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imprint of her teeth on her mother‟s skin.
Ammu wondered at the transparency of that kiss. It was a
clear-as-glass kiss. Unclouded by passion or desire–that pair of
dogs that sleep so soundly inside children, waiting for them to
grow up. It was a kiss that demanded no kiss-back.
Not a cloudy kiss full of questions that wanted answers. Like
the kisses of cheerful one-armed men in dreams.
Ammu grew tired of their proprietary handling of her. She
wanted her body back. It was hers. She shrugged her children off
the way a bitch shrugs off her pups when she‟s had enough of
them. She sat up and twisted her hair into a knot at the nape of her
neck. Then she swung her legs off the bed, walked to the window
and drew back the curtains.
Slanting afternoon light flooded the room and brightened two
children on the bed.
The twins heard the lock turning in Ammu‟s bathroom door.
Click.
Ammu looked at herself in the long mirror on the bathroom
door and the specter of her future appeared in it to mock her.
Pickled. Gray. Rheumy-eyed. Cross-stitch roses on a slack, sunken
cheek.
Withered breasts that hung like weighted socks. Dry as a
bone between her legs, the hair feather-white. Spare. As brittle as a
pressed fern.
Skin that flaked and shed like snow.
Ammu shivered.
With that cold feeling on a hot afternoon that Life had been
Lived. That her cup was full of dust. That the air, the sky, the trees,
the sun, the rain, the light and darkness were all slowly turning to
sand. That sand would fill her nostrils, her lungs, her mouth.
Would pull her down, leaving on the surface a spinning swirl like
crabs leave when they burrow downwards on a beach.
Ammu undressed and put a red toothbrush under a breast to
see if it would stay. It didn‟t Where she touched herself her flesh