Open by Jess Wright

My mother is setting the table for dessert when it happens. Rooting in unfamiliar drawers, she has opened the one crammed with candles, screws, zip ties, etcetera, which Maggie calls the doohickie drawer and which I keep saying should be third drawer down but which Maggie installed as the top drawer the day we moved in, and I haven’t had the strength to challenge it yet, and mum has jabbed her hand on what I think is a screwdriver, she cries out, and Vi’s at the kitchen table flipping the ridged metal tops off Topo Chico bottles, an archness about her eyes and closed lips that I remember from before we were dating, a heat that opens the soft guts of me, and then Maggie, who is at the chopping board with the papaya, dips the knife into her thumb and draws out a smile.

I do what anyone would do in this situation. I go to her, I cry out. I call to mum for the Band-Aids in the doohickie drawer. Sorry mum, plasters. I know what Band-Aids are, she says, I watch TV. I feel Vi watching us and it’s sexy, it’s making me wet.

Maggie fends me off. She hisses, she clenches paper towel on her thumb until red soaks through like crepe paper. Does it need stitches. Vi is already slipping her small bare feet into the ballet flats she arrived in. But Maggie shoulders me out of the way, goes into the bathroom, we are left alone beneath the glare of the ceiling light, Vi half inside her jacket, my mother holding the Band-Aids, I know about this life, she says, she is speaking to Vi, we called it a commune, hippies and that, it can be difficult.

We are not a commune I say, I want more than that is what I want to say, but now I’m standing outside the bathroom door saying Maggie, Maggie, come out, and Maggie is angry I think, or just jealous, which I understand, of course, it has to be worked through. Just let me in I say, and I’m struck by the symbolism of it, hit so hard I can’t move, not when the bathroom door unlocks, not when Vi hovers close, she doesn’t kiss me, she stands at a chaste distance, she says I should head off.

Don’t go, but it is my mum who says this, my mum who stands in the kitchen, although she arrived only this morning, has jet lag, doesn’t know what’s beyond our front door (the avenue, mostly, leading down to the lake, and after that a ruler-straight highway, after that, hill country), does not know how to use the coffee maker, let me make you a coffee she promises, sit down and let me make you coffee. No really says Vi. The door closes.

Maggie comes out of the bathroom, she’s won, her hand is clean but there’s blood under her fingernails. Vi would like that, she introduced herself six months ago as one part dance teacher, three parts witch, we were trying to learn how to tango. It is like a commune my mother says, she sits at the place she has set for herself, the remainder of cutlery heaped on the table like kindling, you don’t have to live together for a commune you know.

What will you do in retirement, Maggie says, will you continue to travel. You must love each other very much, my mother replies, I’m so proud of you both, she is tearful, her eyes shine like wounds, it doesn’t matter what you are do you hear me, love is the only thing that matters. But it is too late, and Maggie spears the papayas, their flesh slippery and stained with her hands.

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Jess Wright is a writer, teacher, and historian based in Leeds. Their work has appeared in streetcake magazine, Queerlings, Foglifter Journal, and t'ART, among publications. They have written two books, one on the history of psychiatry and its relationship to classical antiquity, and the other on late antique ideas about the brain. When not writing, Jess teaches academic skills at the University of Leeds, runs occasional creative writing workshops around Leeds, and tries to keep the cats from digging up the rhubarb.

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