Ana Maloni’s hands trembled as she held the last words her son wrote to her. She wanted nothing more than a moment alone. She also never wanted to be alone again. Neither were in the cards. Life was perpetually on a knife’s edge, smack dab in the middle. A knock came from the front door. She stuffed the letter in her back pocket to go and greet the visitor. A thrill ran down her spine like a message. People! Make yourself ready! she thought.
She opened her front door, and a strong gust of wind hit her. The Himalayan cedars rustled in the wind in the east, the dogwoods shook with the wind in the west. The wind rustled through teeth holes and tree holes; it didn’t discriminate. It whistled through wind chimes on Ana’s porch. There were aches and pangs everywhere on earth, and everyone was dying. But that wasn’t anything new. What was new was that Ana Maloni’s son had died, and so the clocks had all stopped. After he had died, all the throats got stopped up and all the toilets got clogged, and so everything had turned into shit. But that wasn’t anything new to Ana, she knew suffering well. Her life had been a series of tragicomical events pasted together with Krazy Glue, so it was nothing new to her. So she thought.
Standing on her porch was Mrs. Amelise, who lived in the house immediately opposite, holding half a carrot cake in greasy saran wrap. They greeted one another. Ana looked down at Mrs. Amelise’s fingers to find that the tips were covered with cuts. No doubt those are from grating the carrots, Ana thought to herself.Probably a few pieces of her skin in that cake. That was a negative thought. She knew it. She felt bad for it. It was nice her neighbor had made her something. Isn’t life grand?
“Evening Ana. You look bad. I baked this because I thought Johnny would be coming into town to visit this week, but unfortunately he couldn’t make it, because he can never make it, even though he says he will, and Dale says he will, and I tell Dale no he won’t! And I don’t want Dale and I to eat this all by ourselves, because Dale is a diabetic, so I thought I’d bring you some. Plus, you look bad. Have I already said that? And I know you’ve had a rough time lately.”
“Thank you, that’s very kind of you. It looks delicious. It has been a rough time, you have no idea.”
“Yes, I don’t. I actually have no clue at all. I never see Johnny, so I understand a son being gone a little. I hope that wasn’t overstepping. Glad we won’t ever trade places, though. Haha! What a relief. Well, here is your sorrow cake.” She laughed raucously; too loudly, in fact.
“Sorrow cake? That doesn’t sound particularly tasty. Sounds rather unappetizing, truth be told.”
“I suppose so, it’s a family thing. Not a West Virginia thing, but just in my family. Although we are from West Virginia, of course, and we—”
“Please get on with it!” Ana said, surprised by her own outburst. Mrs. Amelise seemed not to mind.
“When I was a little girl and sad—my dad had just nearly died in the coal mine, you see—my ma said I should go bake myself a sorrow cake. She meant to say for me to stop whining, you see, but she couldn’t say that. Moms refuse to say things like that, at least after tragedies. So, I baked a cake. And I actually felt a lot better. I made a chocolate cake with strawberries, my father’s favorite. He loved anything chocolate.”
“That is sweet, I like that.”
“Well, have you thought of baking a sorrow cake? You can take mine but the point is really to bake your own. You have to eat it all. That rule I made myself.”
“I’ll start by eating this one, then we’ll see.”
Ana took the cake with a forced grin for the sake of mutual politeness. For a moment they stood in silence. Mrs. Amelise seemed to be expecting something more from the conversation. She would just have to endure a bit longer until Mrs. Amelise gave up. It reminded Ana of the games of chicken little David would play on his bike with the neighborhood boys. He would always come inside with strawberry red elbows and bruises on his arms and purple knees like plums with bits of hot asphalt stuck in them. When he would fall off his bike, her earth would shake. She would wash out the cuts and put bandages on them and give them a kiss to make them feel better before he went back out again. He never lost a game of chicken. Then again, she thought, it is better to be a coward who is safe and unhurt. She taught him to be brave and unhurt. He did not listen.
She listened to and absorbed the atmosphere around her more these days. Most of all she watched the fog, the thick mountainous fog of West Virginia. It was wild and wonderful; it had held her hand as a little girl. It had held David’s, too. She had loved it, but lately it reminded her of suffocation. David suffocated during his fentanyl overdose, and so she couldn’t forgive the fog for this reminder. The fog to her would forever appear to be clogging the arteries of the atmosphere, suffocating the heart of the world with its crystals of sorrow. He had written her the letter on his last day. His writing had always been terrible looking, real wild looking. She missed seeing it.
That night she had a dream. There was a flock of sparrows migrating north for winter, when all of a sudden, a skylark soared triumphantly up into the pack. Its golden-brown coat was gleaming with waves of ethereal light overflowing. The skylark seemed to be charioting in the morning sun like Helios once did long ago. It was a daring skylark, and it launched ahead with expert maneuvering toward the front of the flock and soared highest above all the other birds, for this skylark had always preferred to fly closer to the sun than most. Standing on the foot of the beach below stood a female skylark, singing out with a trembling throat her message to the flock. The only message the she-bird received in return, however, was the soothing echo of the waves crashing. Soon the flock was gone.
Upon awakening and recalling her dream, Ana thought of a line by Shelley in his poem on skylarks: “Hail to thee, blithe spirit! A bird thou never were.” She got dressed and, as it was a Sunday morning, she decided she would spend her day on the water. Alas, a few feet down the road, it began to rain. Just my damn luck! she thought.
Back at home, she decided she would bake a cake. A sorrow cake. After all, she couldn’t feel more down than she did at the present moment. There was even a feeling of relief that she couldn’t get any lower or sadder than she was, that she had experienced the worst and, in spite of it all, she was still standing.
