from Soucouyant

Long ago, she began to forget. It started with ordinary things. Shopping lists and recipes, bus change and savings cards, pens for jotting down those household tasks that always manage to slip away. But then Mother began to forget in far more creative ways. She began to forget names and places, goals and meanings. She began to forget the laws of language and the routes to salvation and the proper things to do with one's body. She began to excuse herself from the world we knew.

My brother and I were the first to notice. We were young children when it started and naturally alert for the smallest signs of adult weakness. When Mother wasn't looking, we'd climb up to the cupboards and eat peanut butter and corn syrup, lime pickle and molasses. Also the most perverse delicacy we could then imagine, Crisco shortening, spooning up the white sludge with our fingers and leaving greasy prints on the cupboard doors and the walls and the doorknobs. Mother couldn't understand why she never remembered to replenish her cooking goods. Why she never remembered to give the home a good all-round scrubbing. We were never caught.

Of course Mother was minding five or six other children in those early days. Her wits were already strained to the limit. Friday evenings, the children's parents would come and apologize for the days when they were forced to work overtime at their offices without proper warning. They would smile apologetically when handing Mother envelopes. But what messages were these people passing her, really? What kind of people envelop their words? This was still the earliest stage of Mother's condition and she had already learned to conceal her confusion from others and trust that in time things would become clear. She would wave the children's parents goodbye and open the envelopes carefully with a knife, sorting through the small number of fives and tens. Dirty numbers. Meaning new safety boots for her husband and belts for her boys and, of course, more endlessly dwindling cooking goods. Money was still too precious a meaning to forget.

But soon there came the times when Mother hurriedly dressed one boy in his snowmobile suit and ushered him to his parents waiting outside. Only then to remember (too late) that these parents had a girl. That girl with the haunting glass-marble eyes and the brilliant golden hair. Or brown. She would have had brown hair, Mother reminded herself. Mother would laughingly explain to the parents just how difficult it was to tell the difference between boys and girls these days. Just look at the rock stars, she would say. Nanny standup. But her jokes fell flat and Mother steadily lost her jobs. She was supposed to be minding children, after all. She was living on the edge of the bluffs, near an active railway.

Metal monsters in the night. Dirty numbers and greasy doorknobs. This was our belonging. Memory was a carpet stain that nobody would confess to. History was a television set left on all night. The car chases and gun fights sponsored by oil companies. The anthems at the end of broadcast days.

* * *

Then a crisis in something called "the economy." Father was laid off at the factory but later rehired as a temp after two agonizing weeks. The work was erratic. The factory wouldn't need him for weeks on end, but then, faced with a last minute order to fill, it would suddenly call upon him round the clock. Father became a maniac on those days, a blur of energy bursting through the front door to bolt cold dal and rice from Tupperware in the fridge. Frantic nap. Bathroom. Frantic nap. Chugging lukewarm cups of instant coffee, then back out to catch another shift, a toppled milk carton in his wake, pattering white upon the floor.

Mother's jokes continued to fall flat. One afternoon, Father took his first long chug from his coffee mug before running to the kitchen sink to retch endlessly. Waving away our concern as another belt of sickness took him. Mother had accidentally filled...