The Morningside

by Téa Obreht

This might have gone on for months. Me, ghouling around in a half-nourished state, while the scissors and the perfume bottle languished in useless malignancy in their respective hiding places. But things came to a head one evening not long afterward.

There’s a world underneath the world. You can’t ask and ask and ask to see it. Otherwise, these glimpses of it, they turn bad.”

What he kept coming back to was that after the collapse, there was a growing sense in him that he had, against all odds, ended up at the center of a turning point in the city’s history.

What I feared instead was my own unworthiness. That I had failed to be adequately observant, adequately reverential.

There was a face my mother made when she was flabbergasted by someone’s lack of common sense. To the person in question, the face always came off as grimly sincere, even respectful. In truth, it meant she was laughing inwardly with all the disdain she could muster.

“It’s always dangerous to give people a way to tell themselves stories about you before they get to know you. Always.” He patted my shoulder. “So mind your mother. She’s not wrong.”

I had thought I would feel relief. But all I felt was anger. I didn’t want to share silence with this small, changed person and bear witness to her helplessness. I wanted her to sit up and get well again so that I could tell her, freely and without guilt, how wrong she’d been about absolutely everything.

“They were taking care of me,” I said. “I didn’t want to be rude.” But that didn’t matter to my door-slamming, cold-shouldering, silent mass of a mother.

And I realized that I’d brought you into life at a time when everyone else’s debts had come due. Only, the debtors weren’t around anymore to pay up. So it’d be you doing the paying.