Inheritance Rosarium

As a girl, my mother overheard her grandmother praying to die. Every night after, the little girl composed counterweight prayers of live, live, live. Twenty years later, I was born and they still walked this tightrope together, my great-grandmother having no idea god preferred the sound of my mother’s voice. I was one of my mother’s living novenas, not baptized in the church but in the chapel of the nursing home where my great-grandmother waited. * As a girl, my grandmother told me when a loved one neared death she saw black crosses and waited for the phone to ring. Death was always near us and crossing itself. Even as I write this, a vulture circles the sky to the east. I had called my grandmother on the day she died, but I saw no crosses. On the night of her birthday, she slipped away in her sleep without warning, a perfect circle. When I doubt the possibility of mercy, I think of her death. The gone-to-sleep death, given to those who fear it most. My death won’t be like that. * I was baptized under death’s wing, as a girl born on a Friday, the day of sorrowful mysteries. I was a Lent-hearted girl: prone to biting my lip too hard just to taste the salt, loved most the day the saints had gone to gallows. Lent was a gallery of unknowns. St. Isidore’s shovel went missing under purple folds. The downturn of Jesus’ face became a blunt clue, but I always knew where St. Thérèse stood, knew the shape of her small skull. The edges of her roses softened further under their purple veil, as though she had chosen the dark inside of the darkest one and buried herself in it. * As a girl, I did not yet know my mother’s prayers, did not know she was born on the day of glorious mysteries, that every night she wove a net of live under a woman who asked to be buried. I watched my great-grandmother for her rosaries, for the ropes of vein in her hands, for how she spoke in her old age. Her mouth sucked and the tongue pattered, and because she seemed the most holy person in my life, that is how I tried to form my prayers. A soft jaw and a knuckled rosary, a rose wrapped around a demand: show me, show me, show me * It’s said a girl is carried inside the egg inside her not-yet-mother, carried inside her future grandmother. My mother must have known. As a girl, she took my hand, pressed it to her side, and said: Feel this. A single rib jutted away from the cage, a rupture created by my heel, evidence of life. If it’s true, I waited on the tightrope of live, live, live, was carried inside the black cross, and they were carried first by the woman who knew how to pray for death. If it’s true, if god is there at all, she kicks us from the inside.