Red Cork Platform Heels
Published in Overland Spring 2013. Photo: Lenstravelier on Unsplash
We remember my mother’s birthday with red eggs. Grandma shells them with practised fingers. Her lips move, offering thanks to the small plaster Virgin Mary watching from above the sink. She looks tired, the Virgin, the paint peeling from her smock. The radio scratches out its sermons. We eat in the kitchen beside my mother’s photo. We don’t speak. The eggs’ briny scent. I save the rich, fatty yolks til last.
In the photo she is all limbs; her skinny ankles strapped into huge red shoes. It is spring, perhaps. The wind through the trees. The lawn cropped beneath her platform heels. She is turning away from the camera, her arms floating in the light, her long dark hair falling across her face. She looks small in her mini-dress, her knees kissing beneath the egg of her stomach.