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I’ve wondered often, since they pulled her from the swamp, how this could have happened. I’ve asked her, but of course she can’t answer; she’s lost her language. Now, she only grunts. I can’t bring myself to call her Mama anymore. Mona is her given name. My name is Nora. I’m forty-seven. Mona is eighty-nine. She’s young again, looks half my age. She sprints naked through my beds of marigolds and purple phlox, squatting and pissing where she pleases. Her skin is mottled brown with dirt, her muscles, hard and young and pumping, power her marathons around our small yellow cinderblock house. The loblolly and short-leaf pines grow close here, spreading out for miles. They dip into ravines and stretch high, laying carpets of brown needles beneath them. Here she beds down in the musk of the forest at night and rises again at daybreak. I’ve cut back wrestling her into the aluminum tub in the back yard to once a week. I haven’t the strength for more than that. Besides, two days after I bathe her, her hair is again matted with spit and pitch. I find bleached sticks and dead leaves atop her head, trumpet creeper vines wound through her stiffened hair, all crowned with delicate pink lady’s slipper flowers. She could refuse the baths outright. I could do nothing to force her; she’s stronger than any man I’ve ever known. She fights like an animal to make me work. But when the clear water rises to her neck, she stills, her body as taut as piano wire. She mewls as I scrub the filth from her hair, from along her thighs, from the soles of her callused feet. When she rises from the brown water, taller than I, and takes bold steps from the tub, she is radiant. Her smooth skin glows pink from the coarse sponge. Her breasts stand firm and full and beautiful. She beams as I rub the towel over her, eyes flashing with hazel fire, jewels outshining my own stony grays. She follows me willingly into the kitchen after her baths. Heels propped girlishly on the edge of a wooden chair, she waits while I pinch knots of my thin gray curls from a brush. Her wet hair is long and straight, the color of damp beach sand. She closes her eyes, and with each brush stroke lolls her head, letting her soft strands tickle across her bare shoulders. She is out of place here, surrounded by sharp corners, mushroom-print curtains, and somber wood grain domesticity. Her bold, whip-quick movements around the delicate china, her smell—cool like damp moss, rich like moldering stumps—and her naked curves of unashamed femininity place her outside this world, my world. When her hair is dry, it pours golden down her back, like honey, like it did fifty years ago in the album pictures. She leaps from the chair to bolt out of the house, her hair splaying up in a splashed fan of violent sun-color, and I watch her sprint across the yard until the shadows of the woods swallow her like a closing eye.  I never knew the beautiful woman in the album pictures who throws smiles like confetti. She makes every black and white photograph a festival, bleeding color and life into the scene: she in a small kitchen, laughing, hands in dishwater and one bare foot kicked up behind her, her mother tight-lipped in the background; she with an armful of college textbooks, free arm akimbo, smirking at a chagrined young man; she in a wedding dress, one hand on the wheel of a pale, finned ’57 Chevy dragging tin cans, top down, laughing over her shoulder with one arm out in a good-bye to the same young man, chasing and calling after her. The album ends here, leaving years of blank pages and the ghostly faded borders of photos removed long ago. This is the space from which the woman I know would be frowning from color pictures, her hair limp and graying, cheeks rouged, eyebrows thick, skin like dough under her arms. The illusion of her left leg below the knee would be dispelled by the toe of her shoe turned out too far, betraying the presence of the aluminum rod beneath her powder blue knit slacks. I can remember the smell of astringents and lavender that surrounded her. In this imagined photograph, she would be gripping the small hand of her daughter, pulling the child to her side even as the girl fights to put as much space as she can between herself and her mother. 
