My mother had discovered a power so vast she had no idea of its potential, at first. She’d stumbled upon it as a result of her shock, the ability like a ravenous cyclone, spinning within the core of her grief.

She’d discovered a way to travel backward in time.

It didn’t involve any kind of machine. No twist of reality or quantum mechanics. The mechanism to travel into our past was rooted within the wellspring of her sorrow. In the course of a day she exerted her power, erasing the last six months our history as if she weren’t a person at all but some infinite ocean, crashing wave after wave across the sands of our memory. 

Noticeably slimmer, she reached for the cupboards, throwing wee jars of food into a white garbage sack. Jars slammed together, glass screeching glass, the plastic bag stretching into absurd, bulky shapes.

“If you want, I could eat those.”

My mother replied without turning to face me. “This food’s not for you.” Her back was a wall my words couldn’t scale, keeping her presence, her torture, at a deliberate distance. “This is food for babies, and you haven’t been a baby for years.”

Delicate folds of simple, bright cottons, footed pajamas that zipped up the front, short-sleeved shirts still attached to their hangers, all slumped in a box at the end of our couch. What might have been worn for a handful of months would now be worn by no one at all. Without the prospect of being grown out of, their use, their purpose, collapsed in on itself. Now they were lumped for efficient disposal, like costumes once made for some nebulous actor who was no longer cast in the role of our lives. 

Fossilized at the foot of the bed she shared with my father, I watched my mother dismantle a crib as if she were a surgeon deconstructing a body.  For the entirety of the seven years I’d been living, she’d wielded nothing more deadly than a handheld mixer for mashing potatoes. Now she stood with sweat on her brow, gripping a screwdriver within her thin, shaking fingers. Little by little, one screw then another, the crib dissolved into a crumble of pieces. Dents in the carpet, soft, shallow craters, stood out from the floor as a gentle reminder. Something special was once standing here. Nothing now but a memory dismantled, a hint of a future that would no longer be. 

Daylight drifted and night settled in, and with the garbage bin at the end of our parking lot stuffed, my mother shifted her attention to dinner. My mother, my father, my brother and me. Four of us eating around a cramped wooden table, no longer discussing the upcoming fifth. Three months, a week, a few days ago, we would’ve been tossing him name in the air, calling it out as if he could already hear us. 

  “Nathan can’t eat food like we’re eating. He’ll have to have baby food, first.”

“He’ll outgrow his clothes in no time. Babies grow fast for the first couple years. You boys grew fast. Nathan will, too.”

“The crib’s just for Nathan. You boys have your bunk beds.”

Forks clinked away on our plates as we forced food down our throats, but his name was what took up the space in our mouths. None of us knew any more how to say it, as if the letters that made up his name had collapsed, like a marionette caught in a tangle of its own severed strings. Our home was now how it was months ago, and months ago there were only four in our family. 

I gazed at my mother from behind my milk glass, watching her brush tears away from her cheeks as if she were simply putting on makeup. I looked to her, then beyond her. Those were my shoes parked behind the front door. That was my coat slumped over the chair, my small stack of Legos scattered in the bedroom I shared with my brother. Evidence I was here, that I existed today. If tomorrow some disaster took me away, how long would my impression remain? My entire existence stuffed into a box, representing everything and nothing at all, accumulating into the forgotten history of me.