Your mother asks if you feel them in your heart. She repeats the question for years, until you learn to say, “What should I feel?” instead of, “What do I feel?” Your mother answers your question on the last day. “My fingernails,” she says. “I hid them in your heart.” Your mother has scrubbed many floors, but you now realize she has also scrubbed away something else. The hands that made bread are long gone. Her hands smell of bleach, and they brush, brush, brush. A scraping feeling carves its way through your heart. You bring offerings to it; there is nothing else to do. Your heart is gleaming. Your heart is as white as the tiles of the man’s house your mother has worked in her entire life.
Gessica Sakamoto Martini’s work has been nominated for Best of the Net
and appears or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast Journal, Whale Road Review,
HAD, DMQ Review, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from
Durham University (UK) and is the Editor-in-Chief of Orion’s Belt
magazine.
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