Read by Jordan
Written by Nick Sayers
Memory is a complex thing. Do you remember something, or do you remember someone telling you about the thing? And does it matter? I don’t think anyone told me about these memories. Some things carry a weight that is hard to shrug off.
Like any true American horror story, it starts off in healthcare. My mother had colitis. Colon cancer.
My dad would drop my sister and me off at our great-grandma's and disappear for hours or days. We’d play Uno, watch black-and-white TV reruns, and play with Legos. I still remember the texture of her carpet on my feet. When I close my eyes, I can smell the cheap pizzas she would cook for us. No one told me those memories; they are mine.
My great-grandmother took us to church every Sunday, which was a nice break from her one-bedroom apartment. She’d feed us breath mints in the pews to keep us quiet while the service happened. Years later, I’d help carry her coffin between those same pews. She was the first loss in my life. My mother almost took that ribbon instead.
Sometimes my dad would take us up to Seattle while my mom was in the hospital. The visits before her surgery were the peaceful ones. She’d try to put on a smile, give me a bedside hug, and do her best to talk to me. To a young child, it was all confusing. My parents explained they had to cut out a bunch of her stomach parts and fuse other parts together.
After the surgery, it was the first horrific scene. I was allowed to visit. My mother, who kissed my head, yelled at me when I did something stupid, and held on to me every day, had monstrous tubes going into her nose. They were long and snake-like. I couldn’t believe it was her with such serpentine plastics haunting her nasal canals. She tried to speak, and it sounded like a demonic perversion of my mother. As a child, I wondered if she’d be like this forever. I am sure it felt like forever to her. Seeing her sitting up in this alien, sterile, and gloomy place haunted my dreams for years. The most haunting moment was a day my dad ushered me out of the room so I didn’t have to bear witness to her pain. Too much for a child. And too late for me, because I was a witness.
My mom was groaning strangely. It was like an animal. What transformation had she undergone? My dad stood up and tried to speak to her, but the groaning persisted. Her head flung back, the tubes a mockery of human biology, still hung from her place, going to an unknowable location. She made a guttural screech and a strange croak. A witch turned toad? My imagination had so many explanations, but the reality was, well, worse. She started to throw up. Those incomprehensible tubes in her body were a bypass from her throat. As my mother started to turn into a shrieking animal, a strange, colored, viscous mix started to fill the tubes, as her vomit forced her liquid diet out of the feeding tube. I was dumbfounded, chin ajar, frozen. My dad said something like “Okay.” Then ushered me out of the room. As we walked down the hall, I could hear this creature that used to be my mom wretching over and over again. Surely, she was going to die, I thought. I am assuming she wished she had just died in that moment.
When you realize your parents are just human like other people, your childhood irrevocably changes. That person you rely on to regulate you, hold you, protect you, is not a god. They are not immune. They are susceptible to all sorts of horror that comes from cell anomalies and genetic hauntings. Selfishly, I never wanted to see her like that. I wanted her to live forever. For if she can die, so could I. Selfish childhood thoughts in hindsight, but a profound paradigm shift at the time.
Days. Weeks. I’m not sure. We were back. My mother was pumped full of drugs. She lay on her side, maybe to avoid vomiting through her feeding tubes. This was the first time I saw what the butchers had done to her. A massive cut in her stomach smiled at me from cracks in her hospital gown. It was a mocking smile. The doctors truly butchered her body. The split in her was held together by thick staples. A sheen of plastic tape ran down it, reflecting the unnatural light with every shift in her broken body. I imagined they spilled her out for the surgery, everything in her slopping onto a metal table, where they continued their mockery of her flesh, carving out bits of her they wanted, dropping pieces of her on sterile trays. When it was all over, they had to put her back together like a puzzle. Their gloves and masks were covered in blood as indistinguishable chatter between them buzzed around the room. The butchers weren’t good at puzzles, so they put things back wrong, which is why she was changed; she wasn’t my mother in that bed. They made her anew, not a rebirth, but a strange amalgamation of what she once was. I hated them.
I wanted my dad to hate them, too. He spoke to the butchers in hushed tones, like some conspiracy. Worry was always etched on his face. He’d sit cross-legged looking out at the gloomy Seattle sky for eons, while I sat next to him. He knew it was too much for me to be there sometimes. He’d buy me candy and soda from the vending machines.
One day, he bought me Rolos, one of my childhood favorites. I’d rip off the paper, then delicately pull the golden foil off each cylinder of chocolate and caramel, enjoying more than just the candy. I noticed there was a hole in the top of one of the Rolos. I showed it to my dad. He took it from me with a serious face.
“It might be poisoned.”
I believed him. He then threw it in his mouth, and I was scared for him. “Here, give me another one," he said.
He showed me a hole in that one, too. Why was he eating them? “I’ll make sure there is no poison in them.” After a third, he rubbed my head and told me they were probably safe to eat, so I ate them. They had to be safe.
It wasn’t the years of medical debt my parents struggled to pay, the selling of a business, or settling for a lower-paying job that I’m sure tore my dad apart inside. No, it was the poisoned Rolos that stayed with me.
Years later, I realized he just wanted some of my Rolos.
