reprise: persephone before the underworld

The following piece is the creative nonfiction winner of F(r)iction’s Spring 2022 literary contest

airport inn & suites

When I visit Nashville, I stay in hotels. There’s not enough room for people in the house between the dog and the cats and what’s left from their evictions. My father stays with me. He decides the room is full of black mold because the heater is broken so he fixes it until it actually breaks. Everywhere foreign and uncomfortable to him is full of black mold. This is called undiagnosed obsessive-compulsion. This is called an unhealed inner child and knowing my stepmother is more important to me. I sleep wearing two pairs of socks and a sweatshirt at minimum, curled into some half-orphaned December shape.

her brother’s house, over the river

The day after Christmas, my stepmother’s brother shaves off her hair. She sits in the center of the living room, regal in flannel shirt and thrift store jeans, wedding ring, gapped mascara. She cries after I go home.

airport inn & suites

Even before her brother shaved her head there is the bone on bone of deteriorating cartilage. Cephalgia. Hotel sweat. Marlboro Gold on leather. I take what I can get because usually the hotel stairs are too hard on her knees. I crush up the rocks on the hotel desk, massage her migraine with shock for her satiny baldness like gravel in my mouth.

airport inn & suites

The rocks by the pool called for her, she says, in the deathless hours before dawn. I’d run from the hotel room with no shoes on when I realized she was not in bed beside me. I want to know what exactly it is she sees when she holds up a rock-shaped rock and with all the weightless purity of giving up on not giving up finds the silhouette of a heart. I touch her back while she sleeps to feel her breathing.

antioch hampton inn

She says floating in the pool is the only time her body doesn’t hurt. I don’t like to swim. No one in the mall sees a woman too young for a walker but everyone knows exactly how to fast walk around her. It’s not a family holiday without snorting ambrosia crumpled on the bathroom floor except I am too congested from crying crumpled on the bathroom floor. My stepmother nods off into her Chinese noodles. My father is embarrassed but he waits three years to tell me about the drug problem on top of the cancer problem.

Cuddled under hotel comforters, she and I, we watch cooking shows and talk about all the places I should eat on my trip to New Orleans.

america’s best value inn

She gives me ear plugs for the hotel room because of my father’s snoring. They don’t work. It’s better that way. I can listen and make sure he starts breathing again after he stops.

her brother’s house, over the river

The cardboard box is full of moldy albums and back-of-the-storage-trailer racoon shit. We spend hours digitizing photos for the slideshow at the funeral. If you don’t burn the body, you can pick wigs for the wake. My father picks photos with himself in them, too, like he wants to be remembered, too. The dread settling in my gut like river silt is from knowing this or from knowing I would do the same.

her brother’s house, over the river

My father declines half the sacrament. Christ’s blood in a little paper cup is still a threat to decades of sobriety. The house-call priest seems mildly offended. I do not know where my stepmother went, but she is not in her own eyes. I explain three times she can’t smoke inside with the oxygen tank or the house will explode. She asks, Not even in the bathroom?

antioch hampton inn

We sit. We talk about her ghost. My dad cries.

the apartment breezeway

It could be days or weeks or hours or breaths. I learn that Time does not actually exist except in the flattening of your tongue to your teeth or the unspooling loom of your ribcage. In the hospital my father hands her the phone. I tell her to wait for me, I will be there as soon as I can. My father says There’s no way we’ll make it down there to the beach, home hospice is setting up today. She shapes I love you all tongue and no teeth. The way heart-shaped rocks heavy my pockets is nothing new. The Florida summer gulps me up.

america’s best value inn

We sit. We talk about her ghost. We cry but not looking at each other.

the new apartment

The game show contestant said his mother left him a letter to find in a drawer before Hermes split open her hospital bed. My stepmother didn’t leave me shit. I am angry with her for only the second time in my life. The first was when she didn’t wait.

her brother’s house, over the river

I pay Chiron a whole talent and curl up in the place on the bed where she died. She doesn’t come. My father gives me jars of heart-shaped rocks. It’s a little beautiful to have only ever been angry with her after her life. No finger fits the hole in the dam of the River Lethe. Back at home, my classmates don’t say anything but someone leaves a last-minute sympathy card at my seat. It is the only dash of color in the parade of scrap paper name plates, which everyone else remembered to save from the first day of the new semester.

“reprise: persephone before the underworld” is a prose counterpart to the poem “persephone before the underworld,” winner of the 2017 bettye newman poetry award & 43rd new millennium writings finalist.