One gray afternoon in September, she came close to me, where I was gazing at the flowerbeds in the yard, stroked my head, and said: “The flowers grow with the songs of the birds.” I was maybe eight years old. Then she went inside, turned on the radio, and closed her door. That’s what she did. She would throw out a word and then disappear... She would enter her cloud and travel...
“She didn’t raise us properly,” my brother, Johnny, would say later. “She didn’t give us proper navigation instructions.” “She secured us a season ticket for the chimera’s ferry,” I would reply. “Is that a little thing?” “And even that, she didn’t give us consciously.” It fell out of her pocket, and we found it. She didn’t give us anything consciously. Our mother, Erasmia! We knew her broken. Spent in her dreams. In old photographs, we saw her differently. A beautiful girl with flowing black hair and a broad smile on her round face. A wide, always tearful, smile.
“She was beautiful, right? Do you see, Johnny?” “And she is still beautiful. She is the most beautiful!” Johnny strutted like a rooster. As if she belonged to him!
