The Berry Pickers

by Amanda Peters

There is a code among the dying: let the living speak. They have longer to atone for it.

EVEN AS I GOT OLDER AND STARTED TO MAKE MY OWN way in the world, my mother tried to keep me close, pulling on that invisible chain that brought me back into her space whenever I tried to occupy my own.

When you’re an only child, semi-imprisoned, books become more than paper between hard cardboard, more than the alphabet organized into words and printed on a page.

She was drunk and finally talking to me, so I let it pass. I’d been an obedient child and spent my entire childhood doing nothing but listening to my mother.

Time quickens the older you get, as if the universe is trying to push you toward the finish line, to make room for the younger, the stronger, to mark your brief place in history and move on.

I don’t cry anymore for my parents. I miss them, yes, but I think that as the ones we love get older, we just start to separate from them, like oil from water, a line separating the living and the dying, the living carelessly gathering at the top.