Holly Baldwin                                                                                               

Mia’s Mama’s Dying

Mia was late, and we missed the train we aimed to press the flowers under. I could've lined up what I'd collected on the way over, had a press without her. It would've been fine, but I told myself it wouldn't have been, that she would've been hurt. Then I told myself I was a good friend for waiting. I knew, too, that she was self-centered in the extreme, toxic, cruel, and dangerous for making me wait in this heat.

It was the kind of summer day that felt sticky. Atmosphere duked it out with drought and left a chemical clamminess in the pits and the small of my back. I was leaning, arms crossed, against the old concrete block left over from when there was a bridge. The sun moved, though, and I moved too, back into the shadow. Lay down in the moss there, battery acid hot in my blood.

Shut my eyes, and breathed. Slow.

"Hey." I blinked. Mia, a blurry dark shape against the sky.

Silence for a moment. My teeth pressed so hard they hurt.

Mia’s face went through something of a journey - guilt first, good. Then her eyes widened, and she looked down, away. Something got all tight in her jaw, and she met my eyes again for a long moment, far longer than she usually could stomach, before rolling her own eyes skyward, looking away. "Sorry, I was late, ok?" Her words came out hard.

"It's fine." Mine, too.

"A lot is going on—"

"I said it's fine."

She snorted. Glared away from me and chewed her lip.

The distant wail of an approaching train, then. Mia turned to face it.

I didn’t look, though. It was far off, and Mia finally wasn’t.

She chewed her lip again. It was flaking already; I’d convinced her to do a sugar-scrub the day before. Her lips were always all fucked up; it was hard to look at. Of course, she’d already ruined that work. She glanced back at me, and it wasn’t quite a journey her face did, more a leap this time. A drop-down into annoyance. "You don't have to be so..." she started strong, but quickly trailed off. Snorted, looked away. Mia's cheeks dimpled as she sucked hard on her teeth, the bulky impression of braces warping her lips. "Whatever. Never mind, whatever. Let's just do this."

I hopped down. In the shade, still. So much cooler, but still so hard to get a good breath. Still muggy. I’d have to let the sun touch me anyway if we were going to do this, and we were going to do this.

Mia and I laid the flowers we'd collected out on the track in a row, lined up like little cowboys' maidens needing rescue. The track burned when my fingers touched it, so it was oddly delicate work, a cautious hover and drop. I had four hydrangea buds, all different colors. A spindly black eyed susan. A dandelion with a bizarrely thick stem, milky insides oozing from the snared tip of it before pressing, even.

Mia hesitated. Then she pulled from her pocket three limp tulip heads, all peachy pink. Placed them carelessly half off the track.

She didn't look at me or move after. Instead, she stood, straddling the rail, towering over the bruised heads of her flowers. Her shoulders were tight up against her neck. Something spiked hard in me, and I looked quickly back down at the tulip heads. "Huh," I said. "Where'd you get those?"

"I don't know why we still do this," her voice was very low. Steady.

I shifted. "Huh?"

"You know. It never really works. How'd we even start?"

My breathing felt like drowning already, but it stuttered. I stared at her. Part of me wanted to scream, sneer, push her down again. She didn't normally talk back.

When she did, though—

"What do you mean?" I said. I hated how my voice quivered in the thick air between us.

Somewhere, only slightly closer, the train wailed again. Neither of us moved.

"This. Lay flowers on the tracks. It's not how you make pressed flowers."

"It's from Pollyanna!" I snapped. How could she forget? So many after-school days, popsicles dripping over our fingers, watching it over and over again in her nice, air-conditioned living room.

"No, it’s not. It's a chain that he did in Pollyanna. A metal chain. The chain actually did something. It got flat."

"The flowers get flat." My voice shook. I bit my tongue, hard.

Mia snorted.

We were quiet. An even closer wail. The slightest shiver in the ground beneath our feet.

A sickening swoop, but neither of us moved.

Mia reached over her thick shoulder and grabbed her ponytail. Pulled it forward, and I knew she’d put it in her mouth, because she'd been doing that lately, because she'd been telling me to call her on it when she did it because it made her hair gross.

It wasn't very grown-up, too, and we were going to high school at the end of this summer. It was time to act grown-up.