Mama walked with a limp for as long as I can recall, even before the aluminum leg. Her face was always pinched with a pain I couldn’t see and my father seemed to ignore. My father left us when I was twelve. I came home from school one afternoon to find my mother cleaning the kitchen with a passion I’d never witnessed in her. She was no longer limping. "You father’s gone," she said while mopping the floor. She did not look up at me. I nodded. I don’t remember my father, only the roughness of his bearded cheek, but the news hit me, turned my stomach and shocked my heart into a gallop. My head felt as if it were swelling and then swimming off my shoulders. A numbness I hadn’t been aware of in me now melted. My book bag slipped from my tingling fingers. The kitchen tilted and rushed up into darkness. I awoke in Mama’s bed with a cool washcloth on my head. I could see Mama down the hallway in the kitchen on her hands and knees scrubbing the floor furiously. For a brief time after my father left, I would catch Mama smiling to herself as she cross-stitched. On some cold mornings after I showered, she would bring me a clean towel and present it with a flourish. It would be warm and fluffy because she had tumbled it in the dryer special for me. Just as abruptly, one day it all went back to the way it had been. The police came to the house several times, and Mama argued with them until they left. She began to limp again, and she stopped her cross-stitching. Then one afternoon I was pulled from math class by the school nurse and told my mother had been taken to the hospital. Mama’s leg had to be amputated below the knee. I learned later that for nine years she had struggled with a severely ingrown toenail on her left foot. The pain apparently had become so unbearable that she had cut it off with a kitchen knife. The infection claimed the lower part of her leg, but the doctors told me she was lucky. They had caught the infection before it spread too far. After that, the two of us spoke little. It took a long time for Mama to get used to the false leg. She crashed around the house, banging her shoulders into doorjambs, catching her shoe on table legs and falling. She swung her cane with menace. offers of help were ignored, the doctor’s recommendation of physical therapy rebuffed. Finally she mastered it, but only after turning the leg and shoe out at that unnatural angle. She frowned at the uncomfortable glances it drew at the grocery store, but I sensed she reveled in the discomfort it inspired. Her behavior mortified me. Eventually, I refused to be seen with her in public.
Mona had been back for nearly two weeks the night I began to worry how I would hide her from Ernest. As she ran toward the woods at twilight, an emptiness hollowed me out. Without a thought, I called after her, "Did you ever care about me?" She stopped at the tree line and looked back, cocking her head to the side. A moment later she disappeared into the woods. I poured some old coffee and sat in a hard kitchen chair, passing the warm cup from hand to hand. My tired, out-of-focus reflection in the side of the toaster stared back at me. It was a Tuesday, and Ernest would be back from his trip the next day. The thought occurred to me that maybe I should be more worried about hiding Ernest from Mona.
In ninth grade I tried to sign up for auto shop class, but the school wouldn’t allow it; they pushed me toward home economics. I balked and took a writing course instead. Ernest Garnett had a Mustang Mach-1, sable black with a white racing stripe wrapped around it like painted wind. He parked it behind the school next to the auto shop class, where I lingered after school, watching the late class finish. From behind, I imagined the beautiful car looked like a woman bending over. Ernest must have noticed me, and maybe he mistook the appreciation I gave it as being meant for him. His buzzed blond hair made his small face look even smaller on his thick neck. It was April but already hot like middle summer. Ernest’s forehead glistened. The humidity left the sweat on me, and my blouse clung like wet tissue. He offered to give me a ride in his car. I accepted, unable to resist the opportunity. The seats were wrapped in blue, white, and red woven covers. It was stiflingly hot in the car after the long day in the sun, but the air was rich, thick with the smell of oiled machinery and leather. We climbed in and he told me to ignore the trash in the floor. We rolled the windows down and rode fast. Pages of old algebra and English tests flew up off the floor and whirled inside the car until I grabbed them and stuffed them under the seat. I noticed he had failed most of the tests. At each green light we surged forward, and I surrendered to the powerful engine that pushed me back into the seat. I barely noticed Ernest watching me, smiling. Our house stood on five acres of land, at the end of a long dirt driveway. The closest neighbor lived over two miles away. The whine of tires on tar exhaled into a soft powdery sigh as we turned off the main road. Ernest drove a short distance up the driveway and then parked. "Smoke?" he asked, as he unrolled a pack of Camels from his T-shirt sleeve. A different smell filled the car now, like sweat on metal. I declined the cigarette and glanced out the window. He struck the pack against his palm and took one with his lips. "Your mother home?" "Yes," I answered. I wiped my damp palms down the front of my skirt. He touched my hair. "How come a girl like you hangs out around the guys in shop so much? A lot of people say you’re a dyke." "I like cars." My neck was as stiff as a nailed board, and I kept my head turned toward the window, searching for some plan to get out of this, as if the answer might be written in the dust of the drive. Nothing outside the car told me how to unlock my frozen joints. "Aww, I think it’s more than that," Ernest said. "Turn around here.” He ran his fingers through my hair. “I don’t think you’re a dyke." He put his hand on the side of my face and turned my head toward him. It turned so easily in his grip. He was close, his smoky breath panting out