Acid Tears
a story
She arose with timidity befitting the garnished flower draping the bedspread, embroidered delicately with a finesse that mimicked her thoughts, etched into her mind from an unknown dove. The tails of her dress flew across the post to the end table, and her eyes shut tightly against the streaming sun. “What day is it?” she thought, before she knew — “Ah yes, Mother’s Day.”
The phone rang promptly to remind her she was alive. She answered the call quickly, seemingly not wanting to forget the fact that other people lived, too.
“Hello?” she called out to the unknown other person — a figment which lays at the beginning of each human interaction.
“Hello Mom, it’s me, your dearly beloved son, Jeremy,” rang out the tender frayed speech from years of disquietude. It had been a decade since she last spoke to this otherness — a ghost from the reliquary of her devoured nightmares upon fragrant endings of days. And nights would have become for her the taste of medicine dripping slowly upon her tongue, on the day he decided enough was enough, and to move on completely from her life — forgetting that her presence only mattered to her when it seemed that she mattered to himself. But these things were forgotten in her heart those long years, as she held each picture of him close to her chest on Christmas, giving thanks for his breath each December on the day which he was born and took his first inhale of time’s delightful fragrance; and, she knew this voice more deeply, more intimately even than her own hand. This cracking voice which dared not whisper more than a Hello every decade; but, time does not erase those gifts which are more precious than gold and ivory, nor can it measure the amount of troubled joy which echoes within each heartbreak.
In just the same way she replied, “Hello, son. It’s Margaret, your dearly beloved mother,” and wept acid tears upon the transmission device, on this her first remembered day sent above from Heaven.
