Yellow by Megan Jacobson

and her face is planted against the carpet. I don’t move forward to help her. In a feat of determination she pulls herself back up and onto her feet, and she wobbles a few steps until she bumps into the coffee table and tumbles back over again.
    A memory comes to me, the kind of flashback that kicks you in the teeth. At the beginning of summer I’d found a Christmas beetle that’d fallen into a bucket of water I’d once grown tadpoles in. The creature’s back was shiny and its small legs flailed hopelessly as it tried to scale the bucket wall. I knew I could just trail my hands through the water, scoop it out, and it would be all right. But I didn’t feel like it anymore. I squatted down on my haunches and watched it, blankly, until it stopped twitching, and bobbed up and down all boat-like. I didn’t feel sorry for it as I was watching. It was like my feelings had all been wrung dry, and I remember the only thing that made me hurt in the gut was the knowledge that I wasn’t feeling anything at all. I’m thinking of this drowning beetle now, as I watch my mother stumble.
    â€˜Don’t worry about it. You’ll probably break the bloody thing,’ I say to her, and start to stomp towards the laundry.
    â€˜How was your father? I know you were over there!’ she calls out after me and her words smack me on my back. She’s begun calling him that – ‘your father’ instead of Lark – as though I owned him and she wasn’t connected to him at all, like they’re just two strangers placed side by side on the electoral roll because they happened to share their last names. She spits the words out, like I’m tainted too, by the association.
    â€˜Lark’s fine,’ I shout back over my shoulder. ‘Lark’s always fine.’
    Somewhere in the living room a glass smashes.
    â€˜Well then, that’s proof that karma doesn’t exist, isn’t it?’ I hear her mutter.
    It makes me wonder what I did in a past life, because if karma did exist I think I must have been Hitler, the way this life’s turned out.
    I strip the beds and throw our things into the washing machine, that leaky shuddery thing that makes it sound as though there’s a swamp monster in our laundry, then I stomp back into the kitchen and take the yellow pages from its spot on top of the fridge. Flicking through, I find the ads for our local Alcoholics Anonymous. I rip the page out, and in bright-red marker pen I circle the ad and stick it on our fridge.
    Fat lot of good it’ll do, though. I don’t think she even eats these days.
    I don’t know much about happiness, but I know that in a small way, if nowhere else, okayness can be found slipping into crisp sheets at the end of a really long day. It calms me down as I open the linen cupboard, seeing those sheets pressed and fresh and stacked properly where I put them there last week. I like neatness and order. They remind me of respectable people’s hands. The way those sheets are all folded and just sitting there politely, it’s like the way that rich people hold their hands when they’re sitting in the doctor’s waiting room – you know, the type of people who wear pearls and have clean fingernails. Before I grab a couple of sets to put on the beds I stand there for a moment. I close my eyes and lean against the frame, and with my eyes still closed, I slot my hand inside the folds of one of the bed sheets at the bottom of the stack. I imagine, with the pressure of it, it’s someone holding my hand. Not just someone. I imagine it’s my mother holding my hand, and she’s soft and nice and smells sweet like washing powder. She’s holding my hand because she wants me to be safe.
    Isn’t that ridiculous?
    When I’m done with the sheets, I step into the shower and wash the sea off of me. I wash the day off me. As the shampoo suds crackle in my ear I think of Willow