Sinister: memories of something i thought could be.

[lindsey baker]

hello sinister.

she's lying in a bed somewhere in charlotte, north carolina, right now, her 
face on a pillow, the pillowcase slowly and quietly gathering the scent of 
her hair between its woven fibers, grabbing, holding. when she leaves, it 
will smell just like the pillow at home, and she knows the scent soothes her 
daughters.

she is sleeping, or so i hear, exhausted from the strain and the morphine. 
the stitches curl around her jaw and up into her cheek, a soft and 
undulating line probably traversed many times by her husband's fingertips. 
her twenty-year-old daughter sat in a car tonight and wondered if the scars 
of a mother really do pass on to the daughter, if the younger version will 
always think of the mother's scar she has yet to see when a boy traces the 
line of her cheekbone.

the daughter is me, and the mother is mine.

tonight, after day talking to everyone else but her, i heard her voice 
again, the sound of her swollen mouth taking the time to curve through the 
syllables of my name. she will be home on tuesday, and i told her i loved 
her.

i told her happy mother's day.

***

i was the last to know about the accident. matt got the call on his dying 
mobile, and i stood in the mist on a street in chicago, ken and jenn having 
just left, the whole world stretched out before me in dingy grays, holding a 
phone, dialing, trying to find out what had happened.

she fell in the hotel, the granite bathroom vanity. forty stitches outside, 
fifty to sixty inside. teeth. scars. surgery.


when it happened, i had a dead battery and press passes.

***

"isn't it scary that i'm already thinking about the post i'm going to write 
about this?"

"yes."



this isn't that post.

***

i sat in the theater, waiting for the band to come out. i felt terribly ill, 
and all i really wanted was to lie my rain-tainted brow against a hotel 
pillow and sleep. something was wrong -- a million things were wrong and 
right at the same time, and waiting for belle became memorizing every inch 
of the crowd below me, grasping scents and sights and sounds and straws.

i thought about the city and sinister, how i was too nauseated to smoke at 
that minute and how i had had too many cigarettes the day before. i shut my 
eyes for a moment, picking idly at my fingernail, tired of waiting, for 
once, and tired of being keyed up.

and then they came, and by the time they got to the state i am in, i was 
fine.

i was.

dancing.

in some kind of fashion, anyway.

***

tomorrow i will go home, to my proper home. and i will prepare, then, for 
the homecoming. dusting and grocery shopping and flowers and flowers.

i must get her flowers.

sunday morning kirsten and bron left, and i found something on the floor 
near my bag. something of theirs, i assume, a poem. and the paper smelled 
wonderful, as i sat there between two boys and a misty window reading.

and i fell in love with another line, another lyric, another stream of 
words: when did you forget you were a flower?

i forgot she was a flower, and she had to have petals torn away for me to 
remember.

but i remember now, the scent and the softness and the way she makes the way 
make sense.

the way she lights is mine, and i am sentimental, weeping intermittantly so 
that i have a curving line of black down my own cheeks, a memory and a sound 
and a bruise to conceal with heavy makeup.


and so happy mother's day.

and so i saw belle and sebastian.

and so i met sini.

and so there was a boy.

and so thank you kirsten and bron.

and so this is the post.

and so i cried.



i always cry at endings.


xxx lou

_________________________________________________________________
Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com

+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+
        +---+  Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list  +---+
     To send to the list mail sinister at missprint.org. To unsubscribe
     send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to
     majordomo at missprint.org.  WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister
 +-+       "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper           +-+
 +-+  "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+
 +-+    "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000     +-+
 +-+  "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000  +-+
 +-+  "sick posse of f**ked in the head psycho-fans" - NME June 2001   +-+
 +-+               Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa                 +-+
 +-+               Snipp snapp snut, sa var sagan slut!                +-+
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+