Jeff Burt
My mother was not tender in her care. The Vaporub went on my chest not with idling fingers in curls of swans but the rapid beating of hawk’s wings trying to lift talons with the skin of my chest. A spoon was a utensil of malice to force the penicillin down, that chalky half-liquid, half-mud, through the narrowed gap of my lips.
It was not my illness, my mother said, but ours, as if it spread my rheumatic fever to her, night sweats, chills as if the furnace had quit, my lonely hours plastered to the window-watching neighbor kids playing in the snow.
I grew half-formed and half-grafted, arms thin as a rake’s handle, back legs of a fox that ran as much sideways as forward, the convulsing scales of a snake before the lightning strike of a kill, the half of me in motion through the house, the half of me who could not leave the bed, the chair, could not shovel snow, make a snowball in one quick pat, begin a day outside with whitened cheeks turning into reddened flares.
There was no mystery, even though the doctors could not find a source for my illness, like an artesian spring that begins a creek from no known source below, where wells are dug but no pump can draw. I had a condition, a rheum, a flowing of pain, of an ache that lasts and lasts.
My mother tickled hard, and in the angry poke of her fingers I felt the hostility of caring for a son who never seemed to heal. It can affect your heart, she said, but I won’t let it, as if her intention could hold back bacteria.
You’re sick, she said, we’ll stay home. We’ll beat this thing together.