and forks replaced the music of words, slept in a narrow bed in a large room at the end of a carpeted corridor. 
    I watched my memories drip with grey. I remembered the shuffling of feet outside the red brick school overlooking the park, the voices of children fearful and excited on the first day of term and the autumnal smell of an apple bulging my coat pocket. 
    Now the half eaten fruit was waiting. Hesitant, my hand reached down in the coffin, slid along a crease down the magnolia sheet, touched fingers that cannot hold. I pulled the apple out, wiped it with a paper handkerchief. I bit into the flesh. The sound of my teeth crunched through the red skin, reverberated from one corner of my memory to another. A drop of juice trailed down my chin. 
    A light came on outside, poured yellow into the room. 
    A figure walked past the frosted glass door. I stopped chewing, swallowed and waited. 
    It was time for me to go, time to let another mourner keep my mother company. I didn’t know how to say good bye. I never could talk to the dead, not even when they creep across my dreams. So instead I stood by my mother’s side, closed my eyes for a few seconds, and searched for her in life behind my lids.

Claudia Rapport

Late dawn lights the Ohio sky. Don takes his morning rec.
sees sudden sunrise. A universe lit for him:
whatever his sins.
His sky-square turned to sun and now he may
also catch sunset. As the season turns or earth turns
sun notes arrival and departure:
all the slow progress of the courts, of death
should leave at least a chance
to be caught up again by the sun, over the earth’s rim, like a free man.


Rec. hours are set, no swearing, no appeal,
do they know light shortens in September
a privilege not listed, the heart’s delight,
keep quiet then, keep eagerness locked up,
watch for the swift drop
at the end of the day.

Daphne Rock