Radiance
by Gray Birchby

Runestone, volume 11

Radiance
by Gray Birchby

Runestone, volume 11

I am eating my mother so she will love me. 

When I was young, my mother taught me how to steal from the library. Late at night, as I sank my teeth into the books, consuming the words, the thick pages dissolving on my tongue and sending their strange knowledge to twist in my brain, my mother would smile at how well I followed her footsteps. In the dark rooms, she looked like she was glowing. At school, I looked in the mirror and saw my mouth stained blue with the bitter ink. 

My mother was perfect. I needed to be like her. She didn’t have any expectations for me, her only child, but graciously allowed me to battle for her affection. I never knew what I was competing with. I never won. 

When my grandfather died, my mother taught me how to tear into flesh that still held the last vestiges of warmth and take everything left behind. This was her triumph. She was victorious. I followed her as she crept into the house through old stacked magazines patching up places where drafts blew in. The newspapers didn’t work to keep out the cold. I still shivered. I tried to do so imperceptibly, just as I tried not to visibly be taking in her old home. My mother smiled as she cracked open his bones, “Eat,” she said. 

I didn’t understand what my mother had won, but I wanted to take part in her victory. My grandfather tasted like a lifetime of alcohol-soaked bones, swallowed down thick and sour. He was rotted through by the poison even before he died. 

I bit my tongue to stop any noise escaping me, and nodded. 

My mother tore out his eyes and handed me one. The epidermal layers of my grandfather settled themselves beneath her long, carefully trimmed fingernails.

“You can swallow it down in one gulp,” she told me. I thought as I looked at her blood-streaked face, that no one on earth could compare to her beauty. “Or you can bite down on it.” The eyeball was hot from her hand, burning my tongue. 

I bit down. The eyeball burst in my mouth as I crunched down through its center. I learned from books that the crunch is from the cornea.  

My mother beamed at me, and I basked in the warmth of her as bitter fluid from my grandfather’s eyeball dripped down my throat. His memories twisted around my mind, poison soaking in as I gave my best grin.  

I hoped I looked like a young version of her. My mother wasn’t looking, though, too busy admiring the ring she slipped off my grandfather’s hand before taking a bite, so I don’t know if the smile would have won her praise. 

As I lay in my bed in my small dark room, a memory from my grandfather floated into my head. It projected itself onto the barren wall. “Children don’t need decorations,” my mother would say, before readjusting her teen ballet competition ribbon—second place at regionals—hung above our kitchen table. At school, I spent recess chasing butterflies, attempting to capture one so I could stick a tack through each of its wings and mark something beautiful as my own. 

In the memory, my grandfather yelled at my mother, sometime in those teen years before I came along and ruined things. Instead of bouncing and echoing as he’d hoped, his voice escaped through the cracks in the walls. Maybe this is why he added the newspapers. If I ever went back, I would look at the dates.

My grandfather’s anger was not glorious. My grandfather’s anger was a trapped animal, scared and clawing at everything he could reach. My grandfather’s anger was futile. His anger could only bounce off my mother’s pride, never breaching through.  

I rooted for her, of course. Not just because I knew how this memory ends, with her storming out of “that unbearably tiny house,” pride smokey hot propelling her feet forward. I rooted for her, because I knew her anger was always correct. My grandfather was weak. Her anger is an honor. 

“People would ask me if I was a model all the time,” she’d tell me as she turned my lights on in the morning, sometimes hours before day dawned, sometimes minutes before my school bus arrived. No matter what time of day she woke me, her ring always clinked melodiously against the uncovered metal behind the switch. 

“Then you came along and ruined that.” 

Curling into the corner of a bed that already shrank into the room’s corner, I would think she is still beautiful. Everything my mother had, from anger to joy, shone. Everything contained within her flesh was perfect. 

My mother died two weeks ago. It has been twenty years since we ate my grandfather. I sneak back into the home that was never mine, yet I never truly left. I try to avoid creaky floorboards. I stumble on each one. Her body is not hard to find, uncharacteristically slumped at the table in the kitchen. Her ribbon has gathered dust in the two weeks. The cabinets are empty, the lights are off. A pile of magazines sits near the door to my old room, and I feel certain if I pulled the door open, a flood of them would fall out and bury me in photos of young fashion stars. 

Looking at her hand, I note how death pulls the cuticle back from the nail. I snap off her fingers first. 

I will swallow a lifetime of her touch. I will take her radiance as my own. I will know what her love tastes like. 

I remove my grandfather’s ring, slip it onto my own hand. 

Her fingers sear as they go down, singeing her path down my throat. 

She burns like the sun, only after I swallow do I feel the taste of her. She tastes like the candied fruit I stole from the fair when she left me there. She gave me no money, only the command to “keep yourself busy.” The fruit was sticky-sweet, and halfway through, I found it was molded. 

In the mirror, my mouth is stained gray with ash.