We were as close as the moth and the flame, the tongue and the bad tooth, back then. Barely middle-class kids with angular haircuts and bad teeth, a crooked catholic education; me and my little brother Michael. The blue on blue uniforms, badly pressed and worn, were cool in the winter and warm in the summer. Our classrooms were subjacent to the church – the school was on an austere budget, according to the Monsignor, who looked like a more crapulous/desperate version of Ernest Borgnine. His homilies were desultory and long-winded; the heat from the vents gave me allergies and made Michael turn puce with asthma.

I always got an erection in there, inside that church, under the baleful gaze of glabrous-pated saints and doe-eyed stained glass virgins, the best looking girls in my class, Meghan and Bridget, flanking me in the pew. My wet dreams were set in that church, the smell of frankincense and sin, Meghan’s perky, just developing tits and Bridget’s voluptuous lips, almost Garden of Eden evil in that swirl of pipe organ and stained glass rainbow. Then my cock jumped and woke me up, sticky with catlick shame.

It was Ash Wednesday. The Monsignor smeared cinereous crosses into our foreheads as we knelt before him. We didn’t buy any of that bullshit, at best Christ was the David Copperfield/Charles Manson of his day (without the hot, obeisant chicks). Fuck him, we planned on eating meat for lunch, it was Wednesday, it was blt day and we had an early dismissal.

The door of our house was wide open; the living room was full of smoke and that weak golden light, only seen in childhood. The smell of bacon assaulting, somersaulting our stomachs, Elvis singing “Mama Liked the Roses” on the old stereo, speed set by wheat pennies. It snapped, crackled and popped, warm and full, seemingly alive. We saw my late grandmother Grace’s picture framed with fresh-cut flowers from Mama’s garden above the stereo, an empty fifth bottle of sloe gin making standing accusations from the floor, candles burning everywhere, their tiny flames trembling, threatening to burn out.

We walked towards the dining room table, blts and glasses of tang set on solar system placemats, the blts looked delicious, I was ravenous. I noticed her before Michael did, over by the knife block in the kitchen, barely looking like our mother. She had a red foam sloe gin moustache, a bottle of pills in her left hand and a flashing butcher knife in her right. Her eyes were howling and her arms were bleeding, crosses cut into each. She poured out a handful of pills and told us to take them, when we refused, she cut her arms up more – nothing too deep, just hesitation wounds, barbed wire patterns, I felt each one deeply.

My brother Michael started screaming something awful, sounding like a jackrabbit carried by the ears, and I remembered that the first word he ever muttered was “Mama”. This didn’t stop her from cutting, mascara tears running like tiny black widow spiders down her face, a crooked rainfall of crows, still impossibly beautiful. Then I lunged for the knife, it flashed again and I saw a frozen Polaroid of myself in it – shaking. She dropped the knife, and Michael, still crying in torrents, grabbed it; I restrained her, her heart and mine jumping in time with our eyes.

Michael was a smart kid, he called 9-1-1, then he called my father. Mama didn’t struggle at all in my arms, rather she collapsed into them, into me, all the while violently sobbing, telling me she loved me. The cops arrived before my father did; one of them even recognized her. I asked them not to cuff her, still they did, she cried and the needle on the stereo skipped, even poor old Elvis seemed wounded. As they took her away, all broken and somehow still beautiful, her eyes met mine, full of trauma and some kind of strange telepathy. I recognized that look, I had seen it before in the eyes of abused animals and children; it told an unspoken tale of forgotten horror, suddenly remembered like an ill-knit scar in the rain. That’s when I started crying too.

Then she was gone and we didn’t know where. “She’s on a special vacation, getting better guys”, that’s what our father told us. His parents told us “She’s over at the funny farm going cuckoo.” They hated her – always had. They hated her for not aborting me when she and my father were only sixteen. They felt I was the biggest mistake my father ever made. I set him back, continued to hold him back. I hated them too. My grandmother seemed already embalmed with her own venom, that sad powdered wig, all crooked on her head. She looked like George Washington in drag. Always eager to malign my mother, her side of the family, they called her white trash, treated her like it too.

We didn’t see her for a few months after that. My father played Mr. Mom. Sometimes our cousin Rita would play babysitter. One day she and her friend Rachael even did a striptease for my brother and me. We threw pennies at them, just like the stupid French did to Coltrane. One night the phone rang and my father answered. It was mama calling collect. He put her on speakerphone, her voice soft and sweeter than ever. She said she loved us and missed us terribly and that she was feeling better than ever; she’d be coming home soon with gifts and stories that we would love. Later that night I heard my father crying in his bedroom, heard the hammer striking on his unloaded gun.

Then a month and three days later she came home. She was glowing and her hair was longer, beautifully feathered, shining like virgin videotape… it seemed to retain the sunlight from outside. She had gifts, wallets and belts, necklaces and bracelets, that she made with her own hands. When she spoke she sounded like a self-help book, all bromide and platitude. We were just happy to have her back. She seemed fine during the day, took us on trips to the zoo and the planetarium, fixed us wonderful lunches and suppers, even walked with us to school some days. Still she looked older than before, she smoked more and avoided eye contact, and she cursed like a truck driver with tourette’s too.

Sometimes, late at night, we would hear her screaming in her sleep. My father said she would punch at the air, punch him in the face. Sometimes we would hear her talking in her sleep, revealing things we wished we had never heard.