EVELYN HAMPTON

Pearl, My Mother

My mother’s name is not Pearl. It is Maria. Sometimes people who know her call her Mary, like the Virgin. My mother is not a virgin. She is my mother. My father put his dick in her and made me. Later his dick in her made my brother. My brother is named after a saint. I am named after a real-life prostitute. Are there any saints who were prostitutes? Some people used to be named Dick, but not anymore. One of my favorite old names is Pearl. Once, my mother gave me a pearl necklace. She had only one pearl necklace, so she could only give it to me once. People make a big deal out of eating oysters because they are like little vaginas (the oysters, I mean). People slurp the oysters down into their throats and feel about themselves that they are capable of great fucking. The truth is, not many people are. Greatness is a rare thing, like a natural pearl. An oyster forms a pearl in response to irritation. Something unwanted gets into its shell, and the oyster envelops it, to make it more like itself. Then people kill the oysters and steal their pearls. People say that I have my mother’s eyes, but she hasn’t given me her eyes yet. They are still in her skull, looking out at the world with dismay.

Waterfalls, Wolf

My parents are growing old. My father has waterfalls in his eyes now, and my mother is becoming a wolf.

The waterfalls cloud my father’s vision and roar in his ears, so that he sees us only dimly, through a white mist, and hears what we say only faintly, through the sound of water crashing on the rocks below. His doctor says that we must not allow him to drive, he is dangerous.

I wonder whether, in our father’s eyes, my brother and I look like tourists gawking at the sublime magnificence of the falls, while he, our father, sits behind a white curtain of flowing water, a sage in his redoubt?

By shouting, we manage to communicate to him that there is a surgery scheduled. He says he does not want to have the surgery, he does not want to be so exposed.

My mother is lucky, her rheumatologist says. The disease that is transforming her into a wolf was late in her case—often women are much younger when they experience their first symptom, a mask-like rash across the nose, cheeks, and eyes. But the disease is more virulent in aging bodies, so that the few extra years of youth its late onset gave her are now quickly being overtaken by troubling symptoms, such as insomnia and an extreme sensitivity to sunlight. She rarely goes outside during the day. When she does, she wears a hat with a wide, dark brim, and sunglasses, and she makes a deliberate effort to stay always in the shade.

She is also becoming more ruthless, because of a new keenness in her senses. Not infrequently she turns on me before I have opened my mouth and contradicts whatever I was about to suggest, as if she smells everything far in advance of its occurrence.

Though their maladies differ, in their senescence both my mother and father are similarly wary of exposure—my father to the sights and sounds of this world, and my mother to its sun.

Both conditions are hereditary, and I am already experiencing some of their symptoms. At 34, my eyes sometimes trouble me, and I have to put down the book I am reading or look away from the screen and stare into something called the middle distance in order to give my eyes a rest. In the last five years I have moved several times, each time farther north into the mountains, where the air is cool and fresh. My younger brother is lucky; he reads for hours without needing to look up from the page or screen, and he runs on the flat sidewalks of the large city where he lives at the hour when the day is brightest and hottest, when the concrete is so white it is blinding.

Foxes

One day the queen shocked her subjects by appearing before them much earlier than expected. The gathering became silent and ashamed.

When the queen saw the peculiar look of horror and adulation on the faces of her subjects, she said, “What unusual sympathies you people have!”

She was wearing a garment nobody had seen before: both green and scintillating, it proved easier to imagine than to see, so her subjects shut their eyes and dreamed.

Of course, its purpose was to deter foxes.

Evelyn Hampton is the author of two story collections. The most recent, Famous Children and Famished Adults, won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize from Fiction Collective 2 and was published in February 2019. In June 2017, Publishing Genius Press published The Aleatory Abyss, an essay about the Internet, spoofing, adjuncting, depression, the 2016 election, and the poet Mark Baumer. She lives in Denver.