Circulatory System — Split Lip Magazine

I grew up in Vermont, but now I live in California, and I only ever return home to visit my mom. A red blood cell pumped back to the heart. Each time I return, her house shrinks. She accumulates. Hallways become narrow passageways clotted with newspapers and animal figurines and snowshoes and empty wine jugs. Her teeth are stained purple.

My mother claims the items in her house are for her art. She constructs effigies from disparate materials—now the snowshoe has a face and a vulva—or she assembles collages, creating cut-up figures with inordinately sized limbs. There’s an anatomy book, and she’s somehow scissored out the entire circulatory system from a transparency. Elsewhere, she’s created a cross-section of a pregnant woman with a turtle in her womb. I expected knitting or crocheting at her age, not this. She creates portraits, she says.

When I leave, she pawns off possessions, plopping a peacock feather tiara on my head and handing me a series of chipped teacups. After my flight, I call to announce my safe arrival.

“It’s good that you came back,” she says, “but I’m glad you left.”

A week later, I receive an envelope in the mail. A tiny red and blue ball falls to the floor and unfurls itself on the carpet. It’s the cut-out circulatory system, and I recognize my mother and myself in the heart, in the network of veins and arteries, and in every attenuated capillary that seems to bristle and pulse in the draft and hum of the air-conditioned apartment in California, where I live alone.

Francis Walsh is a writer from coastal Maine. Their work appears or is forthcoming in Big Muddy, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Masters Review, North American Review, and elsewhere. Find them on Instagram @walshfrancis.