Livers and Lungs

Aiden Baker

 

My stepmom always watched the same movies dubbed over in Swedish. She didn’t speak English, but she had somehow found a stack of bootleg VHS tapes, American classics with subpar translations. With the dubbing came an uncanny lag from mouth to mouth, the actor’s lips never quite matching their voice. Breakfast at Tiffany’s made weird, the dubbing turning Audrey Hepburn’s grinning wit into something totally other. After school I’d come home and find her in her chair, eyes fixed to the screen, enraptured. I’d grab an orange from the big wicker basket that sat on our fridge and join her in the living room, peeling and watching as a clunky “Moon River” played out. She was always beautiful, Audrey, balanced just so on that window sill, her hair wrapped up in a milky white scarf. I didn’t speak Swedish but I’d watch, sprawled out in the living room with that woman, the closest thing I had to a mother. To this day, with the thought of those movies comes the smell of citrus peels.

One day, in the crisp early air of October, with the leaves just beginning to rust, to crunch underfoot, I pushed through our door and shrugged off my backpack and saw her there, slumped in her soft pink recliner. That day, her neck was bent at an impossible angle. Vertigo was playing on screen, Grace Kelly’s skirt swishing as she ran up the bell tower. I poked my stepmom, pushed my finger into flesh that gave way. She didn’t wake up.

A heart palpitation, doctors said. We buried her beside a Blackthorn tree. Sometimes, when I visit, I’ll catch a crow perched on her stone. Crows are smart, or so I’ve read. But all that wisdom gets stuck in their throat.

 

Aiden Baker is a writer and educator living in Berkeley, Calif. Her work can be found in Witness, Ninth Letter, Orca, and elsewhere. She tweets @wake_n_baker.