Walls | Shauna Barbosa

Walls

She would dress herself by texture and design. She told me she doesn’t remember when she realized she was colorblind. Everything is the same Ladybug, but you, you are different. My mother would smile, her smile, as if she could see the morning brown of my eyes.

For an entire summer my mom and I lived in a quaint room on the top floor of a four-story home my father grew up in. He was away traveling with a team of doctors for two months. Maybe I was eleven.

We opened our eyes when the flies danced inside our ears. I’d look around, a green room. All walls painted teal green. The dry dripping paint suggested my father and his brothers went over the room with borrowed brushes from relatives. He said he was a painter.

I loved looking at the walls. Green like the sea. Green like the trees. Green like my grandmother’s eyes. Green like my mother’s favorite blouse that she chose, by texture and design. I swam in the walls; green in the walls, felt love, danced around in the heat of the summer. The flies are turning green! I’d yell. She’d smile. Imagining green felt like the clothes she washed by hand at night.

I’d wake up to sunlight and color. She’d wake up blessing the room with the sign of the cross. I watched her every morning. Her forehead, her chest, to the left, to the right. She did it each time she entered the room. I’d watch her, feeling protected.

One morning the flies weren’t dancing. She lay still. My father, his first morning back home, yelling her name. Moving slowly – my forehead, my chest, left shoulder, right shoulder. I walked over to my mother and put my head next to hers.

The next time she opened her eyes, after the sign of the cross, she whispered, they’re turning.

words by Shauna Barbosa