Scorpion Season

Set out your memories, Mama used to say, so the scorpions won’t sting you.

It’s the dead of the summer, one year after I let the preacher sing Mama into the ground and throw dust that wouldn’t settle over her grave. People still talk about that funeral around here, but I no longer listen. Those aren’t the reminiscences that interest me. Instead, I return to the house that the lawyers say is mine, though it doesn’t welcome me any more kindly these days. There, I look for my ghosts, where they live behind my closet door: old letters, half-empty journals, report cards, relics from when I was not yet so brittle.

“And then what happens?” you ask, watching me spread out the softened shoeboxes into a long coil on the tile.

“I don’t know,” I reply, sitting back on my heels and attempting to parse the layers of time. “Mama never told me.”

~

When I was young, I thought she was never going to die. From an instinct to oblation, I bowed my head before her strength, fired hot as steel. She packed the dross of her history away, out of sight, as a wedding dress, a newspaper clipping of a man’s obituary, the ream of hospital paperwork for somebody I didn’t know. She never mentioned their existence, except in the middle of the year, when she took them out to air, spilling from plastic bins as if in readiness for a long journey.

The first year she did this, I thought she really would leave to restart her life a thousand miles away, just like her own mother did when Mama was too young to remember anything but a soft voice breaking into tears. The second year, I thought she would tear up the papers and send the clothes to Salvation Army, the way she dealt with my dad’s expensive tools and silk ties the day he called to tell her he wasn’t coming home. The third year, I decided it was a Ritual. It was Esoteric. Ineffable. I rolled the long words around in my mouth, numbed by their grown-up syllables. They made a neat box where I could put my wise understanding that some things must swallow themselves in silence.

The fourth year, Mama caught a scorpion in the kitchen. She crushed its heavy, dark shape under her foot and winced when the stinger pierced through her shoe’s thin sole. It’s my punishment because I didn’t take out my memories, she said, lying in bed with her swelling foot on a pillow. I carried out the scorpion, still pinioned to Mama’s canvas slipper, and felt amazed that I was so easily able to throw an angry segmented god into the trashcan and cover it over with the gelatinous remains of our morning’s oatmeal.

After that, she didn’t miss a single year. But that moment weakened my belief in her immortality, and I killed every scorpion I saw. My remorse over those thousand little deaths made another box for my fear that, one day, the real things capable of hurting Mama wouldn’t be obliterated under a well-placed heel. So I hoarded the traces of my youth as I ran from it, desperate to build a fortress from my protective evidence of recall: here is the valentine from the boy who kissed me in the auditorium after theater club. Here is the beanie from the girl who broke my heart to a tune by Paul Simon. Here is the pen uncapped since it was held in the hand of a man I cared for and will never forgive. I thought I was doing all this the right way.

I told Mama not to worry from a hotel in Kansas City, where the desert couldn’t reach me.

I don’t worry about you, said Mama.

It was what I wanted to hear. I still cried after I hung up the phone.

Eight months later, a car sped toward her faster than any amount of memory could stop. When I arrived home, I found the old blue bins pushed back on a high shelf. She wouldn’t have been strong enough to reach them in years. Beneath their lids lay the stories she hadn’t told me: her sister’s dress, borrowed for a soon-regretted wedding. The obituary, honoring her father in their native tongue. The papers, a record of her best friend’s long illness and short, sharp death. An archive of pain, the absence of things left unspoken: a box we both made.

~

“And then what happens?” you ask. I look at my relics and see my inability to listen, to speak sorrow, to return. I drew a borderland, thinking we were on the same side, but I never asked or told her why. Now, it’s too late. It’s always been too late, in the dead of summer. Set out your memories, Mama said, and they will sting, stronger than scorpions.

I decorate the beanie with pins and give it to you for your birthday. I write grocery lists and pay bills with the pen until it dries up. I recycle the valentine. I remember, and, eventually, I forget.

But every time I see a scorpion, I mouth sorry and let it crawl past me into the dirt, undisturbed.