My Mommy's Sick

She sat on my lap as I read the book to her, her light brown hair draped over my left arm pointing to me the pictures painted on the cardboard pages. She turned to me I looked in her face and saw the shadows of the faces of her mother and father imprinted in her eyes then she spoke to me two sentences to shatter my heart.

My mommy's sick
When she gets better
She'll come and see us.

I held her tiny body squeezing her against my breast, so as not to reveal the tears she invoked in her childish innocence. Yes her mommy is definitely ill lost in a rundown house or an apartment littered with empty cans, food wrappers, cardboard boxes, dogshit, dirty nappies, and human waste as she sits back grasping an aluminum foil pipe losing her soul in one more hit.

My mommy's sick

Or she could be sliding one more needle into her veins feeling the rush in 15 quick seconds as the poison drips through her heart to the haunted centers of her brain tossing the empty needle to the floor to bounce along the pile of rubbish.

My mommy's sick

This once corpulent woman teasing her husband with her affectionate smile as he ran his callused hands along her velvety skin each touch a symbol of the vows they spoke before god.

My mommy's sick.

Now she shuffles down the vacant streets of Spokane a skeleton wrapped in a shroud of blotchy skin her teeth decaying in her virulent mouth as she searches for something to steal or a lustless fuck in an alley to donate more money to her newfound god, a god she loves more than she loves herself, all that came from her.

My mommy's sick
When she gets better
She'll come see us.

I sat and wondered that night as I talked with the girls father as we sat and drank from a bottle of Jamesons on his front porch beneath the autumn sky over Spokane:

Will she ever care again?
Will she ever get better?

nt