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Room-Darkening Shades When she comes back from burying her mother—no, the ashes her mother’s burned into—she comes with school photographs, cross-stitched linens, ropes of fake pastel pearls and a genuine opal ringed with diamond chips inside a green velvet box, wearing her mother’s black coat and scarf, her mother’s pearl-cuffed party gloves. She isn’t the first-ever woman to lose a mother, her husband reminds her, watching her paint the bedroom walls cinnamon walnut, watching her hang the new shades, square and solid, to keep the night inside. You’re not the first-ever daughter to grieve, he says, yanking the shades off the spool to the floor, letting the summer pinks through the lace at five a.m. when birds begin to caw and scrap for seed. Nights when he sets the sleep machine to brook babble, light rattle path 38 through digital pebbles and reaches for her, she turns the dial back to the rumble and crash of waterfall into the well, that sound she remembers from drinking herself down there, and even in the brightness of her garden, she recedes into ferns or kneels in tall shoots of chestnut. Alone in the window, finally emptied of patience, he says I loved her, too, she was my mother too, but his woman is already dressed for the will-have-been-gone, adorned in her future’s perfect black coat and scarf, and she’s not the first ever to go. 39 ...

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