#proud of this coloring he looks rosy happy well nourished

[jackdoohangf]

[thegoldenplace]

The Woman Who Sits On My Shoulder

The woman who sits on my shoulder gets heavier and heavier every day. When I eat, she demands I feed her. When I bathe, she demands I wash her. The same is true when I cut my hair, when I brush my teeth, when I stain my nails with berry juice and alcohol from the basement. She wants to be beautiful, she says. I tell her she is. But she won’t believe me when she can see her skin sagging in the mirror - she says that one night while I’m sleeping she’ll steal the bones from under my cheeks and use them to prop her face into something more youthful. 

This is not to say that I don’t love her. Of course I love her. It just means that I don’t believe a word that comes out of her mouth.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I believe the important things. 

The first day I found her on my shoulder, my mother was sick. I could tell, because whenever I came home in the evening, she wouldn’t have moved from her bed. I had been trying for weeks to make her eat, but she would turn away every bowl of stew or hunk of cheese I put on her nightstand. It was after nearly a month that I was standing over a cart of herbs at the market that the woman settled on my shoulder and leaned into my ear to say, “Those yellowish ones look nice. I’m sure they’ll do the trick.”

Any other child might have screamed, but I had been brought up to be polite, so I simply thanked her. I wouldn’t have bought them except they were only thirty cents and smelled like sun, and when I put them over the meat that night, my mother ate more greedily than I had seen in a long time. So I believed her then. 

In the mirror that night, I looked at her.

“See,” she said smugly. “I told you so.”

“Where did you come from?”

“Where did I come from?” She was miffed. “Where did you come from? What a thing to ask. And aren’t you going to offer me somewhere to sleep? It’s very cold outside.”

“Well-” I looked doubtfully at my bed. “I suppose there’s room for the both of us.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. Her smile was stretching itself for the first time across her long teeth. “You won’t even know I’m there.” 

We slept, and the next morning, we woke. Again she helped me cook. Again my mother ate. Week after week, each day my mother seeming to get more color in her cheeks, each day the woman sitting heavier on my shoulder. It seemed an even enough exchange. When it was especially sunny, my mother would come out with me to sit in the yard. She never acknowledged the woman on my shoulder, but I knew she didn’t mean it to be rude - she just had very little energy, and I was glad for her to spend it on me, even if we were just sitting.

In that warm season, we were happy. She and my father and the woman and I would eat dinner together before the fire. I would tell jokes; my father would laugh, my mother would smile. The woman on my shoulder would whisper in my ear, “That went over well, didn’t it?” When the wood burned out, I would take a second bowl of food, “For her to be nourished,” I said, and the woman on my shoulder and I would go to bed and sleep with the windows open and the wind combing our hair. 

And then the winter came. The snow fell. My mother became sicker. She was weak - she couldn’t form words or lift her head to drink. I propped her up in a rocking chair by the hearth and made fire after fire - “Put a log down, now,” the woman on my shoulder instructed me, “it’s getting drafty.” - but her eyes still drooped, breath still shallow, and one day when the woman and I woke to the chill of frost through my open window, she had died.

A part of my father died too, I think. When I ask for a second bowl of oatmeal at breakfast now, “For her to be nourished,” I say, he replies that there’s no need to waste food on any of that nonsense and goes to throw the leftovers into the compost behind the house. So we wait for him to leave and then she and I walk into the woods, her wrapped in my mother’s old black shawl, looking for all the world like a proud raven. She likes to follow the stream down the mountainside and eat the little mushrooms and moss off the rocks. Whenever I ask if she’d like for me to make her an egg and toast instead, she smiles at me, big and horrible, and I can see all the places where the dirt is stuck between her teeth. I tell her to swish water. “You’ll never be beautiful if you keep doing that,” I say.

“Maybe not to you,” she says. Then she cackles. She has a cackle like a witch, but I swear she isn’t. I asked her, once. She gave me a look that nearly turned me to stone and said that it was a very rude thing to say to someone who was just trying to move gracefully through old age. Then, she made me paint her lips with cherry juice.

It isn’t like she replaced my mother, mind. No one can replace my mother. 

But she does comfort me. I’ve gotten used to her presence, her weight on my shoulder, her claw-like fingernails combing through my hair as we scrabble down the rocky mountainside on the way to the town or to the market or in search of a stray chicken from the coop in the yard. She whispers in my ear the guidance when I most need it, keeps my mind focused when it is most restless. “Don’t trip on the roots,” she tells me. “Watch your fingers on that needle.” “Close the windows for the storm.” And in return I stand as long as she wants in front of my mirror, leaning close to let her inspect every wrinkle and mole on her soft face. I braid her thin hair with dried flowers. I tell her she is beautiful when she asks and let her face shift into the proud, conniving expression that comes before she tells me something particularly off-putting, like that she is beautiful because she’s been collecting the hairs off my shoulders, or rubbing her face with my tears to restore the skin. I laugh then harder than I ever do. 

