Joshua Vigil

Because my mother was usually in a grief-stricken stupor, devastated since her hamster of twenty years had died, I tended to avoid the house. Working late at the hotel’s front desk, taking the bus throughout the island until it no longer ran, anything to escape a misery I found foreign and unwarranted. Instead, I found her in the kitchen, nursing her sorrows by nursing a beer. Cigarette butts from her ashtray spilled onto the table.

Carmella’s eyes were bloodshot and she smelled milky sour, like baby spit-up. When she pulled me in for a quick hug before dragging me towards the double-decker we took across the city, I told her she looked good. I look like shite, she said. She said things like shite and flat and lift and jumper now. Carmella’s attention drifted to what was balanced on my thighs: porridge I bought at the Edinburgh train station while I waited for her, when the minutes had turned into an hour and a part of me wondered if Carmella had forgotten about me, or if this was all one big prank.