My mother once asked about my worst fear. Ten-year-old me told her roaches. The giant flying type of tree roaches that were all over my small Mississippi town almost year-round. But she was surprised. Said she thought it’d be her dying.
My apartment has moths. Some days I count as many as thirty on the ceiling. I grab the broom and smash them one at a time. The death count, rolling. Day by day I find more. They live long enough to multiply—the meaning of their lives before I step in. One second flying or crawling or mating, and then the next—
I once dreamed about my mother. She was in a coma. I never saw her, but I saw the word, Coma. Asked if she would make it—Unlikely. And so I broke. Panicked and sobbed and gasped until I lurched upward, in the darkness, crying, unsure of where I was until my then-husband pulled me down, rubbed my back. He said, It wasn’t real. But for the briefest moment, I knew what it would be like to lose her.
I feel worst when I hit two moths mating. Killing even the potential life.
When I was in the third grade, we had an outside cat who contracted feline AIDS. At the vet, he scratched deep into the top fleshy part of my mother’s
