Thirty Summers # 133 Claine Keily

" It's mothers' day soon," he tells me. The glass rattles as I move through the blackwoods and the wait-a-while with my mother's glass anklet about me. It could be a chain that weighs me down, but I have chosen to wear it lightly and to instead take it out dancing under the moon at music festivals. With intent, I grind the dirt of life into each crevice, now that it is free from the little box it was packed away in after the day of her second wedding. It shines with lack of wear. It is a thing that has been shut up in my mother's house, in a place rank with the stench of disinfectant.

I take it far from her house, where all the windows are blinded by curtains, so as to still her view of the ocean, which she swears has teeth. I show it sunlight. I show it glee.