Leah Richards
Ghost, Mother
I went back to the mountains of my childhood because I thought Wichita, with its feral boars and hoof trails cut through whispering prairie, might quiet her. The girl I once was, barefoot on creek bed stones, untamed child of twig-tangled hair, was restless with waiting. She who carried a notebook of poems across rocks and rivers was a ghost in me, a shimmering apparition still stubborn in will. Haunting while I mothered my children.
My son came first, always in motion. My veins opened when I saw his face. I felt the ghost stirring. What began as a whisper “write” crowed its way to a cackle as he learned to crawl, to toddle. His endless shadows served as inspiration while stealing time. I listened to my ghost. I clutched at notebook and laptop. I trekked from dawn till moon through city parks and toddler playtimes, stumbling in exhausted joy toward the dark hours where I embraced the ghost. She, smiling with sticky fingers while I clicked across the keyboard bearing witness to my son. The ghost, satiated for a time.
A few years later came my baby girl. Her collection of cells silenced the ghost. My body rocked by waves of nausea and blood thrumming forward too fast. I rode, wild, behind the runaway months. Days when my son still needed more, coupled with my daughter in the warm egg of my belly, left the ghost with no voice to howl. Her howling now the hiss of a match, a beetle’s scurry beneath Autumn leaves. It has been said that there lives in all of us, the ghosts of the women we have been. It has been said that they are proud. But my ghost is a girl. A wild child willing herself away from a world where my hem is never dampened nor smeared with dirt. I am not lean like she is.
She was always hungry. Always digging holes and overturning rocks. Plunging hands in the cold creek. Pinching slippery minnows from the shallows and holding them against daylight, searching translucent for an opaque heart. It was she who first discovered the golden thread of a monarch’s chrysalis, plucked it from the damp rock overhang and cradled it home in her palm. She knew treasure. Knew that to find the special she had to keep her eyes peeled beneath crevices.
She is howling again these days. Howling at the earthworms my daughter clutches in her palms. Dirt flecked and slimy, their slithering bodies jerk like arrows to come this way, this way. I find myself in the between. Ghost on one side. Children the other. And me forever pulled in twos and threes. My ghost was never patient nor is she proud. She is insatiable. Gobbling at time, grabby hands shoving to the front. Gesturing wildly and growling when I push her down. “Hush, hush, Little Ghost,” I say. But my ghost says that she has been patient for long enough. “The children are older now.”
She is engine and piston. A pistol shot in the dark. She knows the weight of leather reins in a loose-gripped palm. I clutch the slick clench of a smooth steering wheel. I shoulder the stuttering in both ghost and mother, neither of us ever fully reaching our destination. “We are running out of time.” The ghost and I say together.
Leah Richards is a writer and teacher with Writers in the Schools in Houston, Texas. Before moving to Houston, she lived for several years in Abu Dhabi, UAE, where she wrote the children’s book Fatima Flamingo Visits Abu Dhabi. Her writing can also be found in Hippocampus Magazine, The Nasiona, and Nailed Magazine amongst other places. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University’s low residency writing program in Paris.