Ma’s Soul
3 Minutes Read Time
Associate Editor Andy Sia: Shikhandin’s haunting story pays mind to possession: what we own, what we do not own, and what we feel owed to. Clothing—a metonymy for inheritance—is a spectral presence in the piece, constellating around the body, cinching, draping, slipping. Amid the maw of loss, the piece crescendos toward the end in a fleshy sequence of images.
Listen to Shikhandin read “Ma’s Soul”:
Ma’s Soul
One of these days, my soul is going to walk out on me. I’m sure of it. That damn soul is going to go someplace else. It’s going to shrug me off the way we shrug off our raincoats, overcoats, and Ulster coats.
Ah, the Ulster, such an elegant garment. I remember the one Ma owned, a black velvet thing cinched at the waist. She’d inherited it from her mother. She called it allester. She also called cheese cheech. Her rustic English diction got on my nerves. I didn’t know then that she’d pawned her jewelry to put me in the convent school.
Ma carried a scent around her that only someone from an old family could possess. She had many old things, stuff she’d inherited and that was still around, not sold or pawned. Like that Ulster coat. I wanted it. I wanted her smell too, and her thick long black hair, her soft belly, her smooth pale skin. But I could hardly get near her. Because I couldn’t get near her, I foraged among her clothes. One time I wore an English lace blouse she used to wear when she was a slim-hipped girl. I thought I was old enough to fit into the spaces where her boobs went.
It’s a strange feeling, me looking back at her to a time when I didn’t even exist. My soul wrenches when I do that, much like the raw chicken leg you twist and turn and finally wrench free from the carcass.
I am sure my soul will walk out on me one of these days. But I won’t be dead afterward. I’ll look at the back of my soul walking away. I’ll feel empty, the way an apple feels after it has been cored. And I’ll keep thinking of my mother and how she lived. Always thinking of dying, and wanting it so desperately but condemning suicide as the worst sin a soul could commit. And, ultimately, just going on living, dazed like a moth after it’s smacked itself against a lit bulb. Or a lizard that has lost its balance and fallen to the ground. Or a zombie, with a hole gouged out of the place where the heart used to be. And a thin wind whistling right through it, shrill, and cold, and endless. Moaning like a searching soul.
