"Heartache in Cleveland" by Julie Larick
I was born in a blizzard at midnight on the cusp of February and March. Whenever it snows so hard that the trees hang low to the ground, bogged down with sweaters of white, Mama reminds me of the blizzard. She tells me how eight cars crashed that evening, so unruly and dramatic. The wind whipped around, menacing and taunting, threatening to toss their car as Papa rushed her to the hospital. Mama thinks a lot of things are funny. She chuckles when she describes the sweat that drenched his body as he honked and skidded across icy streets. She almost howls with laughter when she tells me how Papa screamed out the window at a car idling at a stop sign, “My daughter will not be born in a goddamn Honda!”
To her, the most hilarious aspect of the whole endeavor is how I turned out so meek, so unassuming, yet my entrance was likened to a goddess arising to life. Cleveland weather sputters out fast, and the snow always seems afraid to last longer than a gallon of milk before melting to a lukewarm drizzle, turning Mama’s backyard into a wreck of dirt and ice and slush.
My birthdays, without fail, have always been punctuated by pain and loss. This year on my birthday, however, Mama and I sit in comforting silence. We eat a dawdling, lazy breakfast of Turkish coffee, walnuts, and sugar-dusted apple pie (“Doesn’t have fat, unlike American pies!” Mama declares). We bring out the hundred-year-old espresso cups her grandmother gifted her; they are eggshell white, decorated with dainty gold flowers and teal trim.
Many years have passed since Papa died of colon cancer. I had long ago moved out of their house, off to college, and then off to a little apartment in Toronto with my boyfriend and a Corgi.
Mama gazes out the kitchen window to the silent, thick snowfall and muddy sky that permeates Cleveland in early March. Sighing heavily, she sets her cup down onto its saucer. “Sasha, you know I died having you?” Mama says.
Her hair is black with silver tendrils peeking through the hair dye she uses every few months. She’s staring at me, and I notice her eyebrows. How thick they look compared to the 20-year-old grainy photo I saw of her one afternoon while rustling through our dusty, hot attic in search of an old camera. The photo was taken a few years before she settled down with an American husband and blue house and dentistry job. She wore a striped shirt and had a cigarette daintily fixed between her fingers. Mama was looking somewhere into the distance; I wondered where. Her eyebrows were penciled in, arched and teasing. Now, they’re thick and unruly, like mine.
“Sasha? Did you hear me?” she repeats, terse and annoyed. Breaking the spell. I feel like a scorned child again as dread sets in my stomach.
“Yes, Mama. I heard you. You died?” I say, too casually.
I never know how to approach situations like these: dire and evocative.
Mama nods.
“What- how? What happened? You always made giving birth seem so...” I falter. “Dramatic. Easy.”
I glance outside to avoid her gaze, vaguely aware of the piling snow that I would have to shovel later in the afternoon.
“Well, your father made it to the hospital, somehow, without causing an accident. But, you had other plans. You were early, for the first time in your life, and I started bleeding. Enough that I lost almost 40% of my blood!” Mama says, wide-eyed and holding up a four and zero with her fingers. As if I don’t know what 40% is, how much blood was not in her body.
“Anyways, I don’t remember much of that night, other than seeing pools of red spilling all over the hospital bed. I remember giggling and feeling faint, painless. That’s what happens when you die, apparently your body puts you in a state of pleasure and bliss. So you don’t panic.”
Mama is so blase. She has a habit of dispelling awful, disgusting facts to you without so much as changing her tone or furrowing her brow. I sometimes wonder if she ever feels sorry.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
March 1, 2006. I turned eleven early that morning, while I slept on the cusp of months. I bounced down the stairs, in my pink bunny pajamas, hoping for pancakes or a kiss on the forehead from Mama.
I smelled the cigarette smoke first. Mama sat on the kitchen floor, leaning against the cabinets in the dust. She was blank-eyed and smoking, the window fastened shut. “Mama?” I said.
Mama looked up at me. She wore a lavender silk bathrobe, the one my father had bought her many years prior on his trip to Italy.
“Your great-grandmother is dead.”
Her voice didn’t break; it reminded me of the fledgling robin I saw on my walk home from school the previous day. I stood stoic in the doorway, unsure of how to respond or if I was going to school that day or if it was appropriate to ask anything.
