Author name: Annaliese

Drink up, I tell you. It’s only my Mum. A cup of real woman. Dead six years, cremated at McHoul’s on Center Street, most of her, they tell me, filtered out through the stack, sucked into the clouds, blown high over goldenrod-stained fields, drizzled into the West Branch of the Penobscot.

I watch Mama lift the stiff shaft of white delphinium into the light. The bulb over the sink is naked. She is naked, too, except for the white scuffs on her small feet.

Soundtrack of my days and nights: Jamiroquai…Snoop Dogg…Handel…Etta James…A Tribe Called Quest…Debussy…Gil Scott-Heron…Stanton Davis…Nina Simone. I select each one individually, put it in the player, one at a time. Not every one. Not every day.

Although Henry and I have been eating together for years — Brazilian and French, Cuban, Filipino, Turkish, and the 24-hour mashed-potato diner near his place in Brooklyn that stays open every holiday— he’s never eaten in the place where I live, until now. He’s never even visited.