Scan

She arrived yesterday with a tracking number, in a box, like a NORAD Santa Claus at Christmas, flying over the Great Lakes on her way to Iowa. When I was young, she’d dress up as Kris Kringle: a tiny woman in need of a belly. The pillow always fell out of her shirt…

I used to pick her up at the airport in Des Moines. “Do people really live here?” she’d ask every time. “I live here, Mom.” At each step on this journey, I knew where she was. You can’t send ashes through the mail without taking pains to ensure they get there.

I found the box on my front porch after spending the day at the hospital. My colon, that convoluted postal system for waste, is inflamed. The doctor thinks I have terminal ileitis. Every time I eat, it’s like a fire in a movie theatre: the crowd evacuates. I’ve lost twelve pounds in two months.

What a marvelous cook she was! “We need to fatten you up,” she’d yell—I was so thin as a child. I relished each new concoction, her kitchen cell turned artist’s studio. Girl Scout Cover Girl for New York City…first in her class at Fordham…escort on the early Merv Griffin Show—she was going places, as we used to say. A man, and later a boy, like a weight on her arm.

When it pains, it roars.

The doctor sent me off to be scanned. A nurse wheeled me through the narrow, winding hallways, my bed like a truck in an alleyway. We kept hitting things. I thought of bumper cars. Once, at a fair, my mother said, as my father crashed maniacally into us, “I don’t like this at all.” A second nurse set up an I.V. and explained, as if she were a shaman or therapist, “You’re going to sense the dye moving inside you. It should feel really warm.”

“Hi, Mom,” I whispered, standing on the porch. The box exclaimed in big, white letters, “CREMATED REMAINS,” the latter word trying as hard as possible to behave like a verb.

Ralph James Savarese | Phlebotomist
Contents | Mudlark No. 82 (2025)