The Latin Deli: Prose and Poetry

Fever

Fever In my childhood, father was to her and me like the wind—blowing through our house on weekend leavesand when we spoke to him, he carried our voices away with him. He would leave Mother absorbed in a silence that grew within her like a new pregnancy: I remember watching her set the dinner table for two, then eat by herself in the kitchen, standing. Living with her taught me this: That silence is a thick and dark curtain, the kind that pulls down over a shopwindow; that love is the repercussion of a stone bouncing off that same window—and that pain is something you can embrace, like a rag doll nobody will ask you to share. On the nights when she allowed me in her wide bed, Fd lay my head close to hers—her skin was as cool as the surface of the pillow the sick child clings to between feverish dreams; and Fd listen to the delicate knotted thread of her breathing—her rosary of sighs, absorbing through my pores a sorrow so sweet and sustaining that I lived on it, as simply as the houseplant that adapts to what light filters into a windowless room. 35 ...