Dancing Shoes by Beth Moulton

Once I passed the rest area, it was closer to continue to mom's place than to turn around and go home. On most trips I hit the gas at that spot and speed past, outracing the desire to turn back. But I'd had too little sleep and too much coffee and I had to pee. As I signaled my turn, I caught sight of the hideous green and orange platform shoes lying on the passenger side floor. Six-inch heels, high tops, with green laces and a side zipper. "Oh, fuck. I'll hold it." I hit the gas and swerved back onto the highway.

The home health aide had called last night saying mom had been cursing all day about me taking these shoes. And by the way, she says, I quit. That's the second home health aide this month, at least a dozen since Mom entered hospice care. Her doctors had solemnly recommended hospice, saying she only had a few weeks left. That was ten months ago.

When I arrive, Mom is sitting on the couch, walker planted in front of her as if she has somewhere to go. Her cat Pumpkin, eighteen pounds of pure rage, hisses at me from Mom's lap.

"You better have brought my shoes back," she says, while petting Pumpkin. The beast closes its eyes and purrs.

I drop the shoes on the floor at her feet, startling the cat. "Glad to see you, too."

"You had no right to take them."

"The last time you wore them you ended up in the ER with a broken hip."

"It wasn't the shoes that broke my hip; I tripped over Pumpkin." She kisses the top of the cat's head. "He felt bad about it, so we let you think it was the shoes."

If I left now I could be home by dinner time. Maybe call Jeff, have a few drinks ...

"Put them on me."

"Mom--"

"None of my clothes fit me anymore, just shoes. Put them on me."

I study her then, as I might study a stranger. I finally notice how her clothes pool around her, as if she's melting, her eyes huge in her gaunt face, her fingers bony and trembling. Only her personality is still larger than life.

"Ralph died last week."

"Ralph?"

"My senior prom date. I wore these shoes. We showed up on his Harley and danced all night. He was the best dancer I've ever known."

"I'm sorry about Ralph."

"They buried him without shoes."

I struggle with the zipper on the left shoe. "Well, Mom, maybe they--,"

"His sister, the stupid one who dances like her hips don't bend, said he wouldn't need shoes, said the undertaker draped the blanket so no one would know, but I looked under that blanket and there he was in his stocking feet. No matter where Ralph lands in the afterlife, he's still going to need dancing shoes."

"Mom, grief makes people do strange things."

The zipper finally slides up, snugging the shoe against her bony calf.

"Did you know I took these shoes with me to college? I was wearing them the night I met your father. It was at a disco. The place is torn down now; they built a CVS. I won't go there."

"I never knew that about Dad. Or why you hate CVS." The second shoe is more difficult to get on than the first. I start to sweat. Pumpkin is batting at my hair, or perhaps trying to claw my eyes out.

"So I need you to promise me that you'll bury me in these shoes."

When they're in hospice, you've moved past the point of pretending that there is still a lot of time left. Still, it's one thing to know something in your head, but another thing to admit it with your heart. The zipper slides under my fingers, and if I squint a little I can see how my mother looked when she was younger than I am now, a dancing teenager, wearing shoes that I have always been afraid to wear.

"Well, Mom--" I swallow and try again. "Mom. Is there any dress that goes with these?"

Beth Moulton earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Rosemont College in Rosemont, PA, where she was fiction editor for the Rathalla Review. Her work has appeared in Affinity CoLab, The Drabble, Milk Candy Review and other journals. She lives near Valley Forge, PA with her cats, Lucy and Ethel.

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When I Think About My Mother by C. Cimmone

When people ask what my first childhood memory is, I don’t tell them the truth. I tell them my first childhood memory is opening Christmas presents. I talk about the warmth of the fireplace and cascading limbs of a Frasier fir. It is a delightful first memory, but it’s not mine.

My first childhood memory is a spinning box fan and my mother’s smooth breasts. My first childhood memory is just a flash, a short burst of a foggy shower, a mild disturbance to an otherwise seamless day. My mother would argue that she was not a good mother and that most of our days were volatile and intentionally forgotten with overflowing buckets of guilt and shame. To hear my mother tell it, my childhood was a broken heirloom, a fractured branch of an ancestry tree that she worked tirelessly to repair.

There isn’t much left of that day, only a piece of the night, which began with a yellow glow creeping from underneath the bathroom door. The box fan cooled my face; my long hair danced in the stream of cool air. My body was limp and molded by a heap of blankets. Our dog rested against my back; my brother twisted and flopped on the other side of the bed.

The shower began, as it did each night, and draining water paced itself with the hum of the box fan. I waited for the variation of falling water, my mother’s entry to the warm shower, but there was a delay - perhaps a forgotten rag or towel. My mother’s feet eventually sank into the shower and the water ran its course, over her body and down the drain.

The gentle chirp of my mother’s voice disturbed the running water and a clap of a dropped shampoo bottle scared me into easing the bathroom door open with a careful nudge. The light was low, and in my mind, after all of these years, the light is softly falling down on my mother. The rest of the hollow room is dark, and my brother does not exist. I see my mother, her large breasts caressing her chest, her swollen thighs leaning towards the shower wall. I see her hands clenching her face; I see her long brown hair, tacky with moisture, clinging to her back. Her brown nipples are large and caring; her bare arms are tan and shaking.

My first childhood memory is of my mother weeping; it is a memory I have carried with me all over. I have sprinkled it all over my relationships and I have unpacked it each Christmas morning. I hear my mother crying when I look at pictures of my father, a man who never aged. I hear her crying in my mind when I consider falling in love. I hear shower water running when I think about my mother on her knees, begging for peace, for closure, for just a second to see my father standing tall and telling her, “I love you.”

My mother carried her grief with her to her last hour. She struggled to find a light, to see a shimmer of him somewhere along the hospital wallpaper. She reached for my hand before her last few breaths. I knew her fear was that I would only remember her pain, her unfiltered discipline, and her second-hand shirts, so I leaned in as she closed her eyes and whispered, “You are the most beautiful woman I have ever known, and I know Daddy will be so happy to see you.”

This story was written for my daughter; a presumptive telling of her first childhood memory...of me.

C. Cimmone is an author, editor, and comic from Texas. She’s alive and well on Twitter at @diefunnier