“How?” I asked after a moment.
“Hit by a train this morning. Her car got stuck on the way from delivering your birthday money in the mail.”
“What?”
“What else is there to say?”
That was the end of it. I went to school that day, guilt seeping through my pores. I killed my great-grandmother.
The rest of my birthdays before and after had been just the same, with varying degrees of horror. Not all my fault, as my great-grandmother’s had been. My first birthday? Our cat died, though I don’t remember her name. Second? A nasty case of the flu. Third? My last grandparent died. By this time, Mama had taken to calling me moja veštice: my witch.
Birthdays came and went, and my parents argued about the other woman Papa was seeing, or the girls at school with the thin eyebrows called me an ugly mustached bitch or illness had befallen me and relegated my body to the couch. As I crept up into my teens, crawling up thirteen and fourteen and fifteen, I started spending my birthdays with friends from school. Passing evenings at their houses, disappointing my parents. A self-fulfilling prophecy of sadness.
On my sixteenth, I trudged home from my friend Blanche’s through deep pockets of powdery snow after an evening of board games and strawberry cake. I came through the door, hearing Mama sobbing in the kitchen, huddling in the same place she did five years before.
“You’re finally home,” she said, voice cracking like the divots in our old driveway.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, concerned and apprehensive.
I had never seen my mother cry, not like this. Never wailing, never vulnerable. “You’re avoiding us and now your father is upset. We made you a cake and you weren’t even here to eat it,” she said.
I looked to the table, which was shrouded in murky darkness. A lonesome chocolate cake, most likely from a Betty Crocker mix, sat on the table. It looked so lonely, and I felt indignant tears well up in my throat.
“This is the first time you’ve ever made me a birthday cake, though. How was I supposed to know?” I croaked, ashamed at the tears leaking from my eyes. “Anyways, you literally call me a witch.”
Mama stopped crying.
“Sasha, I didn’t know that bothered you. I just thought it was funny-”
“You think everything is funny without realizing how it will affect other people!” I yelled.
Mama looked like a wounded rabbit. I continued without pausing to feel guilty. “Maybe if you looked around you, instead of moping about Papa cheating or whatever the fuck you do all day, you would see that you’re ruining my life.”
I crescendoed, turned, and stormed up to my room, twinges of regret poking at my bones. Happy Sixteenth, Sasha.
Although I got blackout drunk on my seventeenth after a guy I had dated for several months dumped me a day before my birthday, it wasn’t too bad. The next year I was at college, studying microbiology and fielding phone calls from Mama and Papa as I worked through Intro to Oceanography into the early hours of the morning. The years that followed were just as uneventful, but gaping with the hole of Mama and Papa that ached with mild guilt and sorrow. Maybe, I missed them. Or maybe, I just didn’t want to disappoint them in my wild birth.
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I’m 33, sitting in my mother’s kitchen as she tells me how I killed her for six minutes. Mama sets a hand on my forearm.
“Please don’t worry, Sasha. I would do it a hundred times again. It’s not your fault,” she says. “I should think before I speak.”
I stare outside, the espresso cup in my hands. Yesterday, the ground was hard but green, and the trees were drooping but bare. Now, the sky and snow blend together into one seamless white portrait.
“Aren’t I sort of a curse?” I say, the thought bursting from my mouth without a second thought. The words I had kept tucked deep into my lungs for years. Mama smiles faintly, pink lipstick cracking on her lips. She brushes her fingers against my arm gently, a gesture that forces a watery flush to my cheeks. “Sasha. The world is a curse and you’re my winter goddess. You brought me back to life.,” she says. “Now, go shovel some snow, will you?”
I nod and touch my hair, which brushes against my shoulders. I had impulsively lopped it off a few weeks ago and still wasn't used to the lightness.
Mama takes her plate of apple pie with her as I walk to the door to slide my winter boots on. The snow shovel sticks outside in the snow, standing up, rigid, and implanted into the ground. I open the door to reveal a white storm, wind blowing straight through my body. In this moment, I feel like a ghost.
Mama stands in the doorway, gingerly eating bits of pie and watching me intently. “Not going to help, but you’re going to watch and eat pie?” I say through the wind and snow as I step on a patch of ice on the driveway.
She smiles and plops a piece of pie into her mouth, her eyes still charcoal and observant.
