There’s a Ouija Board in my mother’s throat that I can’t see. She’s barely spoken since

the earth bounced and maybe someone somewhere heard it, or perhaps sparrows shot out of the

limbs, peppering the sky with their black smears. I don’t know. I wasn’t there. But I imagine it.

Yesterday the arborist came up with a quote. He thought mother wanted them limbed or

sailed. He left stunned and confused, though his cheeks gleamed.

Neither of us eat, and David’s back at college, studying somehow. My own thoughts have

gone cannibal. It’s a barren field inside my head, sallow but for the one thing I can’t stop.

At night I sleep with a butcher knife under the pillow. Sometimes I press the tip against

my Adam’s apple, nick and feel the sticky drip pool in the hollows of my collar bone. I want to

die a slow death, suck on the tongue of torture for an eternity. I want to hear myself scream and

scream and scream, just to know something worthy and true.

In the morning, we float into the kitchen, light as enemy wind but with no gusts left in us.

Mother sits at the table, still in her robe, though she might as well be wallpaper. 

I can’t remember the last time I saw her eat and the endless rivers of coffee she’s drank

have shaded her teeth pencil lead gray, same as her skin now.

I don’t know how, but I do it. I say, “I’ll do it, Mom.”

She’s avoided looking at me for thirteen days, six hours and fifteen minutes because I am

the one who most resembles him. Not David. Me.

“You aren’t going to hurt yourself. Do you hear me?” Mother looks like a frightened

scarecrow. “For God’s sakes,” she says, slapping the saucer and cup off the table, the break and

clatter of shards and silver pining off nothing but dead silence.

I don’t know if I am actually going to kill myself, but I want to. Maybe Mom noticed the

missing knife. 

“The trees,” I say. “I can cut them down if you really want them gone. That’s a lot of

money.”

Mother blinks three times, so slowly it’s like watching a garage door close and open. Her

eyes are still the color of putty, but there’s a speck of glitter in them now.

“I’ll buy a chainsaw,” I say. “It won’t be that hard.” 

Mother’s arms, the shade and weight of worn driftwood, reach across the table. Hers are

the thinnest wrists I’ve ever seen. When she takes my palm in hers, I realize my hand is shaking,

my entire body trembling. The world trembling.

“Honey,” Mother says. “Listen to me. Listen. To. Me. It’s not your fault.”

And then there’s a metal plate sliding, lidding my throat so she can’t hear me say, It is It

is It is It is. It was my idea to go back out. I talked David into going. Dad was tired. The tree The

tree The tree The tree. It should have landed on me, not Dad. 

Mother taps her fingers on my knuckles where my pulse throbs through a wormy gray-

green vein. She taps and taps.