My Mother’s Stalker

My mother’s stalker is not tall, not short. He wears black sunglasses and khaki shorts and a floral button-down. The flowers resemble bloodied fingers: nails gnawed off, skin sanded away, wands of bone exposed. My mother’s stalker drives a dust-colored sedan with four doors and a crumpled license plate. The first three digits are 79W. He shows me his penis through the front window, which is partially obscured by a camellia bush that my mother grooms diligently, severing the heads of the most vivid offspring for the vase on our kitchen table. Before that moment, I had thought a penis was a kind of zipper, a tab that could be tugged loose, parting the skin to reveal a stone recess where the statuette of an important person might stand. My mother’s stalker drives to our door even though he lives seven houses down, not in the direction of the neighbor with the broken-down truck that’s become a habitat for stray cats but in the direction of the neighbor who once tried to flatten her husband with a refrigerator and ended up dragging both to the curb, one of them no longer functioning, the other unworthy of mourning.

My mother says it’s important that we know her stalker as thoroughly as he knows us. “We have to stalk him twice as much as he’s been stalking me,” she says after the seventeenth time that he rings our doorbell past midnight.

The stalker’s strategy has been a gradual escalation: He followed my mother to and from work every couple of weeks. Then there was the nightly doorbell ringing, but only for a few days at a time. Handwritten notes like stray leaves on our doorstep. It’s the kind of stalking that lacks skin contact, that can’t congeal into a believable story or an imminently tragic conclusion, that can be dismissed as the paranoia of two women who live alone together. Only women are capable of occupying that oxymoron: alone together.

Rain adorns the sky the night my mother and I pursue her stalker. A fitting tribute: The stalker initially became known to us when his little white dog pissed in our front yard, the first rain our dirt had ever received directly. “She’s peeing, not pooping, I promise,” the stalker had said to my mother. She’d laughed and shrugged it off. “Your dog can shit anywhere she wants to. It’s fertilizer.” Later, she insisted to me that she’d never extended any invitation to intimacy. My mother never gives her name away, not even to me. We found out later that the local crows, those traitors, had littered her name all over the pavement. These crows committed this act of vengeance because my mother had once gone to war with their species. After they’d repeatedly uprooted her bushes, she’d carved blocks of foam into corvids, painted the decoys black and galactic blue, and scattered them in our front yard. According to her research, crows stayed away from their dead. A corpse was a cautionary tale, a sign of lethal danger. But the local crows were immune to her psychological tactics. In retaliation, they’d taken turns shitting on our window until the glass became opaque with droppings, and it had taken two weeks per pane to scrape off every calcified layer. We’d lived without light in the meantime, fumbling in the dark and walking into corners, since my mother was unwilling to waste electricity during the day.

“Those crows are still cawing my name,” my mother says, squinting out the window, unrestored to its original transparency. She turns to me and says that you never get to choose your enemies in this world.

We bring a flashlight that doubles as a club. We prance over the acidic cracks in the sidewalk, and in a few strides, we arrive at his house. He’s likely still at work. “What kind of work does he do?” I ask my mother, and she says