10.08.05
papa mama medicine
The sound of mommy�s shoes on the floor tells me that it is Sunday. Her pointy heels, the ones she only takes out twice a week, they clip-clop across the tile of our floor, getting louder and louder as she comes to my room. I can see from the shadow at my door, mommy getting ready to wake me up.
Mommy is there before the sun shines, before the big white Cheshire cat moon runs away from its big brother. Mama smiles and tickles me awake when I am only pretending to sleep (I pretend so she can tickle me, I love mommy�s tickles). Downstairs, mama puts out my favourite dishes, on the table in front of the TV and I know I am supposed to be quiet because the men who yell and sweat so much their shirts get wet are on the TV. On the same channel is a lady with great big purple hair, like cotton candy. Her eyes are big and blue and when she sings I can�t see what�s in them anymore.
This lady scares me.
Mama watches this channel every Sunday and sings the songs the lady does. She jumps up and down sometimes, saying things that I don�t understand. She shakes until my little brother cries, dropping his bottle on the floor so the milk covers the carpet and he looks like a little red shaking island over a white sea.
It is summer and the bees are gathering around the palm trees that suddenly opened some days ago with millions of tiny little flowers. They cover our backyard like a carpet of golden stars and I ask mommy if it is like snow, only less cold. She says yes and I ask her how to make a snowman but then she says she doesn�t know. I tell my brother that this is snow, and that in some places they freeze it so long that it hurts to touch it, but since we didn�t have a big enough freezer we couldn�t and we could only throw them back up into the air to see them float down in slow motion.
He asks me how I know this.
I tell him, when he�s old like me, he�ll know too.
We sit together to take our medicine every morning when daddy has gone to the bathroom and the water has stopped making its rushing noise though the walls. We can smell the strong scent of his cologne wafting into the room while he bathes. The commercial for daddy�s cologne has lots of men riding horses through a great green field with mountains in the background. I don�t know where they are riding, or why, but the commercial man says they are real men, and real men wear cologne and ride horses. Papa doesn�t ride horses, he works in a hospital.
Papa smokes cigarettes too.
Maman says that we have allergies and the special smoke from the cigarettes makes us cough, that it gets into our lungs and does bad things. That�s why we would sit with the loud green machine which would smoke too, from little cups that we had to put over our mouths. The smoke tasted like the mint syrup mamma would put it in my drink at night. Maman said this smoke was different from papa�s and it would help us feel better.
Once, in school, they showed us pictures of the lungs of people who smoke. The teacher pointed to the picture of a pink lung and said this was without smoke and to another one, a black one that was small and could not move and said that it was the lung of someone who smoked cigarettes. The teacher said that we should tell our parents who smoked to stop if they loved us.
That day, I went home and told papa about the lung, I told him that it was tiny and black. He nodded at me. I told him too, that if he loved me he would stop smoking so that my lungs wouldn�t get black too. Papa looked at me for a little bit, with the cigarette between his fingers and the smoke curling up from the end of it. He opened his mouth and from there too I could see the smoke pouring out in curls and �S� shapes and I cried because I thought he was going to die. His lungs would get just as black as the lungs in class and I would never see him again.
The next week daddy had a sticker on his arm he said mommy gave him. He hugged me close and he didn�t smell like burning and smoke didn�t curl from his nose and I felt safe again.
shi-ou-sama at