It feels like the winter goes on for longer than it ever has, but she teaches me to like the cold. When I go to close the window she tells me instead to put on another blanket, or to stoke the fire, and when we sleep she combs the cold out of my hair, and if I cry she brushes the tears over my cheeks and tells me when they frost that I match the earth outside, and isn’t it beautiful how I can do what the rain does, how pretty the weather looks on my cheeks over the rosy flush of winter. 

One morning I wake after the sun has risen and the snow throws light so white onto my walls that my room is flat and my bed is flat and I am flat and she is flat on my shoulder. We walk to the kitchen, my feet in thick wool socks against the cold floorboards and her perched on my shoulder, breathing clouds into the air like a child. I put the kettle on. 

“Hey, pet,” my father says from the table. He is eating toast and sitting in the chair next to my mother’s. The same cloth is down that was the day she died. He takes a bite and crumbs spill over it, too white against its rich red. I look down at the stove. The woman on my shoulder, so heavy now that I ache, shifts closer to my neck. I lean my head into her, feel her slow heartbeat and the coldness of her, and let my breathing deepen. 

“Hi,” I respond. My voice feels dry and cracked. “Want some tea?”

“I’ve got coffee,” he says. There is a silence. I busy my hands, taking a mug down from the cabinet, measuring tea into a diffuser, pushing the handle back and forth so that the mug bottom makes a scraping sound against the countertop. 

He clears his throat. “Want to go out today?”

My hand stills. The woman on my shoulder draws close again. “To do what?” 

“Just take a walk. It’s nice out.”

“It’s nice inside, too,” she whispers in my ear. “What does he know about that? Doesn’t spend time in this house with you, anyway.”

She’s right, I know. I say, “Maybe later.”

“Are you sure? Sun’s good right now. And you could bring your tea.” He nods to the mug. “Warm hands.”

“I don’t know.” I shift my weight from foot to foot. My breath is coming faster now. My eyes sting. I can feel myself hunching over, collapsing, bit by bit.

From my shoulder, the woman whispers, “You know you’d like it better if you stayed in with me. Let him go. It’ll be easy. We can go back to sleep-”

“The air’s real good on the mountain,” he interrupts. “Easy breathing. Nice to get something fresh and crisp in your lungs like that, pet.”

She says, “Rude of him to interrupt like that. As if I’m not even here. You know-”

He says, “I’ve been missing your company lately. Think it’d be good to talk about your-”

“Aren’t you tired-”

“-and how you’re coping with-”

“-into bed-”

“-what would be good for you-”

“-with me-”

The kettle screams. Hot water splashes onto the stove and cries out. They both quiet. With shaking hands I reach to turn off the burner and pour water over my tealeaves, straighten myself up, and force a breath into my lungs. 

“Another time,” I say. I am blind. I am directionless. I take my mug with the hot water and walk to my room. The woman who sits on my shoulder is as heavy as the entire world, but I carry her. 

When I am settled in bed, mug on the windowsill, she begins to preen. “Aren’t you glad to be staying in? I mean, goodness,” - she sends a reproachful glance towards the door - “a walk? In this weather? The cold is much better experienced from the inside. Everyone should know that. And besides, you’re tired - he should know that. He has plenty of other chances to spend time with you. He is your father, even if-”

I raise my head. “Stop,” I say, quietly, and she is so stunned by my asking that she does.

Later, when I wake up again, night has long past fallen. She is asleep, deep in the soft creases of my blankets. Her face is illuminated in a thin sliver of moonlight. I shift towards her and lean my head on my wrists and inspect her face. Wrinkles around her long nose. Moles on her chin and protruding cheeks. Thin lips, pale red, parting unevenly around her cold breath. Thick eyelids with blond lashes, lying flat on her pockmarked skin. 

Beautiful, I think, and then I sleep.

In the morning she is gone. 

The first breath of spring’s warm air comes through my window.

I bring my cold mug into the kitchen and ask my father as he sits at the table, “Would you like to go on a walk?”

The two of us stumble down the mountainside. The air is fresh and crisp in my lungs. I feel light, lighter than I have in a long time. The sun feels so bright. 

The absence of her weight on my shoulder throws me off-kilter, and I am at once happy and sad.