After your birth mother dies, you find it easy to picture her body as another decaying object in her hoard.  It’s gotten worse since the last time you were here – you haven’t been back to visit since you were fifteen, and you don’t know how you feel about it now.

“You don’t have to do this,” says Auntie, whom you still call Auntie even though she’s been your mother ever since you were seven years old.

Your birth mother was her sister, too, and if you don’t help, she’ll have to do this alone.  Out of obligation, out of love, out of an enduring desire to protect her sister from scrutinizing eyes.  She wasn’t always like this, is something you’ve heard Auntie say more times than you can remember.  She used to be so loving.  

By which she means, She used to love people.  Not just stuff.

“I want to.”  The rubber gloves make your hands feel powdery.  You tie bandanas around your mouths and noses as you work.

You load body-sized trash bags, Darth Vader black, one after the other after the other after the other.  The ones you’ve filled stand around like people, watching you work.  You fill trash bags till you run out, and it doesn’t even seem like you’ve made a difference.

The hoard still stands taller than you, in every room, as if the house has been hit by a tsunami of junk.

There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason for the things she kept.  Most of it seems to be tupperware containers, old clothes, boxes filled with boxes filled with toothbrushes, magazines, newspapers, markers with the caps off.  Pots and pans, empty cans, coolers filled with yet more miscellaneous junk.  Everything that can be filled with junk, is filled with junk.

There are ironing boards.  Old refrigerators.  Broken TVs.  Wrappers.  Coffee makers.  Stuffed animals half-eaten by mice.  You remember some of them.

“Well,” says Auntie, peeling off her rubber gloves, “I guess it’s time for dinner, anyway.  We’ll pick up some more trash bags tomorrow.”

You don’t feel much like dinner.  Some rooms were worse than others, and you may have gotten used to peeling back boxes to reveal algae or mold or skittering bugs, but your stomach hasn’t.

“Pizza?” suggests Auntie.

“Pizza sounds good to me.”

The pizza boxes and plastic utensils remind you of the hoard, but you close your eyes and make yourself eat two slices.

The fact Auntie was able to take you was a kiss from God.  The older you get, the more you realize how fortunate you were.  If your birth mother didn’t have a relative, you could have been placed with anyone.  Anyone who was willing to be paid to have a child in their house.

You look around the pizza place, and think about ending up with any of the strangers around you.

Between the visits from social workers, your mother’s hoard only grew.  You’ve gotten used to hearing, Your mother did the best she could, and, Your mother was sick.  You remember Auntie visiting in those early days, trying to get her to throw out just one thing, anything – it was an old raincoat, you think, or a deflated raft, with a big hole torn through it.  Your aunt pulled, and your mother just clung harder and sobbed, like it was her child.

You’re not sure if she did the best she could – maybe she did.  And you know she was sick.  It doesn’t change the simple fact that she valued every object in that house more than she valued you.  Even trash.

That night, you dream of going through that house, opening door after door and just going deeper and deeper in.  The rooms keep getting bigger and darker, the peaks and valleys of trash getting taller and deeper.  You feel like you’re in your mother’s womb again, forgotten, just one object among many.

You look around, and you think about how your mother must have felt by the time she died.  The loneliness of only loving things that couldn’t love you back, throwing offering after offering into the cavern inside you, never being able to fill it.

You wake up crying, and you just get louder, sob after sob wracking its way out of you.

“Honey?” says Auntie, switching on the light.  It’s like you’re a child again.

You hold out your arms, and she fills them.  She hugs you tight.  You hug her tighter.  You want to get inside her somehow, to change the body you were born from.  You don’t want to be from your mother’s house.

You press your face into the crook of her neck, her honeyed hair, and you sob.

“Mommy,” you cry, over and over, “Mommy.”