Samantha S

She is a cluster of red geraniums. Fragrant, scalloped leaves against a backdrop of black-eyed susan and purple coneflower. She is a shaded backyard, the cool grass and fleshy mulberries flattened under small bare feet. Purple-stained toes. She is the fine-woven plastic of weatherproof cushions on patio chairs, pressing into the backs of legs. The frayed scrap of quilting fabric in my lap. My loose and uneven pink practice stitches. She is three cubes of sugar, and a ‘please, just one more’, plunked into porcelain by the wet fingertips of too-big teatime gloves. The burgundy kitchen and loaves of bread stored in the oven. She is the glow from those fat antique Christmas tree bulbs, wrapped around a freshly cut pine. The woody scent of incense whose smoke slithers out from the tiny chimney of a miniature log cabin. She is a gingham tablecloth on a picnic table in a shaded back yard. The bright embers that launch themselves from the end of a 4th of July sparkler. She is holding my hand in the shade when I’m six and I ask if I’m really the oldest grandchild or if I’ve been lied to because another girl told me she’s my cousin and she’s eight. She says no, you’re still the special one, and explains about second cousins, or first cousins once removed. I still don’t understand a lot of things like that. She is starting to cry when I’m seven and she is sitting in a recliner in the corner under five blankets and she lifts up her shirt to show my mom the flat plane of raw skin and no breast where there should have been a breast. She is saying how it hurts. She is never coming back home when I’m eight and I sit on her hospital bed with my grandpa and watch her sleep, and his tears and snot pour right out onto the waffle weave blanket and he doesn’t even wipe it away, and I know then that everyone is different now. When I’m alone I try to breathe with only half breaths because they say that 50% of her lungs are filled with fluid and I want to suffer with her. She is the gray dawn and the blur in my eyes when I wake to my parents telling me she doesn’t exist here anymore. It rains all day when we watch her box be covered in dirt, suffocated. She is everything now, still, when I pull on dirty gardening gloves or take a bath or fry bacon or drink sweet tea, or anything,​ the short time we had envelops my whole life.