Freshwater Literary Journal 2022

Jay Nunnery A Visitation First, they heard it. Reginald would say he heard it breathing even though it couldn’t. It spoke and that’s how they believed—it could only be their mother—if they hadn’t already known it to be real. Through that haze’s enrapturing devotion, the taste of bitter grains on their numbing tongues. “Mother,” Reginald said, staring at the room’s corner, not in disbelief, at the wall’s red paint visible through her and the waning sunlight shining through the smudged, wood-framed window onto her like he’d seen it shine onto dust particles in the air. Then he said, “Louis, Louis, do you see?”

Louis said that he did. As solacing as their mother, she said, “I been called home at last and done seen what I known to be the good Lord. I walked right through that light. But it all went away.” She looked down at her hands like they were no longer holding the one thing she felt she never could have lost.

“Everything got all dark like I’d just woke up from a dream into darkness. But see, the only thing I could think about was finding you. Think ain’t the right word though. It was more as if that was my purpose, and I was well aware of that being my purpose.”

She moved closer. Those root-like veins, diverged all over her face, and the indentation that the rope had left above her sundress’s neckline became visible to them. She moved as if she had never considered movement. Her focus on where she was going. Forward in time. Her arms were out, openhanded, the airspace around her acquiescing; while each time Louis blinked, she seemed to get willed closer. Louis reached out and reached further again, his thoughts drowning, and then he felt her, that familiar touch, how synapses fire for even the artificial, the warmth, as if pleading moved along the blood in his vessels, each blink changing the distance of everything. “Louis, my God, Louis,” he heard Reginald say through gasps like Reginald had been running and had only then stopped. That sort of adrenaline pumped through Reginald and caused him to speak to her. “Mother, I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” Reginald said.

She knew he would apologize. He’d have to before any of it could begin.

What he expected to be revelatory and absolving, this confession that escaped from him, was nothing more than another step. She knew that Louis would say as few words as he could get away with saying because she knew her boys and that none of those words would be apologetic, more time compiling more remorse.

“Sorry’s not important right now. What’s important is us and that I need you.”

“What you mean, Mother?” Reginald said, breathless again, like he’d started running once more. Urgent as perceived matters of survival can make anyone.

“What you need us for?”

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