EVERYTHING
EVERYTHING
EVERYTHING
EVERYTHING I'VE EVER LET GO OF by eva baron
I
n my head, this is how the story unfolds: a girl, the corners of her apron smudged from her thumb, the one that ends up gripping the dirty plates. It’s charming, the fat stains climbing up her waist, and the men at the café where she waitresses tell her this. Hard-working, not afraid to get a little dirty. A year earlier, this girl jabbed the knot in her sister’s back so she’d inch over in bed. At night, she slept with her brother and sisters, the distance between them shrinking the more they grew, the tighter their skin stretched across their jaws. Look—in this way, the ten of them were packed together like the stones lodged in the earth beneath them, the same ones that punctured the crops her father would plant. As the girl understood, to live over an unyielding land is to invigorate touch. Because beds are sparse when money is, the body beside you feels more permanent than it does fleeting, and skin is as easy to
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graze as the grass in the woods behind the family’s hovel. Here, inside their home’s one room, the girl shivers against the wooden walls in the winter, picks at the red paint peeling off of the facade in the summer. When it rains, the crooked shingles clang the way her mother’s tin cup does when she circles its rusted lip with a spoon. As the family eats dinner, the girl becomes a centipede, the legs and feet of her siblings tangling up with hers until a knot binds them together under the table. The only way to escape this, the girl thought, was to carve a gulf with a width of nearly 400 kilometers. The length between Småland and Stockholm, Sweden. Later, this girl becomes a mother, the son latched to her hip eventually learning to walk on concrete instead of moss. Before she waves goodbye to him at school every morning, she grabs his hands, traverses his palms with a finger. A love like this shocks her, and, when she digs her
cheek into the plump space between his neck and shoulder, she’s able to convince herself that she can keep this, the way a dog stubbornly clings onto a branch. What she doesn’t know, in these moments, is that her teeth aren’t as durable as she believes. That, when her son is ten, he’ll find her splayed across the floor of the apartment, her eyes glassy and her breath smelling like pilsner. Once the evenings begin to stretch out that summer, the mother will watch the sun fade from the narrow window in an unfamiliar room. She won’t sleep, even when the hospital staff knocks on her door, a small cup passed from their hands and, firmly, into hers. *** Here’s another way the story unfolds: on August 15th, 1956, Dr. Lindström traces the light tremors whirring through Margareta Eriksson’s hands,
