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I knew my mother’s back as soon as I saw it.
Ten years dead, I saw her from the front window where I stood.. Her lean body bent over at the waist as she worked to unbutton one of the laughing children from the back of the car, I recognized the design of her cowichan sweater and the ginger burst of her hair.
I recognized the car almost as quickly : The rusted Acadian, ragged and patient as a family dog at the curb, white paint covering where the rust had eaten at the body
"Look at that Molly.”
My brother's voice came from beside me.
I felt him duck his head closer, positioning himself so that our eye lines were the same. HIs arm reached out over my shoulder. He pointed, prophetically, to the familiar house directly across from where we stood in the living room.
“Seriously, check that out.”
I followed, peering through the dirty window toward where he directed.
A man was standing in the doorway of the house opposite.
The first thing I noticed were his slippers. You'd have noticed them too. They were unmissable; as glaring as neon against his skin, so pale that even across the road I could see how sickly he was. Feathers surrounded his skeletal ankles in wild clouds of fluff.
I watched the pink slippered man begin to descend his front stairs. He moved effortlessly. his head balanced on a neat, hairless little neck. His face was just as proportionate as the rest of him, his eyes wide apart, his nose delicate, and his children’s show presenter smile widening with every step he descended.
As soon as the dollar store plastic of his slippers hit the ground, a shadow began to leak out of the cement and into the grass. My first thought was water, the way everything it touched darkened and blurred gave the impression of a sudden flood.
“That is so cool.” Carter’s voice in my ear again. 'Amazing, right?"
”
I realized with a jolt what was so ‘amazingl’ about it. It wasn’t water darkening the carefully manicured lawn he walked through. It wasn’t an impossible slipper based flood that blurred and dampened his surroundings in his wake.
What I had thought was water, flattening and darkening the terrain as he moved, was some kind of corruption. As soon as those marabou slippers struck pavement, anything alive in the area died. A single step and it shrank, rotting matter knitting together into a crust of decay.
It was death.
HE was death.
Behind the man, his fine boned body discreet in its cardigan and khaki ensemble, the world seemed to collapse The house that he had emerged from, its image unchanged in my memory for years, was raised in his wake. It sunk into the earth, its form and colour draining into the ground as if it had been one of those fun house inflatables the entire time.
He made his mild and smiling way across the road. Toward where my mother had relinquished one of the children's hands to open the front gate..
I watched his trail of nothing spread to the homes on either side of him. I saw a foreign horizon, black and without reference, begin to emerge.
He smiled above it all. Sweet lips and sweet teeth and gentle hands adjusting the wooden buttons in his cardigan.
“Oh my god”
I couldn’t hear him, but I could make out the words on his lips as he spoke. He was across the street by now, one manicured hand gesturing toward our mother as she fumbled with the lock on our front gate.
“Excuse me, “ I felt the syllables rather than heard them, my nerves receiving each pulse like an electric shock. “Ma’am? If I could just take a minute of your time…”
From where I stood, hands sweating and breath steaming against the window, I saw our mom halt. I saw her features shift when she realized someone was addressing her. I saw her social training activate and her body automatically straighten to turn and face a stranger.
“No no no no no…” My hand beat the glass with every word, hazed handprints of making tacks across the glass. Panic, washed over me.
I had to get out there .
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