by Cate McGowan
Inflation
The funeral director calls on a Tuesday, a day I associate with minor indignities.
Your mother, he says, then stops. Which is what people do with sentences that are going somewhere terrible. They stop before the terrible part, as though a pause could help.
Your mother has … deflated, he says.
I write this down. I write everything down. This is how I survive.
Deflated, I repeat.
We believe she was, there’s no easy way to say this, composed largely of a bubblegum substrate. We’ve seen it before. Very rarely. In women of a certain generation.
Women of a certain generation. My mother, who wore Elizabeth Arden and drove a Buick and kept a dish of M&Ms on her coffee table that she never touched, only replenished, which I always took to be a philosophy.
What color is she? I ask.
A pause. Then he says, Pink.
Of course.
I drive to the funeral home. My mother is in a small room with recessed lighting and a piped-in Celine Dion song I recognize as a message from the universe, though I can’t make out what it’s saying. The funeral director opens a sealed bag with the look of a man presenting something he had no hand in creating and cannot take responsibility for.
My mother is indeed pink.
She is largely flat.
She smells like childhood.
According to the coroner’s supplemental report—because of course there was one, because my mother even in death required a committee—what she kept inside herself included the following:
The names of every teacher who ever underestimated me.
Seventeen years of opinions about my hair.
The small gummy sound she made when she was trying not to cry.
My college boyfriend’s phone number, memorized.
Dolly Parton’s entire discography, compressed.
The specific weight of her own mother’s hands.
The smell of one particular October afternoon—cold vinyl, leaf mold, and candy corn in the glove box.
One perfect, unpopped bubble.
The specialist tells me they can remold her. Press her back into shape. It won’t be exactly the same, she says, but it will hold.
No, I say. I’ll take her as she is.
I carry my mother home in a bag stamped HANDLE WITH CARE, which I have been trying to do for forty-three years.
On the drive home, I chew a piece of Juicy Fruit.
In the kitchen, I put her on the table and sit across from her. The Celine Dion song is still going in my head, because that’s how Celine works. My mother is flat and pink and smells like Bazooka and Elizabeth Arden and the front seat of a 1987 Buick and something I don’t have a name for.
I reach into the bag.
I take her in my hands.
I blow.
From the judge, Julie Marie Wade:
The writer had me at their first sentence, when an ordinary day like Tuesday receives its own characterization: “a day I associate with minor indignities.” From there, it’s a postmodern, pop cultural (literally pop!) allegory of a mother’s death, in which the mother is “composed largely of a bubblegum substrate.” This is likely the slyest elegy I’ve ever read. Translation: Mom has popped. Mom is pink and “smells like childhood.” Mom’s death is actually deflation. The contents of the coroner’s supplemental report reveal a stroke of genius on the part of the author. And what else would an adult child do after claiming their mother’s remains? The reader can almost anticipate the ending, and we’re ecstatic when it arrives: “I reach into the bag./ I take her in my hands./ I blow.”
Author Cate McGowan (she/her) is the author of four books, including the story collection True Places Never Are and the poetry collection Sacrificial Steel. Her work appears in Flash Fiction International (W. W. Norton), Glimmer Train, Shenandoah, North American Review, and elsewhere.
Artist Edward Baranosky’s work emphasizes the ever-changing moments of the sea. As a poet-artist he crosses the channels and pathways between the visual and the textual. Published in Eastern Structures, Haiku Avenue, Lynx Journal, Northern New England Review, Mid-Atlantic Review, Crossing Lines, Comstock Review among others. At 79, he is still emerging. He currently lives in Toronto, Canada.
Gulf Stream Magazine 