One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies by Sonya Sones, Ann Sullivan

every word he says make me feel
more and more like strangling him?
    He heads toward the door, then turns and says,
“If you change your mind about talking,
I’ll be right downstairs.”
    â€œGet out!” I scream.
“Get
out
! GETOUT!”
So he does.
    And the totally psychotic thing isthat as soon as he’s gone
I almost feel like calling him back.
    Calling him back,
crawling into his lap,
and pouring it all out.
    Just like I used to do with Mom.

    I’ve Been Lying on My Bed for Hours
    Staring up
at the folds of lace
draped across the canopy overhead.
    There were a few minutes there,
when I thought
I was actually going to start crying.
    My eyes felt like
these two raging rivers
about to flood their banks.
    But the feeling passed.
Now, I’m way splotchy,
but at least I’m numb—
    as if my heart’s been Novocained.

    I’m Just Lying Here
    Still staring up at the lace,
when suddenly it starts
quivering and shimmering,
    morphing into a safety net.
And I’m swinging high above it,
inside a circus tent,
    holding on to two silver chains,
somersaulting through the air,
a blur of upturned faces watching from below.
    Then the blur comes into sharp focus
and I spot Lizzie and Ray grinning up at me
with their fingers woven together.
    And suddenly,
my
own
fingers lose their grip on the chains.
Or maybe I just let go …
    And I’m tumbling and tumbling
through air thick as water,
crashing toward the safety net below.
    And that’s when I notice a furry tail,
curlicueing in the air behind me.
And I suddenly realize that it belongs to
me
!
    That I’m one of those tiny acrobat monkeys,
from my recurring dream.
And I’m howling just as loud.

    But even so, I can hear the man’s voice,
the man with the nice, warm, dry hand,
saying, “I’ll keep you safe.”
    I can
hear
him,
but I can’t see him.
I can only see the safety net,
    see it falling into pieces
as the ground races toward me
and—
    that’s when I wake up.

    7:00 pm
    I’m still zombieing,
sitting here on my bed in the dark,
just listening to the rain,
when Max brings up my dinner on a tray.
    He switches on the light,
takes one look at me,
and says,
“The first time hurts the most.”
    Then
he reaches out to hug me,
and I flop against him
like a rag doll.

    Morning After the Rain
    It’s the first blue sky,
I mean truly blue sky,
that I’ve seen since I’ve been here.
    It’s as though someone’s taken
a giant toothbrush to it
and brushed away all the plaque.
    The view’s been magically transformed.
There’s an entire mountain range out there
that I’ve never even seen before!
    I fling open the window and breathe in deeply,
filling my lungs
with great huge gusts of clean.
    You’d think this would cheer me up.
But it doesn’t.
It just makes me miss my sky back home.
    Which gets me thinking
about Lizzie and Ray again.
And about what they did to me.
    And when
that
happens,
my heart slows,
then stops beating altogether,
    and sits in my chest like a clenched fist.

    He Loves Me
    He loves me not.
He
said
he did.
But he was lying.
    I love
him
not.
I just
thought
I did, because he
must have put me under a spell or something.
    And I bet I know exactly when he did it.
It was on the night we first met.
He was telling me this long involved story
about this time he got stuck in an elevator.
    And then,
right in the middle of his sentence,
he forgot what he was saying.
    He just stood there staring into my eyes,
with this dreamy smile on his face,
as if he’d suddenly been struck dumb
by my incredible beauty,
    as if he couldn’t concentrate
on what he was saying because I was
such a vision of distracting loveliness …
    As if he
loved
me.
But he loves me not.
And he never
did
.

    Dear Mom,
    How are things six feet under? JK. They’ve got to be better than they are here. My life is a train wreck. Ray dumped me for Lizzie. A week ago today. You never