across my shoulder. My voice tightened and scrunched down inside me. I forced it up, and said in a high, shaky squeak, "I need to get on home." "I think," he said as he reached into his pants, "that you really like dick." Ernest unzipped his jeans and pulled himself out. I stared at it, jutting out of the denim like a pale fang. I could not move. Then, through the windshield I saw Mama standing in front of the car. The blood drained from my face. I fumbled with the door handle. The car door opened and I fell out in my haste to run. "You like to smoke, young man?" Mama held a red and yellow metal can. Her voice rattled like a sack of gravel, snapped like a cracking limb. Ernest jumped and tried shoving his stiffened penis back into his pants. Mama hoisted her can. "You like fucking?" My eyes widened at the curse. Mama didn’t have the cane she usually carried, and her steel leg, as always, was turned out. I scrambled to the edge of the driveway. She hobbled close to the car and began slinging the can. Something splashed out onto the car, and droplets hit Ernest through the driver’s side window. A drop hit my hand, and I could smell it was gasoline. Mama didn’t seem to notice that she splashed herself, too. Ernest twisted the key in the ignition. He got brave for a moment and punched at Mama through the window, missed, but knocked the gas can from her hands. "Crazy bitch!" He rolled up the window while fighting the ignition. The engine seemed to chuckle and refused to fire. Mama picked up the can and dumped the rest across the hood and down his windshield. The engine started. From her pocket, Mama pulled a wooden strike-anywhere match, the kind she used to light our wood stove at home. She touched the white tip of it to the hood of the car. Ernest saw it and stopped, breathing hard, his eyes wide. I whimpered, trying not to scream. Mama looked up at me. The savageness appeared to melt from her face. Her shoulders sagged. I felt myself moving toward her, though I remained where I lay on the ground. I felt myself holding her, preventing her from striking the match. I could almost feel the wooden stick between my own fingers. The stinging odor of gasoline burned my nose. I was a part of her—or she a part of me. I tried to put the match away. Ernest threw the car into reverse, and I was hurled back to the edge of the driveway, my body having never moved. The match scraped down the hood as the car backed out. The match head popped. A rushing sound like a breathy gasp flew up and hung for a moment in the branches of the loblollies before the heat reached me. Fire exploded from the hood, flowing up the windshield in a transparent red sheet. The burst found Mama’s slacks. She didn’t seem to notice. On fire, she hobbled after the car that spun up dirt and backed toward the main road. Her aluminum leg broke loose, and she teetered a moment. She got her balance and continued by hopping, the leg dragging behind her, the toe cutting a snaking path in the dirt. The fire didn’t reach Ernest with the windows shut. I could hear his cursing as the car hit the pavement, squealed in a turn, and took off. I reached Mama as the flames took hold of her blouse and curled the ends of her hair. She collapsed in the sand and rolled, stripping off her clothes. I tore at her blouse and burned my hands. She grunted and thrashed until the fire was out. She stood, panting and nearly naked. Her skin was red and blistering already. I looked away. She said nothing. Instead, she removed her aluminum leg, tucked it under her arm, and hopped toward the house. The burns left her scarred. She settled into behaving like an old woman, older than she actually was. She stayed at home, watched soaps, and quilted. She even joined a quilting bee. Throughout high school, I had seen Mama as ugly, embarrassing. But that day, watching her hop in the driveway, sheathed in flames before the fleeing Mustang, I saw something else. Beauty; raw, vengeful, and sublime. I envied it. But by the time I grew up, I had forgotten such a thing could exist.
I awoke early Wednesday, the day Ernest was due home. Most of the previous night was spent lying awake, thinking and remembering. And dreading Ernest’s return. Through the bedroom window I watched Mona swinging naked among the thick branches of a live oak in the back yard. The bright sun highlighted her in flashes as she brachiated with a primate’s grace. Her powerful hands found limb after limb, propelling her in arcing swoops around the outer reaches of the tree and through its open heart. The tree cupped her like a pair of hands. She didn’t wear her crown of twigs and flowers, and her gold hair whipped freely, chasing her like light after a shadow. I felt myself move toward her, through the window and into the air. The rough bark crumbled beneath our grip and scraped our calluses. Cool leaves brushed our cheeks, our breasts. We soared, our heart rising into our throat and falling into our stomach. The blue sky tumbled in play with the brown earth and green leaves. Free! Alone! Wonderful! I laughed out loud. Then I remembered Ernest, and we missed the next limb. I watched Mama plummet out of the tree and hit the ground. The breath burst out of me. Mona didn’t move. I opened my mouth to cry out, but I couldn’t inhale. At last, Mona stood, stumbled and heaved for air. She looked toward me, then walked back to her woods. I jumped from my bed and rushed out the front door without covering myself. I stood naked on the stoop as she ran into the woods. At my feet lay a woven crown of leaves and twigs, vines and flowers. An old color photograph lay next to it. It was smudged with dirt and damp, as if it had been buried, but the image on it remained clear: Me, eleven years old in a frilly white Easter dress, my father in a well-worn brown wool suit and matching wide tie, the dingy green John Deere cap on his head that he wore no matter the occasion. He held me on his knee, his big, big hands holding my middle. I remembered his hands, touching me. His heavy body pressing me down, his quiet "shh" on some nights. I dropped the crown and rushed to the bathroom to vomit.
