Lily Daly

The Girl Who Turned into Dirt and the Lover Held On

Tonight in the living room my host mother reads aloud from romances.
It’s the early days of winter and the oven
rattles with cow dung, lint, scraps of
village. We barely get through a page
about the orphaned maiden: the father
dies farming for the nation, the mother some sickness
off-stage. She stops to tell me about the neighbors
who have died or might. In a textbook
back home someone spelled out
nine criteria that must be met in order for a government
to recognize something as
a massacre. The name is a form a person apparently
can’t give. Toward the end
of the romance when the prince studies
the silhouette–is it she he
wants or an odd spirit’s imitation?–my host mother
coughs and blows her nose, familiar preludes.
Her second cousin is still near-
bedridden. Or maybe the story has changed. I am
learning new words all the time.
One criteria stated it salts the earth.
What the it signifies, I don’t remember, but this doesn’t matter
much, maybe; in my host mother’s language
all pronouns are the same. A footnote dictated
by a lawyer (or was it a botanist?) clarified:
it must salt a portion of the earth so that light becomes
nonnative to the performance of the—
The electricity cuts off. My host mother is sighing
a diminutive of my name. I want to say
that the Soviet Union like the humorless dark-
haired prince has come back to romance
us but my spoken language is too
barren for that kind of soliloquy. Our matching
slippers mark the time. Why do you always stop
before we can get going? I imagine asking. A flashlight
glances in our window. It searches and
finds my host mother’s face. She closes
the book. She looks at me–one,
two–then rises, turns on stage.

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Lily Daly is a daughter to a mother with early onset dementia. She spends her time attempting to learn jiu jitsu and aerial silks with only one good foot. She has an MA in Eastern Classics and a job managing water resource projects.