We buried my mother twice because she didn’t want to stay under the ground. After the first try, I caught her looking over my shoulder while I cooked swordfish in her spicy tomato sauce. She pointed out each mistake, tut-tutting while maggots crawled in and out of her sunken cheeks. If my wife made an uncharitable remark about one of our acquaintances, my mother would chide her silently from the rocking chair in the corner of the room, grave dirt spilling from her mouth. Once, I clipped my fingernails at the kitchen table and looked up halfway through to see her watching me sternly, though her own nails had grown long and yellow as her discolored skin retreated toward an unbeating heart.

It wasn’t only lectures, of course. She’d been an unfairly funny woman before she went under the ground and the habit didn’t leave her after. On a trip to the zoo, she pointed at an orangutan and tried to tell a joke. Her jawbone dangled crooked from decaying musculature and no words came out. Then she laughed hard at whatever it was she’d meant to say, but with no air to expel from her lungs her hunched, convulsing shape looked instead like a woman in agony. Some nights we woke and she was there at the foot of the bed, staring at us with eyes sinking ever deeper into bruise-colored sockets.

Enough. Enough. We buried her again, twelve feet this time. As I closed the casket, she tried to smile, but without lips she only managed to bare her teeth.

Things were quiet then. No more kitchen table judgment. Reading after dinner, my wife and I smiled at one another because my mother’s eternal rest seemed to have earned that moniker at last. Except each night I woke three or four times in the hollow hours and stared at the foot of the bed where no one now watched over us. I botched every meal I cooked for weeks until my wife relegated me to prep duty. Finally, near dusk, I found myself standing outside the orangutan enclosure at the zoo, where I had come alone without recollection. I wracked my brain for that joke my mother had tried to tell, but it was like searching for something at the bottom of the ocean where no ray of light could reach and oxygen was running out.

I went back to the new grave that night and I dug her up to ask for the punchline.

But when I pried open the casket my mother wasn’t there anymore. There was only a body inside. Old bones and empty flesh. That body wouldn’t move no matter how I implored it. The eyes stared through me to the clouded heavens above. I looked around for someone to tell me what to do next. Where to go, how to live, how to hoot into the twilit woods so a barred owl might hear and hoot back. I’ve kept looking all my life.

* * *

Ⓒ Shane Inman