I walk to the shovel and, with all the strength I can muster, yank it out of the ground. I shiver and wrap the jacket closer to my body, cheeks stinging and red, watching Mama, who came back to life after I killed her momentarily, still loving me.
To her, the most hilarious aspect of the whole endeavor is how I turned out so meek, so unassuming, yet my entrance was likened to a goddess arising to life. Cleveland weather sputters out fast, and the snow always seems afraid to last longer than a gallon of milk before melting to a lukewarm drizzle, turning Mama’s backyard into a wreck of dirt and ice and slush.
My birthdays, without fail, have always been punctuated by pain and loss. This year on my birthday, however, Mama and I sit in comforting silence. We eat a dawdling, lazy breakfast of Turkish coffee, walnuts, and sugar-dusted apple pie (“Doesn’t have fat, unlike American pies!” Mama declares). We bring out the hundred-year-old espresso cups her grandmother gifted her; they are eggshell white, decorated with dainty gold flowers and teal trim.
Many years have passed since Papa died of colon cancer. I had long ago moved out of their house, off to college, and then off to a little apartment in Toronto with my boyfriend and a Corgi.
Mama gazes out the kitchen window to the silent, thick snowfall and muddy sky that permeates Cleveland in early March. Sighing heavily, she sets her cup down onto its saucer. “Sasha, you know I died having you?” Mama says.
Her hair is black with silver tendrils peeking through the hair dye she uses every few months. She’s staring at me, and I notice her eyebrows. How thick they look compared to the 20-year-old grainy photo I saw of her one afternoon while rustling through our dusty, hot attic in search of an old camera. The photo was taken a few years before she settled down with an American husband and blue house and dentistry job. She wore a striped shirt and had a cigarette daintily fixed between her fingers. Mama was looking somewhere into the distance; I wondered where. Her eyebrows were penciled in, arched and teasing. Now, they’re thick and unruly, like mine.
“Sasha? Did you hear me?” she repeats, terse and annoyed. Breaking the spell. I feel like a scorned child again as dread sets in my stomach.
“Yes, Mama. I heard you. You died?” I say, too casually.
I never know how to approach situations like these: dire and evocative.
Mama nods.
“What- how? What happened? You always made giving birth seem so...” I falter. “Dramatic. Easy.”
I glance outside to avoid her gaze, vaguely aware of the piling snow that I would have to shovel later in the afternoon.
“Well, your father made it to the hospital, somehow, without causing an accident. But, you had other plans. You were early, for the first time in your life, and I started bleeding. Enough that I lost almost 40% of my blood!” Mama says, wide-eyed and holding up a four and zero with her fingers. As if I don’t know what 40% is, how much blood was not in her body.
“Anyways, I don’t remember much of that night, other than seeing pools of red spilling all over the hospital bed. I remember giggling and feeling faint, painless. That’s what happens when you die, apparently your body puts you in a state of pleasure and bliss. So you don’t panic.”
Mama is so blase. She has a habit of dispelling awful, disgusting facts to you without so much as changing her tone or furrowing her brow. I sometimes wonder if she ever feels sorry.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
March 1, 2006. I turned eleven early that morning, while I slept on the cusp of months. I bounced down the stairs, in my pink bunny pajamas, hoping for pancakes or a kiss on the forehead from Mama.
I smelled the cigarette smoke first. Mama sat on the kitchen floor, leaning against the cabinets in the dust. She was blank-eyed and smoking, the window fastened shut. “Mama?” I said.
Mama looked up at me. She wore a lavender silk bathrobe, the one my father had bought her many years prior on his trip to Italy.
“Your great-grandmother is dead.”
Her voice didn’t break; it reminded me of the fledgling robin I saw on my walk home from school the previous day. I stood stoic in the doorway, unsure of how to respond or if I was going to school that day or if it was appropriate to ask anything.
“How?” I asked after a moment.
“Hit by a train this morning. Her car got stuck on the way from delivering your birthday money in the mail.”
“What?”
“What else is there to say?”
That was the end of it. I went to school that day, guilt seeping through my pores. I killed my great-grandmother.
The rest of my birthdays before and after had been just the same, with varying degrees of horror. Not all my fault, as my great-grandmother’s had been. My first birthday? Our cat died, though I don’t remember her name. Second? A nasty case of the flu. Third? My last grandparent died. By this time, Mama had taken to calling me moja veštice: my witch.
