Break Your Mother's BackChelle MikoMy son counts the strokes of a toothbrush across his teeth, reverses his steps to catch a crack he forgot to skip, tells me he has to or else, then shrugs and leaves his sentence as fragmented as the mystery of completion that plagues him. I see my brother's hands in my son's: faint life lines that border the palms and a counter-clockwise motion under the tap as he rinses them again, again. But my brother's fingers lingered even longer after 'Nam, made him spring from the couch in the middle of a wisecrack and push them away from him as if they were foreign bodies to be drowned under whatever absolution water offers. Mother used to give the globe a flick and tick off how many bodies of land and water had to be hurdled before my brother strolled down the lane and threw open our gate in Okinawa, swinging his bag as if he could come back by boarding a plane. He stayed just long enough for Mother to tally us—six, seven, eight— and record a fixed impression in the family album. The morning my son enlists, I touch his toothbrush, the bristles bent under the task of repetition, and remember the night I counted him, repeatedly, from his toes to the two soft testicles all the way to the light down of his skull as if he could separate from me just by leaving my body. As I stand at the sink and calculate the measure of time that makes a boy a man, I see my mother's hands, locked on a globe or a white basin, but it's my spine that's curled under the weight of the world and superstition; and I mourn every line I've stepped on, as if one might come back in the shape of a buried mine—and break a son.
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Chelle Miko