Salt

by Anna Kahn

We were both startled to find Kieran’s mother in our kitchen drinking from the World’s Best Cat Dad mug which normally held the mini spatulas that might otherwise become lost in our pail of kitchen implements. She was, I suppose, too short to reach our mug shelf.

I was bog-standard startled there was someone in our kitchen. Kieran was startled even further, given as his mother had died when he was ten.

Even dead she’d aged. Kieran said later he only knew her for sure by the peacock tattoos that flowed down her arms, photograph-memorised. Cherished. I knew her by the noise he made: ‘Here is everything I thought I would never see again’ is a sound that transcends language, turns out.

Kieran didn’t hesitate: straight into her arms. Big man, crumpled down all that way. Past the bulk of him I couldn’t grasp much of what she looked like. Grey hair, eyefeather forearms.

She pulled back enough to thumb away his tears. She had his brow, or I suppose rather he had hers. They beetle-frowned at each other. Kept trying to smile. Neither could manage it.

‘Look at you, all grown!’ she said, clearly in the absence of anything else, better, warmer to say. ‘I worried you’d break out the holy water.’

Kieran could only shake his head pull her tight and hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, until the salt from his eyes started to dissolve her. Welts widening, deepening. She met my eyes and kept her grip on him regardless of the welting. Tam Lin in my kitchen, gritting her teeth.

When Kieran realised the damage he was doing he shot back. Panted like he was overheating.

‘It’s alright,’ she said, ‘I’m alright, really,’ but there was blood on the linoleum. I knew my role: I fetched supplies from the medicine cabinet, wound spray and Melonin, to patch her up as best I could. Her shoulder, the insides of her arms.

Her eyes on me shaped like Kieran’s eyes, round, wide-set. ‘I expect you’ve never done first aid on the dead.’ She was looking at my engagement ring, which had first been her engagement ring.

I put the kettle on. Sugar in everyone’s tea. I brought her a mug that made no claims on her rankings in the global cat paternity community. I kept waiting for the two of them to talk; if this were my mother I would have more questions for her than I had breath, and she’d be the same, but Kieran and his mother kept on keeping quiet as I tidied the detritus of bandage packaging, quiet as I wiped the blood from the floor, only their breath fast, loud, synced up. Pair of startled rabbits.

‘I’m sorry I couldn’t make the wedding,’ she said, in the end, when all was clean and I came to sit. ‘I was otherwise engaged.’

And slowly, like a door long rusted, their laughter creaked open.

Anna Kahn is a Manchester-based writer. They've been a Barbican Young Poet, a member of the Roundhouse Collective (and Roundhouse Slam finalist) and a London Library Emerging Writer. They've gigged everywhere from tiny pubs to literary festivals to music festival main stages, and their work has featured in publications like Nature, Tractor Beam, The Daily Tomorrow and The Rumpus.