The call had come from the police two weeks ago. The English department secretary had come to the adult writing class I teach at the community college, her face pale and expressionless. I let the class go early and took the call in the administrative office. Mama’s van had been found. The police were pulling it out of Mussel Swamp, just off the narrow back road that cut through it. The policeman on the phone said that it appeared Mama had lost control of it, probably during the storm that day. It had flipped from the road and tumbled down the steep embankment and sank into the dark water. The water level of the swamp had dropped during this year’s drought, and the exposed tires had been spotted from the road. Mama had been missing for more than a year. She had left early on a rainy Saturday morning with four other elderly women from her quilting bee, headed for a day outing at the swap meet in Cloverton. The search had lasted for several weeks, and I moved back to Mama’s house. That’s when Ernest Garnett came to see me. He had stood on the front porch, rapping on the storm door. The buzzed blond hair he had in school had receded into a wispy graying corona around his head. A paunch hung out over his belt buckle, stretching his Redskins football T-shirt and showing off the cave of his belly button. He held up a handful of wildflowers and smiled with all his teeth. My hand moved to the door handle, turned it, and I let him back into my life. I needed comfort then, the closeness of another. On Mama’s plastic-covered couch Ernest put his arm over my shoulders and gave me that, briefly. He then explained how his wife had recently left him, and by late evening I was comforting him, patting his balding head in my lap.
The trees along the small road were decayed and gray, moldering ribs rising out of stagnant swamp water. I rolled down my car window and told an officer who I was. She pointed to the side of the road. I parked, skirting the steep drop-off along the shoulder. The truck’s winch whined, its tow cable stretching taut down the embankment. Below, Mama’s muddy brown van slowly emerged from its grave. A young policeman approached me. We watched the rear half of the van sliding out of the water. He was shorter that I am, and he placed his hand awkwardly on my high shoulder, but removed it after only a short time. "You don’t have to be here," he said. "You can identify your mother later . . . you know, after all this. . . ." I only nodded. The van’s rear tires cleared the surface and black water gushed out of the chassis. The windows of the van were shut, but I couldn’t see inside through the mud sliding down them. The winch quieted finally, and the van rested, still leaking black ooze. No one approached it at first, certain of what they would find inside. A man shouted behind the van. From the road where I stood, I heard the rear doors bust open. A long howl echoed into the swamp, guttural at first and then pushing high into a keening wail. The policeman at the rear fell back against the embankment. Something leaped from the van and splashed into the dirty water. I caught only a glimpse of matted hair as it clambered to the embankment. It hunkered, let out another ragged howl, and sprang on all fours up the embankment. It crossed the road, heading for the open forest on the opposite side. The young officer beside me reached for his sidearm, but before he could draw it, the thing from the van bounded into the undergrowth and disappeared. The witnesses called it an animal, though of a kind they could not identify. Inspection of the van turned up the bones of four elderly women, cleaned of all flesh and scattered around the interior. All showed signs of having been gnawed by teeth. The teeth of what they weren’t certain, though the young policeman told me the next day, his face pale, that they appeared human. "I’m sorry," he said, skepticism creeping into his tone, "but your mother’s body was not in the van." He pulled out a notepad and pen. "When was the last time you said you saw her?" I saw the creature’s eyes, though, before it had escaped into the swamp. I saw the creature’s eyes, though, before it had escaped into the swamp, filled with that raw power I had seen and envied as a girl. Only this time, it was far greater, no longer bound by deformity or responsibility to a little girl. What I knew had no explanation. The creature was Mama, but she was no longer my mother. When was the last time I had seen Mama? "The day she disappeared," I told the officer. But I could not tell him that it had been yesterday, in that swamp, that I first saw Mona.
