Once Bitten by Renee Coloman

I don’t know why she says what she says but I know she’s crazy and that’s why she keeps a locked chain across the refrigerator door. I pick the lock, same trick every morning. Grab butter. Eggs. Spinach. Tomatoes. Whip up the ingredients. Fry the oozing mess in a pan. Slap the omelet on a plastic plate. The kind of dish that won’t shatter when Mother slams it against the kitchen floor, when her blurred eyes widen at the biting rats that make her panic and scream and clamp down tighter to save the pieces of her scattered life.

They can’t have what’s mine, she hisses, feeling fussy as ever.

I don’t know why she says what she says but this morning I’m here with her. Again.

This morning, I pray for something different. A reality once considered normal. A sense of time before this day, now faltered and disillusioned. What I’ve come to recognize as a shelled lie. An altered matrix for the past thirteen years. My mother’s haywired mind.

This morning, my routine caring for her doesn’t change.  

Each day here is always the same.

Mother scoots by, passing the gas stove where I stand. A broom in her aged hands. She swishes away the invisible rats blocking her path. The bristles hit the tops of my shoes. Once, twice, then again. Swish-swish.

I got my eye on them, Mother tells me. She sweeps. Vertically. Brushing up against my cheap jeans. I don’t turn towards her, don’t turn away from facing the stove. I pretend this isn’t happening. Even when Mother gloats, telling me she knocked three of them sly rats off the back of my legs.

A few more shuffle-steps and Mother reaches the breakfast table in this house where I haven’t lived for almost seven years; where Mother had set fire to the garage last week, yelping that an army of rats had attacked, biting her feet, legs, arms. Biting holes in the earth and dragging away her laundry inside their tunneling caves winding and spiraling deep into the earth. Who’s side are you on?  Mother had screamed at the fiery collapsing garage, waving her broomstick at the whorling flames. She had yelled with all her might. Fine. Take my garage. Steal my home, my kingdom, my marriage, but you’ll never take my life.

I flip the omelet and can’t help but see the ratty creatures in my mind. Scrawny clawed feet. Twitchy pink nose. Rats nesting upon Mother’s pilfered cotton undies, cozy in their subterranean realm. Plotting, I’m sure, on invisible ways to steal Mother’s soul. Her wrinkled flesh. Her prickly existence. I can’t help but feel a warmth flushing through my veins. A tingling sensation, boundless and free from Mother’s unhinged world. I close my eyes. Savoring the dream. All of me floating, exposed and sun kissed, in the turquoise waters of the Caribbean Sea. All of me atop mountainous clouds, floating higher than the peaks of the Himalayas; otherworldly—a nova; tempered in an atmosphere surreal and majestic. Floating, floating. All of me. Bright as all the stars in Heaven.

Mother’s voice cracks me in half. Luring me back to her darkened reality. 

Better serve up that food before them rats eat it, she says.

A quick blink-blink.

A quick click-click of my heels.

But nothing has changed, yet everything in my life has changed.

Mother spoons a mouthful of omelet past her slippery dentures. She up-curls the corners of her lips. Nods a tiny approval and gets ready for a second bite. She stretches her tongue, anticipating the dollop of soothing food. Angles the unsteady spoon in her hand. Widens her mouth. Almost there. Almost inside—but, no. It happens. Again.  

With both hands, she launches the spoon, the plastic plate, the omelet, and a soiled napkin onto the kitchen floor. She shrieks. Reaches for her broomstick and frantically slaps the bristles in every direction. She spits a muffled cry. Rats are eating my food!

I don’t know why she says what she says but I towel-clean the mess. Sponge-wipe the floor. I reach into the refrigerator, slice an apple. Add some deli bologna. Pile on a few cubes of cheddar cheese and feed her myself. One delicate nibble at a time. Small bites. The way a toothless child gnaws on freshly baked bread. Mother smiles. Tells me she feels safe. The rats are gone. She’s happy when I’m home.

There’s no money for professional help. Mother had said the rats ate all the cash stuffed in her sagging mattress. She doesn’t sleep there anymore. Not since Dad left, fighting as an exterminator when the chemical explosion burned him into vaporized emptiness. There’s a uniform that belonged to Dad. Mother hung it in the bedroom closet, preserved in its plastic wrapping. She tells me she prays for Dad late at night. Tells him she won’t forget. Another good man who fought the good fight.

Vector control still comes by twice a month. Followed by street-sweeping trucks. Mother watches with a careful eye. Points her broomstick at the toasted remains. Charred and splintered lumber. Her fallen garage. The trucks keep moving, refusing to stop.  You ‘fraid of getting bit? Mother yells. You ‘fraid of these rats crawling all over my house?

Workers have learned to ignore her. They don’t wave hello. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not anymore.

Still, she sees them.   

Their invisibility.

Undead rats.

Peeking from every crack and corner and hidey-hole throughout her home. She sees them, even when her blurred eyes are shut tight. Especially when she whispers my father’s name. When she needs to rest her body and sleep, choosing the upright chair by the front window. Waiting. Always waiting. For a glimpse of Dad’s soul.

I don’t know why she says what she says but I can’t keep ignoring the lies. Pretending tomorrow will be better. I carry my own broom, sweeping away the hurt. My mother’s broken heart. The leak in her brain.

I feed her the last slice of apple. Last bite of deli meat. I tell her the refrigerator is locked. The rats won’t get inside.

I click my heels. Scurry out the front door.

My daily routine caring for Mother won’t change.

Tomorrow will be the same as today.

I try not to look back but looking forward means I will always have to look back and try not to fall in the rat holes where Mother, once bitten, will always see them. Alive in her blackened eyes.

Renee Coloman

Image: A brown rat from Pixabay.com