Member-only story
Sitting Room
The hearth, magazine rack, black ant, and mother who misses everything
It is raining and the cows are hidden away. Fog has turned to mountains and stone clouds that sit heavily. Socks hang over the wood stove, still dirty, and mama tests the fit of saplings in a brick hearth. The glow is larger than the blaze inside it, pleasantly full, close to spilling through the house.
I imagine the spilling and see it travel, mercurial carmine snake, through the house, over the carpet and into the kitchen and bedrooms and down the front steps into the world. I don't follow it. I never do. I am patient.
Even when the thunder rolls. Even then, when it has landed, I hold onto patience. All I have, resistive to the world. When daddy comes home, drunk, with black lacquered hands and sooten face, the orange snake is slithering circumferent about the world. The fire has gone everywhere. Then I am no longer alone.
God is in the fireplace. God and old stories. When I read the stories aloud they stay, stoking, and the socks, drying above the hearth, they absorb them. When I wear them next. We go walking.
Momma wears a shawl, and she keeps a blanket over her knees. The knees give her fits. She rocks in her torn chair beside a wooden magazine rack. Her yarn work keeps her attention. A black ant…
