My Mother’s Rooms | Cheryl Pappas

When my sweet, tired mother died, she left me her spotless house. I’d never owned a house before, never cared to be stuck in one place. Especially here in western Massachusetts, among nameless woods and fields. Some say it’s peaceful. I don’t like peace. I like cities. I’ve lived in seven of them, and I like all their crumbling, messy noise, their shouts and their vigor. The rumble of a dirty taxi and its fake pine smell. 

I eat Doritos. You could say I’m the opposite of my mother. 

Her house was all wood, glass, and metal. A clean Scandinavian surrounded by fog-laden fields and a forest way in the back. She moved here after she raised me and my three brothers, after Dad died. I’d never been here; I never had time. In the will that she prepared years before her death, she’d written that the house would go to me, because she was sure I wouldn’t have a home. 

When I first arrived, I dumped my three suitcases on the speckless hardwood floor in the foyer. I shouted “FUCK!” up to the high ceiling and laughed when it came back to me.

I was hungry and opened her fridge. I picked out a still-unexpired plain yogurt, among a tall, neat stack of them. 

I could see my reflection in her spoon. My hair looked like Medusa’s. I walked around and ate. There were three stories. At the top were two bedrooms and a gleaming bathroom decorated in ivory and sand. In her bedroom, her grey slippers lay by the side of the bed as if waiting for her feet. The accident had happened so fast, she went straight to the hospital and never came home. Thin-layered rugs, metal banisters, clicks of doors, smooth, wrinkle-free clothes in the walk-in closet. A strange absence of any odor whatsoever. On the main floor, the living room opened out to a wall of glass. The expansive field of green and gold stretched far back to a thick stand of pines. Quiet. I hated it. A crow flew overhead. I could hardly hear its caw from inside. The glass must have been very thick.

I finally found the basement, through a door off the pantry in the silver kitchen. The wooden stairs were unfinished and the floor unpainted cement. By the lightbulb dangling from the ceiling I saw boxes stacked high. At first I thought that’s all there was, but I saw a tiny flashing red light coming from a darkened room on the other side of the garage. My heart skipped. I skirted past her car and heard a faint beeping. The beeping got louder as I got closer. I opened the door wider and turned on the light.

A velvety couch against the wall had big brown and yellow flowers on it, like it was from the 1980s. In fact, it was our couch from the 1980s, and the whole room was decorated exactly like our living room growing up. There was the coffee table where I’d bumped my head when I was 5, with copies of National Geographic, People, and TV Guide on top. There was our TV in the corner, where my brothers and I would watch Saturday morning cartoons. On the edge of the table was the beeping object. It looked like a remote. I grabbed it. There were two buttons glowing red. One read “Now,” and the other read “Then.” 

I clicked “Then,” and a windstorm erupted in the room, dust clouding my sight and covering my clothes. When I opened my eyes, a large bay window opened up to our street in New Hampshire. My childhood friend Jimmy rode by on his Huffy. A sunbeam with tiny particles of dust streamed in toward my mother, who was sitting on the couch, reading Architectural Digest. The TV was showing One Life to Live. I craved a bag of Doritos.

“Mom?”     

Mom looked up from her magazine and zeroed in on an empty blue plastic bowl on the floor in front of the TV. “Sarah would you pick up that bowl you left there from this morning?,” she shouted. “I am tired honestly of picking up after you kids.” She licked her finger and flipped a page.

I walked over to the bowl and saw nacho cheese crumbs at the bottom. I picked it up and started to head toward the kitchen, but the door led out to the garage. I closed the door. I didn’t want to see the now. 

I sat down next to her, the bowl in my lap. Her hair was black again, full of soft curls. She was intently reading an article. A photograph of a house in Sweden was on the opposite page, with the words “Scandinavian Dream House.” A dark wood house with wall-sized windows sat underneath a bright blue sky and powdery soft clouds. 

I reached out to touch her arm, just to see if she was real, if I was. My finger traced her warm skin lightly. When she looked up from her magazine and stared out the window, I knew I wasn’t there. She gazed out like she was concentrating hard on something, the way she looked when trying to solve a problem. 

A commercial for Folger’s Coffee came on the TV (The best part of waking up . . . ), and it snapped her out of her reverie. She put down the magazine and walked over to pick up the bowl, which was no longer in my lap but back on the floor.  

She walked past the couch and out the door. As she passed through the frame, her figure, which had been warm and real only a few minutes before, became transparent until she eventually disappeared. 

I felt the remote in my pocket. I heard its low beep, like it was running out of battery. I took it out and clicked “Now.” 

I was back in her dream house. I shut the door and went upstairs to unpack.  

Cheryl Pappas is a writer from Boston. Her work has appeared in Juked, The Chattahoochee Review, Jellyfish Review, Hobart, SmokeLong Quarterly, and more. Her flash fiction chapbook The Clarity of Hunger will be published by Word West Press in Summer/Fall 2021. Her website is cherylpappas.net and you can find her on Twitter at @fabulistpappas.