The long-term care nurse calls me.
Your mother is at the hospital.
She’s had a bad fall.
A broken hip?
No, she broke her back.
I am to blame of course.
I am so guilty;
I may as well have just shoved
my elderly mother to the floor myself.
It started when I was seven years old,
when I was so angry with my mother for
cancelling my summer camp,
six weeks without my friends who would be there,
cancelled without a single consideration for my happiness.
We can’t afford it this year, she had said.
Bullshit!
I stomped out of the house,
a pouty little brat,
began plotting my revenge.
But what could I do to my mother?
She was bigger than me.
I was just a kid.
I saw the sidewalk,
I saw all those cracks,
and I determined to step on every one of them,
all the way to the end of the street and back again,
to maximize my mother’s suffering.
That would show her.
I knew it would work,
though I didn’t know when,
and despite that I loved my mother all my life,
and after that summer,
I never again wished her any ill will,
I couldn’t undo the curse I put upon her.
My request had been waiting in Beelzebub’s queue
for many, many years.
Today he delivered.