You, you’re as thin as a snake…I’m asking you to eatup, please, a something, just a little something, for me I’m your mother, but nothing. As if too tired to hold even her spoon’s silver, its bowl weighed down by only the light it scoops from a far sconce, she’s exhausted, with no expression of response, then, thrusting the white of her wrists out, her pure upturned hands, she rises from the table, walks to the hall, seemingly somnambulant (her face fine and un-lined, slenderwaisted nose, greatuncle lips though that mensch, he was actively sensuous, loved him his women and girls and his food and drink, and her introverted ringlets of hair, corkscrewy enough to take up a tangle of it with which to open a bottle of wine), up the stairs to her room, which she enters with feathersteps, then lies down: enters not through her door, as there’s no door to her room, it’s just curtained, and the old curtain from the shower downstairs the stronger defense, against what — Israel having hung it in punishment after Josephine had found her inhaling inside, smoking what; her form as if gusted, through the hallway and into the sheer, and then through it, oneirically, in a gauzy meld (at least that’s how it’s been filmed, softfocus, soundtracked with an orchestra of strings divided more than could be any family, tribe, or her nation), disappears into sleep, fade to black: despite or perhaps thanks to such state, which is medicated to numb — generically zaleplon, with zolpidem occasionally mixed — to share her angels as if these halved wingless pills offered in return for fast friendship with Lilith, the Mother of Night, to hold wild heavens of sleepovers, gossiping over junk manna until dawn upon the winds of the harp. Rubina had had it all, had possessed the stuff in the veins, the life and its generational furtherance — all the living branches of our bodied tree, veined out from her heart to the tips of her fingers and the pleasurable bud between her thighs and her toes: it’s that she could’ve engendered, barring the effects of an unfortunate endometriosis — and maybe that’s why she slept so much, always tired…that’s what the doctors decided, not depression or smoking or drugs or the college degrees her car required or whatever else the shrinks shrank from her, the pulse always in her protuberant eyes and the burnt broken wing of her mouth — but sensing that she was of no use, perhaps knowing this only on her last night as if it were a void just discovered within her in bed and about to sleep for her last, found deep in her womb as a hunger, a lower thirst, having hidden to maturity in a hollow, the death grown bare, her barren. Ours will be the world of the bloodless. Ours is the world of no claim.
