Cobalt Rivers

by Audrey Elledge

Nameless is the feeling that rises within you as you think of your mother’s hands, flour-lathered and sifting dough, stirring clotted oil until it spins into something like a prayer. The same hands that dressed you as a child, that lifted your fine doll-hair into barrettes, that steered you away from fire, that taught you about a woman’s blood, now crease with the indifference of age. Her veins, bulging cobalt rivers that slope down her wrists, are more apparent now than the last time you visited. When was the last time you visited?

You wonder when this will be the final time she presides over the humming stove in her yellow kitchen, when this will be the last time she calls your name—the name your friends don’t even know—, when this will be the last time her arms circle your back and press you close like a promise, squeezing you into something ripe and luminous and young, when time will finally drain the speed from her body like a red-bellied mosquito sucking life, leaving you with the stinging and relentless bite.

You can’t put your deepest fear into words—that your mom will die—because to give it form and shape is to invite the possibility that it will come true. 

But in the hollow of the night you cannot let these thoughts live in your head too long, unpacking their bags to stay, peeling the paint off your walls. Spare yourself from grieving death twice because for now you have her, and anyway, you can’t keep what you did not create. 

For now, let this nameless force surge and push in and out of you, welling and retreating, like the burning and ever-receding tide.