The Day I Walked Into the Wrong Room
Chapter 6: Fear of Heights
The shy one, with her palm-sized breasts, shuffled over on her knees and pulled me to her breast before I could see her face. Caraway-flavored milk dripped on my tongue, and I had to suck harder, use a pumping action with my lips, to get the milk to flow, which stopped when I took a breath.
Mary-Ann worked in construction and built small wooden buildings. She often works higher on the building than her fellow construction workers, almost all male. She had no fear of heights before her son, Emel, but each day, the fear grew. Each day, the climb grew harder even as it took less effort. The fear for a motherless child, of a fall that would prevent her from seeing him again.
As she thinks about his little toes, like little pink buttons, and his pudgy little fingers, so uncoordinated, but when he grabs something, he never lets go, her fear travels with her milk, into my stomach, where it swirls, thickens, and poisons my blood. It travels down my legs to my toes, through my arms to my fingers, and up into my head. Blackness, interspaced with red and blue swirls, like a vortex, the fear pulls at me, like it wants to pull me down, to the bottom.
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