Cricket Breath
Amber Smith
My mother never looked in mirrors; she collected them instead. Every Saturday during the summer, our town held the Main Street flea market where people ate melon slices while looking at antiques and thought of starting collections of their own. My mother started hers when I was seven years old, the day she brought my sister and me to the flea market for the first time. We argued over who got to sit behind her on the way there and asked if we could roll down the windows and stick out our arms. The quiet music she played on the radio was buried under the rush of the breeze.
It was a hot day and my mother wore a long dress that gently flapped against her body when the wind blew. That was how she walked—like the wind. She held each one of us by the hand as she lead us through groups of mothers, grandmothers, and other children. My sister and I scampered behind her in white cotton dresses and brown sandals, bumping into other kids and tripping over caterpillars. But the way she walked through the crowd was mesmerizing, never touching anyone, gracefully sliding past shoulders, floating almost, until she got to Madame Grey’s booth where she stopped, like the sudden halt of a symphony. Madame Grey sold antique hairbrushes, combs, mirrors, and perfume bottles.
My mother’s fingers hovered above the week’s new assortment, tinkling up and down like she was playing scales. My mother’s hands were spindly. Rose stems. She picked up a mirror that looked like the one in our bathroom—the one that she and her boyfriend had often looked in together when he brushed her hair at night. She placed that mirror back down and continued to grab others, turning them over, rubbing translucent, plastic ridges with her fingernails, and inspecting the dirt caked in glass crevices. Her hands occasionally passed in front of a mirror’s face, and I wondered why she stopped allowing her own face to do so. My mother’s hair was coarse and hung as one clump to the middle of her back. Her nose was crooked and her mouth always reminded me of a broken piano, the way they were drawn in cartoons. I thought she was the most beautiful woman in our town. But even in our house, a minefield of mirrors, I don’t think she ever saw that woman.
They were broken, the mirrors. Not by accident, but on purpose. After flea market trips, my mother took her new mirror outside, wrapped it in a garbage bag, and dropped one rock on it. As her collection grew, she perfected her technique and was able to crack the glass without shattering it every time, creating jagged scenes that reminded me of exploring stalactite caves. I used to think it was silly, her breaking her new objects, but they gave our house the luminosity of fallen icicles, an ambiance of distorted images. My sister and I had to jump up to catch glimpses of ourselves in that lovely, damaged world. We’d laugh when we saw eleven pairs of eyes or six mouths. There was a lone photograph on our walls. My mother wedged its corner behind a gilded mirror frame. It showed her boyfriend trying to teach my sister and me how to fish on the pond behind our house. His name was Egon and his chin was gray with a shallow cleft. He was sitting on a woven lawn chair and I was next to him on an upside-down bucket, but my sister, who was more interested in catching toads than catching fish, was squatting off to the side. Our backs faced the camera. My mother had tiptoed out the screen door to take it with her Polaroid, and then walked toward us, flapping the unripe image until it developed. She knelt next to Egon to show him and put her hand on his knee. She pointed out the way he and I were both tilting our heads.........continued in print version.
