There is a light and it never goes out (open)

My mother’s house is still standing. I’m not surprised, but it feels strange looking up at the old place without her with me. Everything has changed from the days that I used to run barefoot along the rotting floorboards, making prints in the dust that used to lay as thick as snowfall on the ground. I am older, I am more…socialised…I guess would be the word. Not civilised in any way shape or form, but arguably miles away from the wild animal I used to be when I lived here. I suppose I have Bean to thank for that, though he’ll never know how much really. It’s strange but he’s awakened a caring inside of me that I thought died with my mother. As for her, well, of course that’s changed. She’s no longer here. Not in the twisting vines that run along the gates at the front of the house or the cracked windows that blink at me as through broken eyes.

Everything has changed. And yet here the house stands, as vivid as it always was in my memory though it’s discolored and drained and strained, shifting into sepia like an old photograph of itself. I thought maybe it might have gotten worse, might have collapsed in on itself completely- but it hasn’t. It reached a level of desolation and decomposition long before I was born and has neither improved nor gotten worse over time. It is a constant even though its inhabitants have changed and shifted or simply ceased to be altogether. I find that sort of comforting as I twine my hands around the iron run gates that jut like ebony fingers clawing at the sky. There is a lock and a bolt over the opening- but when has a lock and a bolt ever stopped me before? I’m Citrine Tunbark afterall, expert cat burgaler, petty thief extradinairre, stealing from the rich and the poor and the not very rich and the very poor. I could go in if I wanted to.

Go and peak inside the crumbling hallway, the ceiling coming away like a wet cake, flaked with paint and peeling wallpaper, follow the line of dead leaves and crumpled newspapers further into the house. I find the room where I slept, that mattress in the corner of the room, my precious things as a child kept locked away in a little chest of rotten wood. I haven’t seen them in years but I remember the box; a handful of pine cones collected from the trees in the yard that have grown wild and unkempt, a set of paper dolls, flimsy and cut crudely from the newspapers because I had no real toys, a cat’s skull, a handful of baby teeth. I could negotiate the fallen balustrades and find the place where my mother and I used to draw in lipstick on the walls when she was having a good day…I could creep quietly and with trepidation to the bathroom. Look down at the place where I found her, floating in the tub, her hair fanned out around her like a halo. I could look, I could sit, I could remember.

But I won’t, of course. Slowly my hand unfurls from the wrungs of the gate like a flower and I force myself to pull away. I cast a last lingering look back over the house, half expecting to see Mom at the window, as she always was in life with her lipstick smeared bright around her mouth like a gaping wound, pulling her silk nightgown- the one that smelt of chicken carcasses and strange festering damp but I always liked the feel of- around her body but never enough to reveal the jutting bones of her spine poking through like the keys on a xylophone. She isn’t there, of course, though I already knew that when I looked- of course I did. She might have been ethereal and strange in life; willowy and fay like a fairy tale creature, but enough someone like her can’t come back from death.

I should go back to Bean, make sure that he isn’t getting himself beaten up the way that he somehow manages to do- especially after I promised it wouldn’t happen ever again the last time it happened. But I sort of blame him for the fact that I’m here now anyway. If he hadn’t pressed me to talk about my Mom that evening when a few too many blows to the head had left him dizzy and strange, more open than he had ever been. It was because of him I even had the urge to go here today. I can’t say that it has helped; the exercise has hardly been pyscologically or emotionally purging.

And I’m nervous too. Bringing my eyes up to scan the street in case my Mom’s husband is lurking somewhere like a shadow in an alley way, ready to pounce, put me in a community home or worse dress me up as his daughter; comb my hair, put me into pretty dresses and make me wear the slack dead skin of someone who will never be me. What would happen then? I think, imagining men in white coats and sticks- though that’s Bean’s memory not mine. They’d give me a name, a birth certificate, stick me in an academy and up in front of the reapings. I’m not doing that. I’m not going to be anyone’s daughter now my Mom is gone.

A fox disturbs a few trash bins pulled out into the street and I nearly jump out of my skin, heart pounding in my chest, the normal fight or flight instincts coiling over me so powerful that I can nearly stand. I am stood still, but it feels as though my stomach has taken off without me, gone careening down the street and into some dark corner. Only a fox I tell myself, only a fox.

The fox though had uncovered a few treasures I notice, upending the trash can and sending the goodness held with in spilling into the streets like innards spilling from a gutted cat. There is food, and food in good nick too- if you don’t mind a little dirt. I’ve been on the streets long enough to be over the indignity of rootling around trash cans for food, and when a belly is rumbling as fiercely as mine is now there is little room for pride. And in this instance, the bounty is particularly appetising.

There are stale wholemeal muffins still in the cellophane wrapping,
protected from the smell of garbage juice which even I’ll admit takes a little time to get around and I immediately snaffle them up into my arms. Picking through limp lettuce leaves and blackened banana skins doing my best to breathe through my mouth as opposed to my nose, I dig deeper and see what else is there. Unopened yoghurt which is fine if you don’t care about sell by dates, a few scraps of meat which I swear is still warm and nestled between packets of potato chips. I’m so hungry that I sneak it immediately into my mouth, too consumed by nourishment to notice that slightly musty taste which only ever comes from garbage diving.

If only my mom could see me now. For some reason I think she’d be proud.