Estrapade

Oil Spill, an excerpt

10 Years Later — December

Dauphin Island, AL

The black veil of sleep tore open to the sight of my bedroom, as I awoke to a phone call I’d been dreading for the passed three years. My mother had finally died in her sleep. She’d been in hospice for the last leg — 6 months as the doctors had prescribed it.

I’d been reading Dostoevsky before my eyes grew heavy, repeatedly reading the section in Crime and Punishment where Raskolnikov was looking for an ax to kill someone with. The irony wasn’t lost on me. After the click of the phone and the inexorable echoing of the silence that replaced Dr. Graves’ voice, I’d crept outside our home.

The ocean waves that once coaxed me into complacency looked black, shimmering beneath the moon’s glow as if it were something else. Something great and ancient. I envisioned walking through the tall patches of grass — into the sand — my feet and ankles sinking. My body, not my own.

The first thought that came to my mind was that I was sick. This was just a temporary hiccup, some sort of flu that would work itself out in time. I’d previously misheard Dr. Graves. Because I was sick. Tomorrow, I’d call her and she’d tell me that my mother wasn’t doing well, but was alive, nonetheless. Sure.

I held onto that belief for as long as I could and then toppled into the sand beneath me, howling. Grief is such an ugly thing, isn’t it? How my mother could still somehow exist and not, baffled me, stripped me practically naked. It’s so sudden, the change. To go from pulse to memory. To hold physical residence only to then disperse into a fog.

I sunk down into the ground and let the waves soak through my clothes. Behind me, her bedroom window still remained. I could run back inside — up the stairs. Make a right. I could fall into her bed and sink into her sheets, smell the bergamotof her lotion, cry until my eyes bled — but, I didn’t. None of those things could cure me. They were simply the remnants of her, further proof of the fog she’d slipped away in.