Ash

The year it snowed in Texas was the year Mama bought me red cowgirl boots. It was the year I stomped on my daddy’s grave for leaving me, the year Mama smacked my legs in front of everyone. I was not going to the funeral unless I had the boots. Daddy had promised, promised, but Bobby Reardon said he was rotting with the maggots in his face. Well I stomped on Bobby too, stomped hard on his toes with my roach-killers and made him cry. I got sent home from school and Mama slapped me for sassing her. I slammed my door and wrapped up in a quilt like I was a hot tamale. The little ball of fire was moving through my body. It would move ever outward ’til I was consumed, always consuming. It would make me sorry, that little ball, that little ball that was never quenched.

The year it snowed in Texas was the year my brother was born. It was the year my mama, standing in the flurries of that short, brief visitation of winter dust, made me love her, the filaments of her hair lifting in the puffs of wind. I didn’t know you could fall in love, just like that, at the sight of someone standing. How can a woman give away love so everyone felt it, even the birds, the trees, the snow itself, come to bless Kilgore? I would never love as she did. I had only that brief moment. How we are spared knowing who we are.

Years later, I found a map in my brother’s lonely apartment in L.A. “Bury me here,” he instructed in a scrawl on a map he had drawn of Woodlawn Cemetery. He had spent all his savings burying his lover and I couldn’t even buy him a headstone. The county would keep him ’til they made him ash — my shame. I dyed my hair, changed my name, moved to Arizona. I camped beside a positive vortex but I could not escape Mama’s sad eyes watching me from the shadows of the junipers.