Mother of God by Sara Peters

Author:Sara Peters [Peters, Sara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2025-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

TEXTING: RUTH

Can you come over tomorrow at noon

I still haven’t found her

We need to go to Ed’s

TEXTING: DARLENE / MOM

Good morning Mom

I’m pulling out your photo albums

Who will I see?

My dead grandfather

My dead cousin

You as a child

Various photos catering to male vanity and rage

Basketballs, whisky, bonfires, tires, dead animals, trucks, soccer balls, weed

I’m so scared

It’s so awful to work with clients and hear them long for their mothers

How broken their hearts are

How small what they want is

How impossible, nonetheless

The trees shading your house lift their enormous arms

They shrug, dispassionately

Do you love me?

Did you ever love me?

You’re just tired

You’re just tired, aren’t you Mom

In one Polaroid she is half turned toward the camera, holding a yellow plastic sand bucket. There is a trailer behind her; she’s wearing triceratops-printed shorts and rubber boots. A March wind comes off the photo, even now, smelling like mud and broken ice. It was too chilly for shorts. She looks tiny and freezing.

The last few days, her presence has become like the hum of the fridge. When I die and when I haunt I will be a rapacious ghost. I don’t want to be a subtle ghost, only plucking my eyebrows to tasteful arches, only the most natural lipstick, the barest brush of mascara, in gentle laundered cottons to my bare ankles. I want to wear glass and metal, let my flesh bubble up from my clothing, absolute in my sovereignty and my abiding rage.

What matters is the depth of my devotion. She may not ever understand what I want from her, even though I said it so many times, it was like there were certain words she couldn’t hear, certain phrases, certain emotions, the way human senses are limited, or like being colour-blind. I have to consider that it’s like not being able to sing. Or, conversely, having perfect pitch. A physiological fact.

I prepare breakfast for her. I pull out a long wooden cutting board and on it I arrange:

Granola, in her favourite bowl (white porcelain, with a nearly rubbed-out sprig of honeysuckle painted on the bottom);

A tiny flowered pitcher of milk;

A grapefruit, from which I painstakingly peel the gummy white layer;

A coffee with skim milk;

A carton of sour cherry 0% fat Greek yogurt

Pantomime of a nursemaid as I travel down the stairs, and when I place the tray outside the basement bathroom door I think: if there are mice, they will feast, but Darlene will appreciate the gesture. It had a high Catholic air about it. Uselessly, delusionally symbolic.

Back upstairs it occurs to me that the Virgin Mary should be included in this ritual. Hello, I say to her. Hello.

I scatter granola at the base of her pedestal. I smear yogurt on her face. I draw bigger, blacker eyes over her own and I add thick black eyelashes.

I lie down in bed and scratch myself ferociously, mindlessly, for what feels like hours, flipping myself over and over like a steak.

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