Tatamagouche ch.1 - (Malagash characters) (Patreon)

1.

People think something is broken or not broken. One or zero, like binary. People love binaries. They love to know exactly where they stand. They love a logical world. 

I think that way too. I can’t help it. Either this tree branch is broken or it is not broken.

But then my father's death only halfway snapped the branch inside our mother. My little brother Simon and I were the still-living wood in the branch, holding the rope around her neck, keeping her alive. She was in pain for so long.

Worse, she had to hide it. She had to be strong.

Our mother solved problems for a living. But computer programming and real life aren’t the same thing. The variables in a computer are all logical, and the math does the work. But emotions don’t fit. Pain is worth this. Taking care of my children is worth this? Compare. It is impossible. There’s no way to calculate a solution from feelings. So, our mother must have made a choice.

She took two cinder blocks from the garden, carried them by hand along a moonless road, to set them on the pier beside the lobster traps. She left us two notes back at the house, knocked onto the floor somehow, under her computer desk. 

It must have been hard standing out there. There must have been cold wind coming in off the water. There must have been voices in her head like the ones Simon and I heard afterward in the church, in our grandmother’s kitchen. Selfish. Cowardly. Abandoning.  Oh god who did her makeup?

Still, she padlocked a chain around her waist in the cold air. She pushed the chained cinderblocks off the side of the pier, and she fell. The Atlantic Ocean is green dark off that pier at night. Selfish, cowardly. I get so angry when someone says that. There was no easy answer. Our mother made a difficult choice. She chose herself.

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