Model Home

by Rivers Solomon

One day soon, I’ll be a failed deity, too. My daughter is learning not to believe in me.

My phone buzzes in the seatback pocket. I paid for in-flight Wi-Fi specifically to be reachable, and now I have to live with it.

In my years away, the small trees have grown into abundance. They cast shade where once the blare of the sun heated the concrete so hot you could fry earthworms.

The bricks that Mama used to sink herself were from the path Dad had been paving through the raised beds going on six months now. It’s difficult to believe my mother would kill my father and then herself over an unfinished garden project, but the symbolism of the bricks dragging her to her underwater death seems apparent.

Six seventy-seven would’ve been a burglar’s paradise. Intruders we had—they just didn’t steal. They were fixtures of our home. Part of the furniture.

Eve shakes her head, casts judgment. I don’t care. It reminds me of Mama to be looked at and found wanting. For a second I can pretend she’s not dead.

I love her but hate her effortless beauty. We look just alike but nothing alike. I’m a rough draft of her.

And now, I have no mother, will never have a mother again.

I could never know how Mama was going to react to anything, though. I hated tossing the coin. I preferred to keep secrets. If I didn’t show her who I was, she couldn’t disapprove.

She said to me once that I wasn’t a real person. I was a paper doll. I wasn’t offended. I felt seen.

The only easy intimacy I’ve ever had in this life is with my sisters. Only when I’m touching them can I convince myself my hands are not blades.

If something were to happen to you, you said. If something were to happen to you. I wondered, then, if that meant that everything up to that point was stuff not happening to me.

Every white face to me is a mask. I never know what’s behind it.

The words seethe under my tongue. Mama’s words and Pop’s. History repeats and repeats because history is people, and we can reproduce only what we know, and we get what we know from our elders. The same mechanisms that facilitate language facilitate the passing on of pain.

I am left with a man who was pleasant, but who I cannot say that I know, and a man who I remember fondly, but also remember not at all.

Do not read of the indignities visited upon Black people enslaved in the American South, in the West Indies, unless you are prepared to die of grief.

So much of what we speak is our attempt to make our fantasies real.

I should’ve packed snacks, a Bible, water, the hair of a lover in a locket, a letter to God. I’ve brought with me only fear.

Mother is God, and I am an animal, made of blood and longing, and what was it Mama said, all those years ago? How powerful it would be for us to be called animals and say, Yes, yes, of course. And what does that make you? Not animal? Not flesh? Not alive? Dead. Oh, Mama, yes. How sweet it is to be alive.