I can tell she's been drinking by the discarded lemon skins dripping on the counter.
I clock them at quarter to three, or nine fifteen
and the clock reads ten past twelve, or zero zero one zero on the digital.
There's a dead energy, like watching a spider stand statuesque,
giving you the anticipation of feeling your skin crawl
when its threadbare limbs stroke the polished surface of your wooden floor
and the simultaneous begrudgement that it isn't instead rotting in a bed of decomposing soil.
The windows are unrelenting slabs of black
and the only light is a twisted regurgitation of the scene behind me,
a mocking parallel universe that blocks me from the outside of this hollow house.
I hear laughter lightly bouncing off the back walls
and I see, through God's black humour as it feels a miracle,
a light through the window, bobbing up and down through the movement of some silhouetted poltergeist -
the consumed, burning end of a cigarette.
And the light transfixes me, in all its seductive intoxication
as its products curl gently against the absorbent tissue of my mother's throat,
because it penetrates the darkness outside;
because black silence encloses me as it is pulled backwards
and is then broken when it is rocked forwards and laughter once again stains her nicotine-kissed lips;
because that bobbing light in our shadowed, rotting garden holds more power in that moment than either of us.