1. Food cravings

I came home one afternoon to my brother’s Nintendo DS broken into 227 individual parts spread on a placemat in the dining room. This second time around, mom didn’t have to translate hormone soup into an actionable request; he spoke to her directly and often, though I never hear it. Mom swallowed each piece swaddled in a bit of sweet bread and marigold jam. I wished he would ask for something easier to make like peach cobbler.

 

2. Hand numbness and tingling

Despite the extra 130 pounds of weight, mom stayed determinedly on her feet. The only obvious sign the walking was arduous on her was the swelling. She outright refused to buy new shoes, so every night I had to use fingers of Vaseline to ease each foot out of her slip-ons. In the morning, I’d grease them again, and she’d rise and walk once more. She walked me to the bus station on Thursday morning and home from the bus station Saturday night. She kept up with her herb garden. And she never missed church. Nothing but death could keep her from her spot in the choir. Center alto, all in blue.

The lord works mysterious, Mrs. Gloria said to mom after the service is over. The whole congregation had prayed for my brother’s safe second passage. Of all the fervent yes lords and thank you jesus’s, Mrs. Gloria’s was the richest. Her voice sounded like an oak tree smelled and she always prayed with two hands clasped and her head tucked as tight as she could so that her chin left a light bruise on the thin skin protecting her breast plate.

God is good, Mom replied. I’m singing for two. Never thought I’d have that chance again. Which made me think of how mom might’ve sung when I was little more than some dividing bits of flesh and sightless eyes, how her steady voice might’ve carried my unsaid prayers up to the lord when that womb was mine.

 

3. Back pain

My brother is 5 foot 6 and 130 pounds. He is 19, 20 in July. He loves a girl, then loves a boy, then loves that boy’s sister and her cousin, and makes the sister and cousin fight each other for him. The sister wins, but the cousin never speaks to her again. My brother never loses. He brings that boy’s sister to our house while mom’s in the garden and I’m hanging some drawings on the bit of wall above my bedroom window. They fuck ugly. Not the noise or sight of it really, but the rhythm. The percussion of it. A crooked, fleshy thumping when he thrusts her into the wall we share.

Thunk…      thunk     thunk   thunk… thu        nk… thun…k    thunk thunk        th…unk.

It throbs through the house, and I can’t get the drawings positioned straight. If mom were inside instead of hunched over in the garden pulling rosemary plants from the soil, she would’ve felt it. And in feeling that nauseating thread of unrhythm she would’ve known nothing inside her body or inside that boy’s sister or inside the gut of the world could give him anything worth growing towards. All his desires started and ended inside himself so he cannibalized his own energy and made a plaything of yours. All the world’s love were good puppets.

Th…unk. Th… unk. Thunk… thunk thunk…                                                                        thunk.

But mom is outside. So, while I’m hanging drawings and trying to keep still against the unrhythm beating up against my walls, I stare down at the curl of her spine and imagine my brother folded up over top of her. He keeps the curve exact, keeps her eyes trained low in matters of soil and worm and aphid.

When my brother is back up inside her, her back hurts every morning until she gets out of bed and folds herself over as best she can. Sometimes I know she’s doing it just by the way the floor creeks different under their weight.

 

4. Stretch marks and other skin changes

I was at work, a town away. An hour bus commute. She didn’t call and so I did not come, which makes mom think I don’t know anything about it. She tells me, once I realized I could do it, it was easy. Natural even. Everything just came naturally.

Maybe.

I’ll concede: I’ve never given birth at all, let alone to a child I’d already raised. The lord’s miracles for me are much more mundane. He makes the rosemary grow back in the winter. He kept the heat on once daddy was gone. He led Mrs. Gloria to our kitchen and blessed her hands to make meals of thick stew and gammy meat when all we had money for was rice and water. What could I know about rebirth?

Your brother was like a baby already, just needed a little positioning.

What I know is: I came home and mom was on the kitchen floor and my brother was not in his room not in the living room not in the garden not on the roof. I know that the leaking splits of skin along her abdomen would eventually scar into milky brown stretch marks. I know that she refused to let me lift up her white cotton night shirt to look between her legs to check—just to check mama please just let me check you’re not torn down mama.

9 months later, when my brother returned to the world a wiggling baby I couldn’t help but think I couldn’t be in this house when the rhythm started up again.