Birthdays came and went, and my parents argued about the other woman Papa was seeing, or the girls at school with the thin eyebrows called me an ugly mustached bitch or illness had befallen me and relegated my body to the couch. As I crept up into my teens, crawling up thirteen and fourteen and fifteen, I started spending my birthdays with friends from school. Passing evenings at their houses, disappointing my parents. A self-fulfilling prophecy of sadness.
On my sixteenth, I trudged home from my friend Blanche’s through deep pockets of powdery snow after an evening of board games and strawberry cake. I came through the door, hearing Mama sobbing in the kitchen, huddling in the same place she did five years before.
“You’re finally home,” she said, voice cracking like the divots in our old driveway.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, concerned and apprehensive.
I had never seen my mother cry, not like this. Never wailing, never vulnerable. “You’re avoiding us and now your father is upset. We made you a cake and you weren’t even here to eat it,” she said.
I looked to the table, which was shrouded in murky darkness. A lonesome chocolate cake, most likely from a Betty Crocker mix, sat on the table. It looked so lonely, and I felt indignant tears well up in my throat.
“This is the first time you’ve ever made me a birthday cake, though. How was I supposed to know?” I croaked, ashamed at the tears leaking from my eyes. “Anyways, you literally call me a witch.”
Mama stopped crying.
“Sasha, I didn’t know that bothered you. I just thought it was funny-”
“You think everything is funny without realizing how it will affect other people!” I yelled.
Mama looked like a wounded rabbit. I continued without pausing to feel guilty. “Maybe if you looked around you, instead of moping about Papa cheating or whatever the fuck you do all day, you would see that you’re ruining my life.”
I crescendoed, turned, and stormed up to my room, twinges of regret poking at my bones. Happy Sixteenth, Sasha.
Although I got blackout drunk on my seventeenth after a guy I had dated for several months dumped me a day before my birthday, it wasn’t too bad. The next year I was at college, studying microbiology and fielding phone calls from Mama and Papa as I worked through Intro to Oceanography into the early hours of the morning. The years that followed were just as uneventful, but gaping with the hole of Mama and Papa that ached with mild guilt and sorrow. Maybe, I missed them. Or maybe, I just didn’t want to disappoint them in my wild birth.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I’m 33, sitting in my mother’s kitchen as she tells me how I killed her for six minutes. Mama sets a hand on my forearm.
“Please don’t worry, Sasha. I would do it a hundred times again. It’s not your fault,” she says. “I should think before I speak.”
I stare outside, the espresso cup in my hands. Yesterday, the ground was hard but green, and the trees were drooping but bare. Now, the sky and snow blend together into one seamless white portrait.
“Aren’t I sort of a curse?” I say, the thought bursting from my mouth without a second thought. The words I had kept tucked deep into my lungs for years. Mama smiles faintly, pink lipstick cracking on her lips. She brushes her fingers against my arm gently, a gesture that forces a watery flush to my cheeks. “Sasha. The world is a curse and you’re my winter goddess. You brought me back to life.,” she says. “Now, go shovel some snow, will you?”
I nod and touch my hair, which brushes against my shoulders. I had impulsively lopped it off a few weeks ago and still wasn't used to the lightness.
Mama takes her plate of apple pie with her as I walk to the door to slide my winter boots on. The snow shovel sticks outside in the snow, standing up, rigid, and implanted into the ground. I open the door to reveal a white storm, wind blowing straight through my body. In this moment, I feel like a ghost.
Mama stands in the doorway, gingerly eating bits of pie and watching me intently. “Not going to help, but you’re going to watch and eat pie?” I say through the wind and snow as I step on a patch of ice on the driveway.
She smiles and plops a piece of pie into her mouth, her eyes still charcoal and observant.
I walk to the shovel and, with all the strength I can muster, yank it out of the ground. I shiver and wrap the jacket closer to my body, cheeks stinging and red, watching Mama, who came back to life after I killed her momentarily, still loving me.
Julie Larick is a freshman at The College of Wooster with multiple publications (The Incandescent Review, Kalopsia Literary Journal, Teen Voices Media, The Augment Review, Lake Erie Ink, and ArtWorks).