1My mother scoops snow off the fire escape into the kitchen pot. Her hands dart
like birds. I'm four, maybe five. It's snowing for the first time, but I'm
sick with something and can't go out. She carries the snow to the bathtub
where she bathes my brother and me, scrubbing us in a kind of rage until our
skin is as rosy as the bottoms of angels. After she dumps the snow from the
pot, I kneel outside the tub and play with it, not knowing what I'll remember
one day or that no one escapes the fire.

2Someone asks, "Have you written anything yet about your mother's death?" "No,"
I say, "no, I haven't." I don't explain that there aren't any angels to
consult, and that if there were, they'd hurl themselves like despondent drunks
onto the gleaming knives and spears of the spires below. Instead, only birds
scatter at the approach of dark, and I try not to see too much, the forgeries
and desecrations, or the black snow collecting on the floor of my heart.

3Then it's spring, a year since the failed operation, the road into town
smeared with blood and entrails, and a quorum of crows crowding around what's
left, hungry, contentious, but to me, simply driving past, it looks different,
like a blob of God's spit.

4Where we sleep, you know, isn't necessarily where we wake up, it all depends
on what we dream, my dead mother, for example, crisscrossed by the fence,
fingers hooked through the diamond-shaped links. Maybe the complexity of the
machinery has made me restless, or the heat from someone's tears, but it's 2
a.m. and I'm still awake, every rusty cut burning with its own peculiar
insistence, and the radio on the white nightstand for company.