Page 9 - WTP Vol. XI #6

was the one who let them in.
Venus, My Mother
My mother watches the obits and goes to funerals
of past lovers to eat the sandwiches. She presses the toothpicks that held her sandwiches together into an empty, leather-bound journal: six toothpicks collected over nine years. “I want to see the people left behind,” she says.
She once watched a movie where the main character was accused of not living a full life. “You don’t even know what the Sistine Chapel smells like,” the accuser said, staring out the screen at my mother. Two weeks later, she discovered the space under those magnificent frescoes smelled like the tangy body odour of a young musician with a Gibson strapped to his back. Come with me to see The Birth of Venus, he said as they gaped up at the blues and pinks on the ceilings. My mother, staring up at Adam touching the hand of God, felt it a divine invitation. There was nothing divine about it, she now says. One morning, she woke up in their tiny apartment in Florence, and he was gone.
Before I was born, she flew to Florida, bought a red corvette on her student loan, and drove it back, where she sold it at a profit. She can vividly describe the blur of the yellow line guiding her home, the pub where she stopped for dinner, and the man with a toothpick held in the corner of his mouth who asked to buy her a drink. She liked how the toothpick moved when he spoke. They played pool and danced, his hand guiding her hip to the rhythm of the jazz song playing in the background.
“You didn’t want that?” I ask in response to the longing I sense.
“A corvette wasn’t practical. Some things aren’t meant to be kept.”
“I wasn’t talking about the car.”
Flash Fiction
“I knew what was coming.” “Shouldn’t he have had the choice?”
Silence. “It’s not your fault,” she said and turned away.
That first toothpick she collected is kept separate from the rest. She describes the framed portrait of the dark- haired man, and the man’s wife, who sat in the front pew with their three adult children, their shoulders touching. “See? I didn’t miss out.” my mother says. “Happy endings are only tragedies waiting to happen.” I think
of the siblings sitting together and imagine myself one of them. I guess it depends what kind of happy ending you’re talking about.
She once celebrated New Years eve in a ski resort with a friend. A band played jazz music and, as the familiar scat riffs filled the dim, smoky room, my mother stood, her chair almost tipping over. She tried to catch it and tripped, her face smashing into the ceramic tiles.
“To hide the hole,” she tells me, “you just keep your lips shut.”
I’ve collected her stories over the years and pieced together the chronology in the same way I layer colours when painting her. In every painting, there is the shadow of a figure in the lower corner, the silhouette
of a Gibson strapped to his back, easily missed. It has become my signature, the closest I will ever come to bearing his name.
Hatland is a writer and educator based in Winnipeg. She is the Di- rector of Youth Programming for the Manitoba Writers’ Guild and Co- Director (Canada) for ILS – International Literary Seminars. She has attended the Yale Writers’ Workshop, taken creative writing courses through Stanford University Continuing Education, participated in the St. Petersburg Review Masterclass, and has an undergraduate degree in creative writing through the University of Winnipeg. She is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Education degree.
2