"Why do we do flowers, though? Why not a chain? Why do boys get to crush so much better shit? What made us think we had to stick to flowers?"

I snorted, rolled my eyes, and looked away. "It was your mom!" I snapped.

At that moment, the little automated bell started ringing, the flimsy bars that encouraged folks not to cross the tracks lowered, and while it was simple enough to duck under them, I felt suddenly trapped and contained. Pinned down in place.

The station was empty. No one would stop us from simply not moving if that was what we chose.

The potential for that choice was crisp in the air between us, and I couldn’t breathe right.

The train is approaching the crossing—

"My mom?" She said softly.

"Yes!" I shouted. The word wasn't big enough, and the bell was too loud. "Your mom didn't like us doing the chain, she said it would derail the whole train and then it'd fly off, and we'd all die!"

"Oh yeah. Ha, shit."

"Yes, ha, shit, c'mon Mia! Let's get outta the way! The train's coming."

"Hm."

She didn't move.

I could hear it now, the mechanical churn of wheels, the shriek of metal singing under and in it. I could smell the breath of it, chemical as the heat felt pooling at the small of my back.

"Mia!" I yelled. "Mia, come on! This is stupid, let's—"

"My mom's such a fucking drama queen."

"Yes, she's ridiculous, can you please—"

"She's dying, you know."

"I... what?"

The next shriek was right behind me, and some instinct surged into my limbs as Mia turned, staring blankly my way, dark eyes under thick brows, a face that I had decided long ago was not quite as pretty as mine, at the very least. At least.

I must've grabbed her, because then I was holding her tight with shaking, bony arms, both of us thrown backwards into the sloping grit and grass on the side, thorns from the wineberry tangle up above catching on my hair.

The train screamed at us as it passed, a terrific wail.

Mia was crying.

I couldn't hear it. Couldn't even see it. Her head rested on my collarbone. I couldn't see anything but the thick mass of brown curls, the gawky slope of her too-large ears, and her cheeks were fat and soft against me. One of those cheeks sparked wet against my neck, and I found myself pushing her away at the dip that swooped through my gut, a spike of something strange that strangled me from the inside.

She looked down, and then up at the wineberry tangle as if she'd just noticed it. The train seemed to rip sound along with it for a second as it passed, a gush of steel and smoke, and then it was far enough away that it didn't matter anymore.

I stared at her.

I could still feel her tears in the hollow of my neck. They seemed to simmer there, boiling over soundlessly, a teapot without a spout cover.

My voice was cracked when I found it. "What do you mean she's dying?"

"I dunno. That's what Dad said."

"Oh. I mean... my dad says horrible shit about my mom all the time, it's not really true." I said immediately, relaxing slightly.

Mia was quiet. She reached behind herself and pulled her ponytail forward again. I saw the end of her curls, already a spike of dried spit. Disgust and fear warred for a second before allying, and I snorted, looked away. "Really. Like, just cuz you've been blessed so far doesn't mean you get to be all dramatic over basically nothing. Just cuz your family's finally caught up with the state of things. Your dad's just saying she ought to die, or something."

"No. He doesn't want her to die."

"Sure. Sure. Even if that's true—which it's not—he's just trying to scare you, then."

"No."

"Ugh. Mia, don't be an idiot, it's just some basic—"

"She's got AIDS."

I stared at her. She stared at me.

I started laughing. It was terrible. I knew, distantly, that it was, even if it was true, what I thought must be true, even if the world wasn't all wrong like that, because Mia was one of the lucky ones, Mia never even got hit, Mia didn't know how to boil water when I met her, had never made a meal for herself, had never gone to bed hungry, was terrible at hiding and didn’t bother to be quiet when others were loud, she didn’t even know how to heat up soup, what kind of fucked up degree of blessed must a ten year old be to not know how to—

"She's not gay! Not a dude, neither. She's a chick."

"Yeah."

".... So yeah, see, she doesn't have—"

"Dad said someone raped her."

The air left me. The cicadas had always been screaming, but for the first time, I heard them.

I was supposed to say something. I didn't know how to say it.

Mia stared at the tracks. It was then I realized she was right, and I was an idiot, and her mom was an idiot, and the flowers weren't like the chains, that they'd basically just smeared into mush, and this wasn't fun at all, and why did we do this, anyway?

