When our rent was late, the landlord pounded on my mother’s front door. Our duplex was dusty and hot and a country-western station played on in a cluttered room. I'm not sure how long I stayed with my mother in the blur of her dark hours. Once, the sky did change from dull gray to a blue, swirling into something bright against her washed-out face. It chilled my insides to see her so weak, frail like a dead bird. I rubbed her hand some while she lay in the bed with her low breathing.

I could feel the thumping inside my ears, and the swish of the electric fan blowing against my skin as I ran a damp sponge over her face. Sliding it all over,

I washed her like grandmother did the last time my mother was recovering. “Watch her carefully, dear. Her eyes are darker now. There’s no spark.”

Whispering and mumbling, my mother whispered, “Stop it. Stop, you hear that?”  When it got too quiet, she set those flat brown eyes on the window. “You hear that? Listen,” she swallowed. She was picking up those voices in her head. And I following her gaze, looked too, for something outside of sorrow.

Later, when the landlord found the pill bottle, I sensed his fear. Sweat was forming above his upper lip, the horror on his face, blurting out, “Jesus Christ,”

as his wife clutched that stripped robe up to her throat. And the neighbors, they all gathered, gathered around our yard shaking their heads, as I stood near the window, lost, with filthy hair and a empty gut, watching the lights flashing, listening to the sounds of new voices filling the house, footsteps, commands and the tick, tick, tick of the kitchen clock as they strapped my mother, the frail bird, DOWN.

They said the landlord called for the ambulance right away. And you could hear those sirens far down the road past the Hess station, a long low whine for my mother as they carried her.