Marked.
“And Cain said unto the LORD, My punishment is greater than I can bear.” (Genesis 4:13)
My mother. I hadn’t heard from her in thirty years, but still she found me. A note enclosed in an envelope, along with her new address. “I’m dying,” it read, nothing more. She’s been dying for centuries, for as long as I can remember; but there was something in the spidery, shaky scrawl, like squashed bugs against the fading white of the page, that wrenched me from my home, and back into her life.
It was a shock to see her. She looked desiccated, ancient, contorted into the shape of her chair; half-blind, half-deaf, half-mad, shrieking whenever she slept about the sable-eyed snakes that she saw slithering through the heating vents and pouring through the letter box, waving her walking stick at shadows. She grunted as I appeared in her doorway, the prodigal met with such indifference that I waved my hand in front of her face to see if she could see me at all.
“I know who you are,” she said simply, directing me up the dusty staircase to a compressed room in the attic of the house. And what of our relationship now? I sleep. I cook. I clean. I take her to the toilet, I wash her clothes and bathe her as her eyes scratch me. “Useless, selfish, worthless” she hisses, the scolding sibilance of her words like the crack of a whip.
Twenty-fours a day, I stay, breathing only when she sends me to the supermarket, to fetch her fruit. I buy apples, by the kilo, and feel their immeasurable weight as she takes her time letting me back in. I can’t have a key. I can’t be trusted. Not after what I did. I don’t rest them on the step. Red welts appear on my palms as she listens against the door, pretending she isn’t. We stay silent, as the stretched handles on the bags scream.
“If I’m so terrible, why do you want me here?” I ask her one afternoon, spoon poised, her mouth gaping open and shut like a scrawny baby sparrow’s. I blow on the hot apple crumble, scattering sweet cinnamon scented crumbs across the mound of musty blankets piled upon her lap. She ignores me, and stares at the television.
“Do you want me to go?”
“You’re not able.” She says, finally. Or do I misunderstand? She repeats it.
“You’re not Abel.”
“I know.” I say.
I climb up the stairs, making my way towards that barren aerie of mine, perched on the cold, dark side of a formidable mountain. I lie on the bed and close my eyes, feeling the sky open up above me, the pinpricks of the watching stars upon my skin. Heaven is still, indifferent. I feel I could reach through the roof and into it if I tried hard enough. I sleep. Close to the sky, closer to God.
Nicola Belte is in the middle: of England; of a year out before starting a masters degree in literature; and of a collection of short stories.