"Yeah,” Mia was still talking. I wanted to crush my hand into her mouth, or maybe my face. I wanted to make her stop. “She was raped a few years ago. Some guy in our church. They didn't have testing for it yet then, so they didn't... anyway, yeah. She was ok for a while, just… scared, and sad, I guess. Lately she’s been sick, though. Tired, shaky. She had a seizure, apparently. That was the big thing. So then she went to the doctor. And the doctor said it's AIDS."

AIDS didn't happen to Mia's mom.

Rape didn't happen to Mia's mom. Rape didn't happen to anyone—it was just the unspoken threat, the monster the world threatened us with when our skirts got too short, or we got drunk, or snuck out at night. A consequence for other women who did other, stupid things. It happened in dark alleys in the city, on the news after we went to bed, before the opening beats of Law & Order SVU, it didn’t—

No one raped. No one was raped.

"How..." I started. I didn't know how to finish.

"It's fine," she said. It obviously wasn't. How could it be? How could anything ever—

I could barely breathe.

Fuck her.

Fuck her.

"So," I finally said. "Is she gonna do a die-in?"

Mia blinked. Stared at me. "What?" she said, as if she hadn't heard.

My heart was hammering. For some insane reason, I kept talking, though. "I mean, yeah. A die in. On the steps of a political structure? Is she gonna make a quilt? I dunno."

"Stop."

I laughed a cracked, crazy burst out, and it seemed to even make the cicadas go silent. Mia was staring at me as if it was the first time she'd seen me at all, and I wanted to fucking punch her. "Gonna get into meth? Gonna start being gay? I guess to be the kinda gay that gets AIDS, she's gonna have to have a sex change, first."

"What the fuck are you—"

"I mean, really Mia, what the fuck!"

Mia jumped. I jumped.

We stared at each other.

Somewhere, distantly, another train began to wail, lowly.

"Fucking christ, Heather, I just… I really can't, right now," she said softly.

"You have to, I guess." I snapped.

It was something my mom said, often. For a moment, I had a vindictive thrill of pleasure that she now had to hear it. Mia with her perfect, secular family. Mia, who always had clean clothes and perfectly packed lunches. Who was uglier than me, and didn't seem to even know she was supposed to care.

I felt like I had a stone in my throat, but regurgitation of it might kill me.

"Well, yeah," she said softly. "Yeah."

I stared at her.

Fuck that.

Fuck that.

"We can make her a quilt," I said, and it was so lame, and she snorted and stared at me, and I stared at her, glared at her, and then she rolled her eyes again. They landed on me after, though, and she bumped my shoulder, hard, with hers. I reached up, pulling her gross ponytail our of her mouth. It caught on her braces, and she gagged, and I snorted.

We sat in the thorns for the next train.

Sat there after, too.

Sooner than seemed possible, the shadows grew from the other side, fell over us, and it wasn’t so unpleasant to sit there, then. We bitched about the boy on the bus who liked one of us - argued over who it was, even though it was me, so obviously. Made a chain out of flowers and didn’t crush it.

Built a fucking fairy house. It had been years since we did that. We didn’t call it a fairy house, though, just a little house, so it was ok to do, even though we were teenagers, now.

I put on my little radio, eventually. We always tried to win the evening call-in contest. We never did.

A song came on, soft. Slow and sad. We went quiet, then. Looked at our tiny house, and her head fell lower and lower. Her soft brown hand reached for her ponytail, and I caught it, and suddenly, she was in my arms and sobbing. Not crying - sobbing, full-on dry-heaves and snot, and my fingers dug so hard into her arm they shook, knuckles whited out and nails blooming pale from pressure, too.

Another train passed. It was dark, now, almost fully dark. We clung to one another in the shadows, and I wanted to rip out her hair and cry and punch her and cry, too. I wanted to—

It wasn't her fault. I had to remember that.

 END

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Holly Baldwin is an agender & neurodivergent author living in a small row house standing alone on a dead-end street just outside of Philadelphia. They share their life with five cats, one lizard, two human children, and one adult human. When they are not writing, they enjoy midnight diner excursions with friends and daytime faerie house building with their kids.