MA BARKER: REDUX — CANDACE HARTSUYKER
/When you’re the gangster’s mother, you know your son loves you more than money, more than his favorite lavender gray cat that used to curl up in his lap, tail draped over one knee. Your initials are scratched on his chest with a needle. He did it himself, handkerchief daubing beads of blood. The first letter of your first name and the first letter of your last name, a permanent tattoo and testament to his love for you.
In the bedroom with the light dimmed, you can pretend any man is him. You remember when he was a boy, eyelashes sticky with tears, face mashed against your breasts. Your arms around him, your hair covering him, keeping him safe from the other boys who’d shoved him and given him a split lip.
Your eyes follow him everywhere. Clinking against your throat: a gold locket, a strand of his clipped baby hair locked inside. He collects broads who are younger versions of you. Halfway between girlhood and womanhood, they slink around corners, look at him through half-lidded eyes, touch their bruised mouths with the side of their thumbs.
You’re satisfied until he starts bringing home a girl in a squashed, felt hat. He used to buy you pearls, a fur coat, fresh cherries from the marketplace, plump and unbruised, red staining your teeth. Now he buys all these gifts for her. Soon, everything he’s earned will go to her. You can imagine it, the veil framing her face. You’ve thought about getting rid of her, flipping out a switchblade and pressing it against her swan-like neck. But you know that wouldn’t work; he’d find another girl. Maybe he’d even try to get rid of you: his mother, the one woman who has never let him down.
He brings the girl up to his bedroom to listen to records, closes the door. Ear pressed to the hallway wall, needle skipping, you hear their hushed voices. For his birthday, he wants her to jump out of a cake. It will impress the other men. They’ll envy him, wish to have all that he has.
The day of his birthday, it’s easy enough to divert her, send her off to the bakery to bring him his favorite sweet: a cheese blintz. The celebration underway, the cake wheeled in, you pop out like a firecracker in just your slip. He never sees it coming, the gun in your hand. And then he’s the firecracker, the one who goes pop, and you’re holding him like a bride trying to save her dying groom, the gun skittering to the floor. From far away, the wound is a flower, a carnation, a gentleman’s lapel. You tenderly push a lock of hair out of his eye. Blood pirouetting from the wound in his chest, you remember teaching him how to tie his shoes, your hands over his, one loop and then the other, and how the laces looked like the ears of a newborn bunny rabbit, cotton-tailed and quivering.
Candace Hartsuyker has an M.F.A in Creative Writing from McNeese State University and reads for PANK. She has been published in Okay Donkey, Heavy Feather Review, The Hunger and elsewhere.
