Andrea Gerada | Prose

There was a room. It was small and old with dust etched in corners where the broom couldn’t quite reach. 

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Everyday the girl who is becoming an adult opens the window to let sunlight wash the world. Her mother, whose face is young although she is losing her hair and strength, lies in bed, slightly sticky, smelling of baby powder and nothing. 

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It is September and the girl dreams of autumn—cloves, pumpkin flesh, burnt orange. There is no autumn in this tropical spitfire. She and her mother exchange affection like giddy children. They kiss and hug, they coo as if speaking to a soft infant. Then they carry on in mysterious silence: the girl dreams, the mother forgets. 

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At certain times of the day, like a radio announcement, the mother will say something, words which have the history of a thousand years on its coattails. The girl expects this. Her eyes will go to the window and she will seem very fascinated by how the concrete street is washed white by the sun. Meanwhile, her mother will review failed businesses and passion projects, the fact that she never finished school. She will ask her daughter about money. She will speak of men who have given her everything and nothing all at once. Daughter, mute mouth, feels the itch of a legacy desperately trying to catch up to her. She is determined to read her book of Vancouver and Naples and Buenos Aires and the French Riviera. She imagines that the white of the street is the beauty of an Edward Hopper painting, and that there is art to her station. 

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Time is told only in wisps of hair forming knots on the floor. Broken tissue and spilled rice that the girl will sweep while her mother sleeps. Everyday, she notices, the room acquires a smell, dust and must, palace of aborted dreams. 

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But when she is feeling particularly immortal, as if God or someone else is perhaps paying attention to her small nest of dreams, she will find beauty in the way the sunlight catches the yellow and cream. In this small room, where nothing more can be housed, at least stands the unrelenting magic of love.