With Love

Ten years from now, when the world ends, I become my mother. Nothing of me is left. I push her wiry hairs up through my scalp, her yellowed teeth into my gums. I coat my body in her blood and ash. I learn to say words the way she would have said them, the flames of her anger, the dying embers of her fear. Repeat them. These are all the tools I have. I peel her skin from its pile outside my childhood home, the only building not reduced to charcoal and soot, and patchwork it over my face. Her flesh melts into my bones. These parts of her become me. I become a part of her.
I have children because she did, and they go by the names she called me. They have myriad limbs and charred skin, dark eyes that sprout from their bodies and blink into the obsidian sky. They were born when the world ended. They are not allowed inside the house. They claw an orbit around its foundation, never within reach, whittling their skeletons to pointed ends in the shattered glass and dirt. I am always looking for them. I take my mother’s fingernails from my mother’s fingertips and join them in the fray. I call, in my mother’s voice—they know hers better than my own, they will distinguish her before they see me. She is everything that I am. Some nights, when the wind howls across the scorched earth around the house, I call to her, too, inside. I learn to pronounce her name the way she did, I learn to cage her destruction inside my cavernous chest. Nothing of me is left. I search, I pull handfuls of my mother’s fat and waste from the fire-streaked desolation she sent. I wear her skin to leather against my ribcage. I become a part of her. My children will never be a part of me.
On aftershocked evenings, when my children scatter the wasteland around us, when the sun is indistinguishable from the hellfire clouds that surround it, I pull my corpse back onto the porch of my childhood home. And inside. I am not allowed inside the house anymore. I smear my entrails over the wallpaper and crush my blood vessels into the pristine kitchen table. This is where the world has ended, and this is where she remains. My mother comes to me then, though she wouldn’t when I called. Her blood glitters red in the fires that catch just outside our windows. She is not the things she left me. When she comes, she is glistening muscle pulled taut over a polished white skull, and in her clenched fist, she holds our still-beating hearts together.
She says, I didn’t mean to hurt you. She says, I wanted to keep you safe. Lies through her weeping gums. I grab the bottoms of my eyelids, pull until her skin rips off, and drop it to the floor. A flap down my front. I will become her again when the fires die outside, when I can hear my children circling over the incendiary crackling and the sweep of ash. When they orbit once more. I stand before her, so we both see everything, and we compose each other—she is the death-soaked anatomy who made me what I am, and I am the smoldering carcass of everything she could have been. She says, I really do love you. I unhinge my jaw and I swallow her whole.

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Grace Shelton is a Spanish and Creative Writing double-major at Susquehanna University, where she gains inspiration from late nights and music played on loop. Her work has appeared in Rivercraft, The Lumiere Review, and Rougarou, among others, and Treehouse Editions published her first chapbook in Spring of 2022. She spent this past summer in Barcelona, teaching a creative nonfiction class to Latin American immigrants through Catnova's Abriendo Caminos program.