Hothouse

By Natalie Brink

There is nothing on earth that simulates the same feeling of seeing a parent cry for the
first time.

My family had many things to cry about between my years of four and eight. In the
crushing weight of an absent patriarch bloomed my Mother. She was strong, beautiful,
unforgiving, temperamental, and loving. She was whole in my little eyes. Whenever she entered
a room, it became hers. Her emotions breached the waves of calamity, stretching the physical
limits of the house we called a home. When you shut a door, she slipped through the cracks. She was everywhere, even in the reflection of yourself. Her presence was held in the flame of a
candle, just as fickle. Her laugh was the tinny tinkle of windchimes that hung lethargically
around the backdoor, without substance. She was fleeting.

One night, something guttural and ugly slipped through the two inch crack under my
door. It slunk under my covers and ran its razor sharp hands over me. I woke up with a shudder,
and I knew: she was awake somewhere. Somewhere in our home she was speaking, and I knew to be afraid. Feverish chills sprung up across my body; I became panicked, stricken with an unpleasant awareness that I needed to be asleep. I shooed her terrible energy out of the room, sneaking underneath my door with it. What was I going to do? How could I find her? We moved across hallways bathed in her mood, the ugly energy and I. I followed it to her room, which was inexplicably cold, and it slithered away. I was alone, flattened to the wall. The room smelled like vinegar, and the walls wouldn’t stop shifting and shaking. Blinking the sleep from my eyes, I tried to figure out what that horrid sound was emanating from the bathroom. It stirred something within me. My fingers looked for something to grab hold of as a particularly heavy sob turned the room completely upside down. That was it, then. She was crying. Crying. I whispered the word to myself until it took shape in my mind. I’d certainly cried before, but this was different.

Spills of light fell from her bathroom in different hues of blue and purple. They
illuminated the room as I mustered up my strength and began taking feeble steps. Slowly,
balancing myself between sleeplessness and curiosity, I made it to the bathroom. My heartbeat
became a whisper as I brought my restless ear to the crack. Between sobs came stifled
mutterings. God, she said. Please, I heard. She was praying. Peeking, I caught a glimpse of her in
the mirror, and suddenly her sobs became my own. There was my mother, like I’d never seen her before. She was Mother, praying to God, and she was bathed in glow. The same divine blues and purples fanned out from her head, framing her face, encompassing everything she was.

A sob erupted from her throat that cracked the mirror; I began praying, too.