I knelted over the toilet and heaved, but nothing came up. I sobbed as the memories flooded me. I picked up the crumpled picture by the toilet, but could not open it again. I squeezed it tighter and threw it into the wastebasket. I got up, still naked, and stared at myself in the bathroom mirror. My face, puffy and wrinkled, was empty, unrecognizable to me. My body sagged all over, the skin gray. Who are you? the shell in the mirror asked me. I had no answer. I splashed cold water on my face and brushed my teeth. After dressing, I stepped out onto the back stoop and took up the crown Mona had made and placed it on the kitchen table. Saplings were wound into a circle and bound with thin wild grape vines. Bluebells ringed it, and the pink flower of a lady’s slipper hung at the crest like a gem. Where did Mona go at night, in those woods? What else was she hiding out there? I decided to find out. The woods were dappled with yellow light. The last time I had been this far in I was a child of thirteen, exploring, hiding. The smell was the same, earthy and warm, of dead leaves and dampness. A breeze cheered softly, far away in the treetops. A hoot drew my attention to a beech tree. Mona perched in its branches. When I saw her, she turned and leaped to the ground. She took a few steps and glanced over her shoulder at me. I followed. We traveled for an hour, plunging deeper into the woods than I had ever ventured. Mona splashed into a small stream we came upon and laughed. I crossed on a few flat rocks and struggled to keep up with her through the ravines, but she never got out of sight. Mona stopped at the edge of a large hole. Fresh earth was piled at one end. Mona glanced once at me, and I approached the edge. She bolted into the forest, disappearing. I found the missing album pictures in the hole. It was clear they had been buried a long time, and like the one Mona left on the stoop earlier, they were damp. Most were mildewed; some were torn into tiny pieces; all of them had my father or Mama in them. I dug deeper in the hole with my bare hands and found a pile of my father’s old clothes. Then I found a skeletal forearm. Along its yellowed length it had been gnawed. With both hands I moved the earth faster, until I found a skull next to it a faded green John Deere cap. From somewhere high in the trees, Mona howled, long and mournfully. The sun was setting. I kicked all the pictures back into the hole with the bones. My hands were filthy, my nails caked with black dirt, as I buried the past and, at last, filled in a hole within me.
Mona turned away at the edge of the woods and vanished. When I entered the back door of the house, Ernest was there, waiting. "There’s no dinner?" was the first thing he asked, his bulldog face frowning. I went to the sink and washed my hands, scrubbing the dirt from them. "Well?" He rested his hands on his hips. I continued cleaning my nails in the water. The dirt was deep and hard to clean. "I’ve been driving for eight hours, Nora. All I expect when I get home is a meal and my wife. Is that too much to ask?" We had been married less than a year. Ernest had asked me to marry him three weeks after he first showed up on my doorstep after Mama went missing in the van. The marriage happened quickly, no family—I had none—just documents and a guy pronouncing it as official. Was I expecting a profound change in myself by marrying? My life gaped like a chasm, and I had not realized that, for most of it, I had perched at the chasm’s edge, throwing in pieces of me with hopes of somehow filling it. Ernest moved into Mama’s house with me, got rid of her furniture, and moved in his own. I cleaned. I cooked dinner. He traveled, was a salesman. He fucked me, liked it when he made me gag on him. Months crumbled and blew away like dust. And then Mona returned from the dead, striking like summer lightning in dry brush. "Nora!" Ernest bellowed. "Don’t you ignore me." "Get out," I said. "What?" I rounded on him. "Get out, I said." His eyes widened, and then narrowed. "Get out!" "Nora—" I grabbed the toaster, yanking the cord from the socket, and hurled it at him. It struck him in the arm without much force. He stepped forward, his fist coming up. He’d never hit me before. Would he now? I pulled a kitchen knife from the wooden block on the counter and met his gaze again. I will kill you, I thought. The fight left him. He dropped his fist and kicked a kitchen chair across the room. "Crazy bitch. You’re as fucked up as your mother ever was." He turned and left.
Today, I stand in my back yard among my marigolds and phlox as the sun sets. Mona passes beyond the tree line. I undo my powder-blue blouse, and drop it among the flowers. I toss away my bra and kick off my slacks. I place Mona’s crown on my head; a wilting lady’s slipper dangles from it. The grass tickles my bare feet as I sprint toward the forest, and I revel as the shadows open to accept me like a wakening eye.
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