Leavings
- May 18, 2022
- 3 min read
by Olga Musial
I. A table crushes under an earthenware pot, it’s your fist. You leave your daughter behind at the mall parking, tires drawing canyons in hot asphalt, it’s guilt — and what do you call this type of daughterhood, this shattering? A good one, or a sad one? And what is sadness if not the earthenware pot left cleaved in two, in three, in four, glue sprinkled astride it like the seeds of a papaya, guilt the sound of a shopping cart rummaging away, away, away?
II. Our walls flake off where, in other people’s houses, they’d hold embroidery and watercolor. The day father leaves you, they grow ceremonial, shed skins like snakes, in long, white flakes, as if they wanted to bury you underneath. In place of cleaning up, your pockets swallow shards of the pot in their frayed mouths.
III. In mourning, you sit on a folding chair and watch the sun, like we did when I was a child and wore my hair in plaits only because you told me that was the way to wear it, and now, when we lie down on the grass. It tingles my back and yours, like pins puncturing a seamstress’ pillow, as the chair creaks by our ears. The sun’s chin is cleft, like father’s, and so even the clouds can remind you of a loss you shrug at, says it is nothing much, people lose people all the time. Then, you cry through your nights in our empty bathtub. If he doesn’t come back in a week, you’ll start praying, you, who thought God was just a picture people spoke to when they got lonely, the way Grandma spoke to her walls, held debates with ceiling fans.
IV. Before March comes, you throw the TV to trash. Useless thing, you say, tossing it aside. For days, we’ve been watching the Super Bowl, the live streaming, then the recordings, as salt from the peanuts crunched in-between our teeth, stuck in the curves of our sofa. You only recorded the advertisements, pointing at them, saying, if we had that our upstairs neighbors would invite us, even once, for dinner, and I can never tell you they care for their earthenware pots like they were people, the pot you’ve already forgotten after the I’m sorry I’m sorry said to yourself in front of the mirror, because what is a daughter if not a reflection, a mirroring?
V. To amend the broken pots, we go to the mall, your car jerking to a stop behind the entrance, smashing its front into lines of shopping carts. Colorful blouses peer at us as we slide through alleyways with the kind of takeout we can only afford at the end of the month. As we eat, your fork scratching the plates, carving rivers of sauce you tell me funny, I’ve already forgotten about him and I wonder if takeout is all it takes for a person to forget. In the night, when I pretend to be asleep, you take strands of my hair and weave them into braids. Carefully, with your yellowed fingertips, finishing them off with red ribbon, but in the morning, I unwind them into waves of curly hair and ask myself what I did that you got tired of holding me so soon.
Olga Musial (she/her) is a fiction writer from Warsaw, Poland. Her work is published or forthcoming in Fractured LIt, The Global Youth Review, 805 Lit and elsewhere. When not writing, you can find her combing through second-hand bookshops or tweeting @olgamusial.
