We flag a cab to the Bronx. Mama is downright giddy. A thick wad of rubber banded bills waits at the bottom of her purse, a cool one thousand dollars from cashing her child support check. As we get in the taxi, Mama tells him where we’re headed. Squeezing my hand, she grins, jokes with the cabby about the shitty drivers and the crazy heat. Wriggling in her seat, she parses out chunks of cash, concealing some in her bra, some more in her underwear. Her long, curvy, loud body does none of this discreetly.
I admire the sparkly green jellies on my feet, the pair Mama bought with our new money. Then I click, click, click my heels, à la Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, one of two tapes we own.
A haze of vapor wavers over the pavement and dances off of everything that holds us. You could fry an egg on the simmer of the sidewalk and melt right there, like an Italian Ice chased to crunch before it’s a rainbow puddle. A swimmy mirage sprawls ahead, a city alive, pulsating in trapped fumes. We pass kids playing near the open fire hydrant, splashing against torrents of water pulsing through the engine port. Laughter squeals outside of our window.
We are not here to play. In the backseat of this cologne-filled cab, my slap-happy mom schemes to cop dope in the burnt part of the city. The South Bronx is a razed boneyard. Iron beams of buildings spear the sky. Condemned structures reach out of the ground as sepulchers of businesses and homes incinerated by corruption during the fires of the ’70s. Maybe grass grows underneath it all, yearns for light, fights to sprout through cracked cement. I haven’t seen it. I would know if it were there because I notice most things. My senses alert and attuned, I must be present, so as not to be hurt or forgotten by Mama. I keep watch for erratic bodies and swift movements. I feel the people around me.
Today, Mama is the kind of happy I don’t trust. I know the drill, the way this game unfolds, the losing for us both, and I’m not down. But what choice do I have? The taximeter reads $6.25 in bold red dashes and Mama hands the driver a ten. She is giving when she has the means.
We exit the cab and step into the remnants of the conflagration that maimed this community. Charred bars pierce the earth and air like caged elephant ribs, casting shadows, offering dark refuge for junkies and crackheads to retreat, and repeat, their need. They stumble through the grim landscape unmoored, twitching and shuffling their lead feet. Caressing the air in bizarre gestures, loud and abrupt, they converse with no one. What are they reaching for? They make me believe in zombies, make me wonder if it’s possible to be alive on the outside and dead on the inside. They are the corpses from the Thriller music video, but with less facility and vigor. I can run from the room when Michael Jackson howls to summon the dead from their crypt, but I can’t run now.
“Damn, I gotta take a piss.”
Mama twists her knees together. I watch the zombies to make sure they don’t come too close. If they bite you, you’re one of them, and that scares me more than anything. I pretend I’m not afraid, that I am brave and can dispel their evil sorcery. I’ve been telling myself that Mama isn’t one of them.
We walk toward a slumped figure on the corner. She’s an elderly woman, clad in a soiled winter coat in the sweltering heat. Her skin is marred with scars and scabs. She has no teeth and cackles as Mama whines about how she has to piss like a racehorse. Purple gums gleam in the light. Mama grasps my shoulders to square them to her. Beaming, she gives instructions.
“Shosh, stay here with Agnes, I’ll be right back.”
I stand there with Agnes, the day’s guardian stranger, and watch her jog around the corner of a crumbled wall. My eyes track Mama until she scampers out of sight. I know better than to ask if I can come. She denies me each time because I am safer out here—on the street with her connect (ever an interchangeable being) or in a locked car with my cousins—than in the dope dens. Agnes leans in.
“Look at those fancy feet!”
She nods toward my green jellies, sheening in the sun, but she smells like urine and everything reeks of hot garbage. I feign a smile.
“Thank you, they’re brand new.”
I twist my jelly clad feet to catch the light more. It’s unfriendly not to respond when spoken to, and maybe she can protect me while Mama is away.
“Ooh wee, they shine right.”
I see they’re a little scuffed now. Maybe it happened because we were rushing, and I tripped. I look up and notice some life form, birds soaring in the bright white sky. They must be vultures; nothing here but decay. What if I were granted the gift of flight? Catching the breeze, I’d swoop away to waterfalls, open faces, and lilac bushes galore. Guided by clouds and wind during the day, stars and sound at night, I’d journey the world. For a second, I tilt my head back to the heavens, beyond the scorched building tops, and glide to a softer place than the one I’m stranded in. Teleportation renders this moment possible. I spiral through crystal wreaths, spiral further into myself.
Mama staggers back to us distraught. Muttering, the words catch in her throat and she chokes. Her recent glee, a faint memory.
“I lost it… all my money. It’s gone.”
Each utterance is more wretched than before. She trembles, convulses, her entire body shakes. Black rivers fall down her cheeks as she gasps for air and clutches the seared brick wall. She collapses onto the sidewalk to retch animalistic wails between her one coherent sentence. She can barely speak, she can barely live. “It’s gone” is all she can say. Shook fingers rake through her hair, grasping chunks to rip and tear. She moans and keens and grieves. Gnawing on fleshy nubs of bitten nails, she rocks.
I know not to say a thing when she goes to this place. My job is to disappear. Love, right now, is too great a risk. Still, I need to know that I’m not dying, too. But if I reach for her, like every cell longs to, I’ll be smacked, called a little bitch, and shoved away, like all the times before. I’ve learned better, so I refrain. I don’t know when Mama last loved right. I haven’t seen it.
We wait for her to rally, Agnes and I, for what feels like eons, each minute punctuated by her mourning and mania. Slowly, she rises, continuing to weep, staggers and, finally, regains her footing.
“Naw, c’mon honey, we’ll find it.”
Agnes tries to assuage her as she returns to where Mama peed behind a desiccated, black wall. I trail after them. Now that she’s ambulatory, I seek to comfort my inconsolable, unreachable parent and reassure her of things I don’t know, mirroring what I see Agnes doing. Mama does not look at me or register my presence. Invisible, I strive to stay here.
No longer consumed with her one-pointed pursuit to get high, now she must remedy this grave misplacement and find money to quell the stirring of withdrawal in her gut. Agnes will score a pinch for Mama, to keep her right, just enough to still her despair. But is it too late for me? Too late to locate myself once more, feel the contours of my form and rematerialize? I need to know that I’m real, yet I won’t find myself in Mama’s eyes because she can’t see or be seen. She’s already dead and has joined the zombies I fought to repel. Right now, I don’t matter to Mama and am merely a nuisance to the latest catastrophe. But I know I’m more. I will trace my way back, to remember what’s true.
As I drift further from myself and my phantom parent, the moment threatens to erase me. Battling dissolution, I catch my fall though sensation: the ringing in my ears, the drum of my heart, the tight sips of air expanding my seized chest. I settle, am delivered back to myself, in the pressure of wiggling toes, against the webbing of plastic green jellies that tether me to me.
Shoshana Ray (she/her) is a somatic psychotherapist and writer whose work centers on posttraumatic growth: what we can gain, through whatever we’re handed. She’s published in The Keepthings, In Short, Herstory, and others. Currently, she’s editing a memoir about living with the cost of the truth, over the cost of lies.
“Beauty, Terror, & Everything In Between,” her free Substack newsletter on embodied resilience, is the best place to connect. Shoshana resides in the Twin Cities with her husband, son, and geriatric tuxedo cat. Her pastimes include house dancing (locale, not genre), cracking jokes with her loves, and visiting a pair of wolf brothers up the street at a local zoo. She is an aspiring tea sommelier and an analog enthusiast, with two typewriters to boot. Learn more at www.shoshanaray.com.
