From the Outside

When you get back in and close the patio door to the lightning bugs trying to Morse code their way inside, your mother’s hand on the bathroom floor will limp-grab the door, try to open it, fail, then open, palm-upwards, like it’s Sunday Mass and she’s waiting for communion, and there will be a wine cooler pool beneath her head, empty pill bottle next to it, eyes arcing an orbit from right to left, then disappearing behind lids, and you’ll sit her up the way you did last time, scoot her over to the tub and run the water and the way she’ll fight you as you touch your finger to the back of her throat, but the pills will have taken away much of her strength and the pills will come back up, half-formed, like the sickle of a moon you’d point your telescope at on nights when the light pollution cleared and you could see more than just a couple stars, while your mother moves in delirious ways now, swaying into the tub where the water’s already swirling the pills into a whirlpool, reaching for the ones she can grab hold of and trying to bring them back to her mouth like a toddler with a clump of dirt, pulling now at the shower curtain, bringing the rod down onto her, curtain in the water, splashed at and making warbled sounds, the water getting into your eyes, and when you try to clear the water from your eyes she’ll catch your ear with her palm and you’ll tumble into the tub and onto the curtain, water still running, pills still circling the drain but not able to find it for the plug that’s covering it, and her arms will become a flurry behind you, bringing you to your back so your eyes are just underwater and everything is a foggy bubble world of ever shifting things, and your mother’s hands will seem limp even as they clutch your throat, the warble of the water hitting plastic even louder here, under the water, where the bathroom’s light warps and bends like a faulty sun in a patchy sky, your feet kicking like two limp fish beached on a pier, hooks in mouths or maybe already down their throats, tugging at vital insides, and you’ll come up just long enough to hear the way your mother’s slurring her words, voicing them ceaselessly, not meaning anything but saying them anyway, her eyes two pale rocks you’d skip across a quiet lake, etched in, looking at you as you hear the way your breath sounds like it’s coming from somewhere outside of you, when you can take it, for just the second you’re out of the water, before going back down again, some of the water going in your mouth and down your throat, icing your stomach, your clothes plastered to the frame of your child’s body, socks slipping halfway down your feet and already soggy, her nails sliding around your neck like ice skates on fresh ice, falling into grooves and slipping out of them again, the pills orbiting like planets above your eyes, water rising higher so you can’t reach the surface, shower rod clanging onto the floor and sounding here underwater like a bell being tolled in a town far away from here, your mother slipping on the water that’s spilled onto tile and so sliding forward, forcing head’s back against tub’s porcelain, your eyes pulling open to let in more light, bubbles from your mouth popping at the surface, everything edged in black now, hazy and indistinct like the world in a fog on a summer’s night, and when you call out it’s a sound apart from you, a noise you’ve never heard before, and the rest of the water comes in, spilling, and the way the black looks when it comes in and wraps you up is like waking and sleeping at once, pulling yourself away from yourself so you can see, finally, what it all looks like from the outside.