Step on a Crack

My mother is walking crooked again. She has slipped another disc in her back and she is in a great deal of pain. She can hardly move at all. Most of the time, she has to lie completely flat on her bed, because it hurts too much for her to sit upright or to walk. When she does walk, she uses a cane and limps while her back curves outward, like a question mark. She is waiting to get in to a hospital for another spinal surgery; her fourth in less than five years.

My mother lies in bed with her eyes closed to block out the daylight. She puts her hand to her forehead. She says, I don’t know how to make this stop. Neither do I. So we make phone calls to doctors and chiropractors and get referrals to surgeons in Denver and California and Arizona. We make phone calls. We leave messages. We wait.

Outside, autumn storms drift in from the north and the west. Gray clouds swarm the horizon and the sky starts spitting rain. All of the leaves are floating down from their branches; quiet winds sweep away the last remaining flecks of yellow from pale Aspen limbs.

Lately, all of my dreams are in black and white. In my most recent dream, I am sitting on a bench next to a forgotten set of crumbling train tracks. Everything is gray and colorless, except for a single, rust orange leaf stuck on the corroding railroad ties. I am alone in an empty field, waiting for a train that never comes. Behind me, through a speaker mounted on the rooftop of an abandoned train station, a recorded voice repeats an old childhood rhyme over and over again: Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. I wait for a train that never comes and listen to the mechanical voice seeping through the static of the crackling speaker behind me. The same rhyme repeating on a loop. Step on a crack, step on a crack. The ground beneath my feet is shriveled and dry, split like shattered glass. I stare at the rust orange leaf that is just out of my reach. I keep my feet hovered above the splintered, broken ground. Step on a crack, step on a crack. I am alone and I am waiting for a train. The sky is gray and colorless. I am stuck motionless, like the leaf. Cracks are everywhere and I cannot find a safe place to step. The railroad tracks decay in front of me. Wood and iron decomposing. The leaf begins to disintegrate. I keep my feet hovered above the splintered ground. There is nowhere safe to step. I stare at the rust orange leaf. It withers and fades.

I bring my mother trays with bowls of soup and cups of coffee and plates of muffins. But the pain makes her nauseous and always ruins her appetite. I stack books for her to read on the nightstand. I wash dishes. I sweep the floor. I wait for doctors to call. I hold her x-rays up to the faint sunlight coming in through the window. Her skeleton glows bright white on the page. Dim silhouettes of falling leaves flutter behind the film; tiny shadows flickering through her curved spine with its bulging disc. I listen for the phone to ring. I wait.

I hold the x-rays of my mother’s backbone and I stare out the window at wet yellow leaves pinned flat against the dark, soaked street. The pavement is full of cracks. A heavy sheet imprinted with images of my mother’s glowing spine dangle from my fingertips. I stand still, stuck. Everywhere, cracks. And I cannot find a safe place to step.