Mary

I stopped believing in Omma’s God the day she covered herself in plastic wrap. When I was younger, Dad used to pick me up from middle school around three in the afternoon, his poorly hidden shooter bottles laying across the floor of the backseat. His breath was hot and his cadence mean—I did not talk to Dad, then. We only yelled. Screamed loud enough until one of us cried—who would break first? Me, knowing this, and him, desperate to drink, would both coalesce rather simply to the idea of dropping me off at Omma’s after school, leaving him to do God knows what with the drug dealers that lived further down on Fulton. Just seven houses down and he’d get his fix. Only had to figure out what to do with me, first. The only issue was that Omma, at that time, had fallen quite far off of the wagon. In fact, I recall thinking that a wagon wasn’t high enough. That it would make more sense to say she fell off a very high trampoline, or a cliffside, perhaps a telephone pole or even heaven. Gracefulness never had less of a place than with her during my sixth, seventh and eighth grade school years.