She was going to make a chocolate cake with strawberries, sometimes called a Thunder Cake. Except this would be a Sorrow Cake, not a Thunder Cake, even though technically it was a Thunder Cake, too. Ana had never been a mom who bakes. She had baked this cake once, however, when David was little for his first-grade class. While transferring it she dropped it on the floor. With a little bit of ingenuity, and a lot of sticky chocolate frosting, she was able to glue the whole mess back together. David’s class ate floor cake. They probably would’ve enjoyed it less if they knew it was floor cake. Life rarely gives us non-floor cake, Ana thought, we just don’t know it.
Ana was planning to put some booze in the cake. It is important to do as you have planned, and not stray from the plan. If you don’t do as you plan, you end up drinking all your booze and not adding any to the cake. Nevertheless, things were moving forward without a hitch, despite Ana’s lack of sobriety. The fact that frosting was simply sugar and butter always amazed her. Making the cake itself she found pretty straightforward. The whole thing was going so well. Then she realized she didn’t have any strawberries. Strawberries, she thought. She thought of David’s strawberries when falling off his bike. Big and red and filled with seeds of rubble. Sad strawberries. In other words, she was very drunk.
Outside the window, the wind howled. The sky was grey. Not just any kind of grey, but grey like a pair of dead eyes, grey like brain sludge, grey like a love that is over, and a little bit blue like Sundays. Ana got her things to go down to the store to get strawberries. She was in no position to drive. Luckily, as her mother once told her, “People don’t have to do what they are or are not in the position to do.” It wasn’t wise advice.
Ana once read that 1.8 people per 100,000 died from a heroin overdose while 12.8 people per 100,000 died from a car crash that same year. Numbers didn’t mean much, though. The reality was that David died of a heroin overdose, but she had never crashed her car. She wouldn’t mind a little dying, she thought to herself, or at least dying a little. Either a little dying or dying a little. Then again, I already am a little dead, but just inside, she thought.
The car sped along. Outside her car window, she saw a magnificent skylark in the corner of her eye. One that looked free and unencumbered. Ana rolled down her window. She put her arm and began to make a wave motion. She knew she looked silly, driving drunkenly and making wave motions with her arm out the window while looking at a skylark. Maybe they should show school kids a video of her so that they could learn that sometimes it is okay to judge people.
If little kids saw that video, they would also see Ana crash directly into a mailbox, then someone’s yard, and then a tree, because that is the very next thing that happened. These three events happened one after another. It would’ve been better if they had been spaced out, but life tends to have bad things happen like a house of cards collapsing all at once.
Ana opened her eyes in a haze and staggered out of her car. I’ve gotta make a run for it, she thought, before they get me. Some people just can’t catch a break, she thought. As she gained her balance and looked down the street, she saw a small blip. Ana could’ve sworn it was David. She raced out the door, attempting to track down the blip she had just seen. The blip was headed down to the creek, it seemed to her. She moved as fast as she could down to the creek.
When she finally got to the creek, no one was there, not even a blip, and especially not David. It seemed painfully obvious to her that that would be the case. Her legs ached, the creek trickled. It was all very peaceful for a moment. In the water there were a lot of little, tiny fish, baby fish. She stepped into the water to be closer to these blips, which was far too cold to be stepped into, and so she immediately regretted it. Birds chirped happily as they watched her. Their singing appeared to her to be cries of sympathy; perhaps they were fellow mothers who had also lost their young, or maybe poets who would tell her story to all those who visited the creek from now on. Ana stepped out of the water and decided she needed to get warm. She needed to go home and lie down. Her car could wait.
When she got home, her eyes were so heavy; she felt the gravity of it all, but mainly of her alcohol-soaked body. She looked down at the cake and thought she saw David’s face in it, somehow, inexplicably. Then she collapsed, and her face catapulted into the sorrow cake. Sophocles couldn’t have imagined a sadder moment.
Ana awoke groggy and with a sore neck. Out of her back pocket she retrieved the letter. It tingled on her fingertips. She took a deep breath and read:
Mom, I know we haven’t been in touch lately as much as possible. It is my fault, I know. I can’t keep blaming dad, it is me. I’m what’s wrong. I’m so wrong I’m right sometimes, like you used to say. I’m so up I’m down. I love all your little sayings. They’ve left their mark.
But I’ll be better one day soon. You gave me a beautiful childhood, and you taught me how to do right. Everyone I meet who tells me about their parents reminds me how great you are and how lucky I am. Even with dad, I guess I’m sort of lucky, even though he’s a bastard, a sneaky bastard, some would say. I might even say that. I appreciate you cleaning up my bumps and bruises all these years. They’ve been nasty, and would be nastier without you. You’re like a nasty sponge, a pain sponge, and I’m sorry for that. I’m not a kid anymore. It’s faded before my eyes. I guess I’m just writing this because I miss you, and I want to be better. It’s sort of stupid to say you want to be better. Isn’t it obvious? We all want to be. I also just wanted to say ‘Hi Mom.’ I’ll write to you more soon, but for now I just wanted to let you know I’m okay. I love you.
Once, they had visited the beach when David was little. They had both fallen asleep together on the sand. The tide from the previous night had receded, and all that remained of the dwindling ebb of water was a series of lumpy impressions that the waves had grooved out. The dwindling ebb was all there was. But that wasn’t anything new. The sun dried everything up, but that wasn’t anything new. What was new was that Ana’s son had died. What was new was the things that got left behind. All beautiful music dies, Ana knew. The echo was new, it lived on. David’s echo lived on. It echoed like dead roses on a lover’s bed, or how nighttime echoes on the blades of grass within dew. It was a nice thought. She felt close to an epiphany. But then she remembered she had a bunch of chocolate caked on her face and a car crashed into a mailbox.
