by Zoe Raine
You see a fire truck split in half and open to the public like a children’s museum. The head-on collision is wiped clean from your memory, but what you remember are the car door locks that almost blocked your view of your mom who is outside the car, who is the main display, while you are strapped in. You can still see her, hurt, with her leg in a bucket and skirt pulled up so it wouldn’t get wet. Was she smiling at you?
You see the silver inside of the fire truck like the coins stuck under your car seat. The silver insides—a sliver of first memories—fuzzy stars and thick clouds like when you rub your eyes too hard. Where is your dad? The medics? The stuffed animal they gave you? You sink into the cushions and stare.
An observer is all you’ll ever be when your mom is bleeding.
Like when you watched red and blue lights on white walls through your blinds and were too scared to look at the scene unfolding on the front lawn. You heard him yelling, heard stumbling, heard crying. Long after the lights were gone, you tip-toed downstairs and saw your mom sleeping on the couch with your childhood blanket.
Or like every scene after with violent men, with alcohol, with drugs that blurs to the same starry pocket of mixed memories with your mom standing up and brushing herself off.
Or like the blooming harvest bells of bruises that turned to a pulmonary embolism while you were away at college. The biggest blood clot the doctors had ever seen, pulled clean from your mom’s lungs. You watched beeping monitors through Facetime. I’m fine, no worries, she said, until later you learn she had a bedside priest to say her goodbyes.
When you ask her about the collision later, was that just all a dream? she tells you about how your dad drove onto a one-way road, tells you about the woman in the other car wearing a red dress, tells you about the stuffed animal the ambulance driver gave you. She opens a scrapbook to show you the dollar-coin-sized hospital band that fit your wrist, yet you remember only the aftermath.
Zoe Raine is a bartender based out of Bellingham, Washington. She found her love of literary magazines through interning at Passages North and is now an assistant fiction editor for Sundog Lit and reader for Fractured Lit. Her work is featured in A Velvet Giant, Lost Balloon, Invisible City, and elsewhere. You can find her on Twitter @ZoRaineMaki1 or visit her website.
Emerge Literary Journal 