The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets - By Kathleen Alcott Page 0,11

he loved it for how much James had loved it, by proxy of loving James; it is clear he hadn’t wanted to hurt anything that amounted to love, that he hadn’t seen the equation clearly.

I know my mother because my father has given her to me. As concession for her not being around, he racked his brain for details that would soothe the lack, that would give me proof beyond photographs that she had existed. As such, they are the closest I have to memories of my mother, and though I cannot attest to witnessing her as an obscenely messy eater, I can smile upon the discovery of ketchup on my blouse and insist happily on its passed-down origin.

There is one story my father could not tell me, so I told it to myself: my mother in a loose nightgown, her hair falling around her, groggy, looking out the window that morning. She opened the refrigerator and noted that like always, milk was low but butter in excess. She was troubled by a dream the contents of which she couldn’t recall, only the unsettling conclusion. I had just learned to crawl and her body was tired from chasing me. There are variables, of course—what, exactly, was different about the way she took her coffee cup down from the cupboard so that her hip rubbed the knob on the oven? How long did it take before she knew, and did she, with a distance she recognized as strange, for a moment find the lapping of the flames beautiful?

The memory I have, which I know is not a memory but rather something my brain horrifically constructed over and over again during my childhood, shows my mother between the stove and counter, a tight space a foot and a half wide, trying to get a better look out the highest window, which was small and situated unusually high. In some versions she is spying on our neighbor, a lonely, funny man named Warren my father later befriended as a solitary man himself; sometimes she is watching our cat’s slow attack of a bird. She turns because she thinks she’s heard me cry out in my sleep, forgetting her proximity to the stove.

The fire travels up the light cotton to the neckline (the material stretched with my tiny hands), catching on its way her hair, which is almost the same color as the flames. Her first reaction is slow; she just looks down and watches as her body grows warmer than it’s ever been, than she ever thought possible. She holds her palms out incredulously, she calls for my father, she notices for the first time that the too-bright yellow they painted the kitchen is something she loves fiercely, not just pleasant but exquisite. She calls for my father, she whirls, she remembers vaguely to drop to the ground but it seems as if the heat is lifting her, she is overwhelmed by the smell her hair is making. The cotton is clinging to her as if another layer of skin; she is impressed by how quickly something foreign has become a part of her. She calls for my father. At this point, I am crying.

She calls for him, but he cannot hear her. His great hands clutch at lilac flannel sheets as if clinging to a rope; the sweet smell of liquor clings to him cloudlike, fermenting. In the kitchen, the flames have reached around to heart and lung. His mouth forms an O, waiting for the dream’s punctuation. It is Warren, our neighbor, who smells the smoke rising from my mother’s flesh and climbs in through the bottom window always left a crack open for the cat and calls 911 and rises my father, whose dreams have left him with an erection that falls promptly while he holds my mother’s limp and growing limper hand.

Since then my father has had difficulty sleeping, no matter how high the dosage of the sleeping pills or whiskey or a brief phase of cheap white wine that I gently teased him about. I grew used to his silhouette in my doorway, his eyes squinting to make out the rising and falling of my chest. Sometimes, I would wake to see him sitting at my desk, tinkering with the loose knob on the third drawer down or straightening my schoolbooks into piles; once, he had opened my algebra textbook and begun solving equations. I pretended to keep sleeping and hoped, for his sake, that he could find