it’s orange mum

I just need to see my mum okay, she says as she peels dead skin from her heel. But just like a spool unravelling in a babies grip, the dead skin turns to a thread of healthy skin. Shit, she has been trying to cuss less in the last week, it’s like with my cuticles, she speaks into the room. It’s a bare bedroom, just a thrifted bed, a bedside table, a washing basket bought as a house-warming gift and a few shelves for underwear and tee’s and socks and pants. She looks at the flakes of dead heel skin, sorta like cobwebs and fingerprints. A copy of ‘Life Ceremony’ sits by the top of her bed. A few days ago she was talking to her friend, Peggy, about a story of people eating humans as a means of population increase: they’d cook the dead person, usually hiring this company to do it, and during the wake people would get talking and then fuck in the streets. The countries population was severely low and Japanese people are so good at poetics. Peggy asked for the book but Fragie said she hasn’t finished it yet. I’ve got another book on the go and I forget which headspace I need to be in when I switch between the two. The two of them caught up on reading vices and the process for choosing books in bookstores. What’s the difference between a bookstore and a bookshop, Peggy asked, probably the same difference between film and movie - one sounds pretentious, Frag spoke and stopped; a brown dog walked past with a yellow bow around its throat.

She didn’t tell Peggy about her dry heel. She didn’t admit the dryness in her skull. She didn’t confess about the flat in her spirit. I need to see my mum, she keeps saying it, I need to watch her cook soup and everything will be okay. Images of someone doing something hold more comfort than the moment becoming a memory. She scrolls through a painters instagram page and begins messaging them. She feels like a peasant asking how much it would cost, hold on, she says, I’m not making myself feel poor because I want to know if I need to budget or save.
*
The door closes and she begins to peel an orange as she walks out the Fitzroy North gate. Holy shit, she shouts, she runs through the house to her bedside table, a blue bottle of antibiotics sit in her bag now. I just need my mum and her soup and her backyard. Her mum made her heart feel warm earlier in the year. She asked why she doesn’t throw away the worn chair by the window, because that’s your tree-watching chair darling, her mum said. Window’s from timber floor-to-ceiling sit in her mum’s house. A single glass door separates the left side from the right side of the garden. On the left is a herb garden and on the right is the washing line, violets and orange chrysanthemum’s. That’s your flower mummmy, Fragie’s four-year-old mouth said, a planted orange chrysanthemum sitting in a terracotta pot for Mother’s Day; it’s got mum in the name. Her mum laughed and cried, that’s my daughter, wiping her cheeks, so observant.
*
Mommy, she says standing by her tree-watching chair, someone and someone else hurt my heart. Fragie doesn’t have the mental space to ask how her favourite person is really doing, as if her favourite person would be honest. Mother’s tend to keep their bigness hidden. It’s that bigness that makes a mother a person - full of history and bursting with character. Fragie watches her mum peel onions and pass the garlic to her. Preparing garlic is so feminine, she told her mum last year. The soup turns into a dish requiring the oven, demanding sizzling oil and roasted rosemary over vegetables.

I knew you’d help me mum. Fragie doesn’t notice her mum’s eyes, so full of expectations and pressures. Always my best-friend.