Lakshmi Sunder
My mother asks me to wash dishes. I oblige her,
only because I can listen to “Waiting Room” by Phoebe Bridgers.
But it doesn’t end up playing, goes instead to some
song about December. It’s already January. My last
year of childhood has slipped down the drain.
The water remains cold this month. I overdo the soap but
it’s still not enough for the last fork. I must add more
to the yellow sponge. The suds pool
on the counter like tatters of lace. I wipe them off first, rinse off the sink,
only then wash my hands. The opposite of what they tell
you do on aeroplanes, putting your own oxygen mask
on before your child’s. The word waiting
room: What I’m in now, in the limbo between
Houston and Chicago. What I’m in now, waiting
for my mom to give me an echo. My fingers are
clubbed and that might mean heart disease, might
mean oxygen deprivation. This happens when you
don’t put yourself first. On a plane. No
wonder my hands are so cold when I’m done washing
the dishes. They shake as I text my dad to put his seatbelt on.
Last year I text him that two-hundred and sixty-
four times. Today I keep him from plowing through
ten-thousand men, all of them him. I tell him to be
poised, that sometimes it’s okay to not flash pepper
flakes in people’s eyes when they have something
you want.
Better to be a lion called a rat than a rat
called a lion,
he answers, shirking off my plea. The
dishes drip down below the rack no one
ever wants to lift. My hands shake, but I wonder
instead if its the dishes that are cold. Can glass feel?
I long to press the curved carapace of plates against my chest
to keep them warm, even if such a pressure breaks them, even
if that means shards will burrow into my skin and draw blood.
The other day my cat dozed on my chest as
fire crisped my hair. His eyes glowed like banked coals.
When I felt him thrumming against the wings of
my clavicle, I knew that I wanted to be a mother.
My cat is older than me now, and I am older than my parents
now. In less than a year I will get a piece of my
jaw cut out, placed somewhere else, on an island
of lost things. Like an infant or old woman, I won’t be
able to talk for two months, to eat solid
food for two months.
I imagine someone holding my hands
through it all, looking bravely at my jaw wired
shut, my mouth swollen with genetics,
my whole face transformed—chin recessed
like a crone’s. I joke to my mother that it’s all
because she had me when she was forty-one.
It’s my yearbook quote, I tell her. Living proof
that you shouldn’t have kids after forty.
My mother screams at me over the sink.
After the orthodontist told me I’d need surgery,
my dad and me
fled the waiting room. He forgot to pay but I think it was on purpose.
His empty words:
God willing the surgery goes well.
I’m sorry this is the lot you were given,
my mother tells me emptily, the water slinking down the drain.
How do I tell her I wouldn’t want it any other way.
*The process of role reversal whereby a child or adolescent is obliged to support the family system in ways that are developmentally inappropriate and overly burdensome (Encyclopedia of Adolescence by Lisa Hooper)
Lakshmi Sunder is a first-year studying English and Cognitive Science. She enjoys writing poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction about intersectional identity and dystopias that reflect reality. Lakshmi has been recognized by the YoungArts Foundation, the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, The Adroit Journal, The Common, and The New York Times Learning Network.
