‘97 Bonnie and Clyde

bonnie’s mother

You know how it is when you love someone?

And the hard part, the bad part, the Jerry Springer show part is that you never stop loving someone.  There’s always a piece of them in your heart.

Now that she is dead, she tries to remember only the love.  She imagines every blow a kiss, the make-up that inexpertly covers the bruises, the cigarette burn on her thigh – all these things, she decides, were gestures of love.

She wonders what her daughter will do.

She wonders what her daughter will be.

She is holding a cake, in her death.  It is the cake she was always going to bake for her little one.  Maybe they would have mixed it together.

They would have sat and eaten it and smiled, all three of them, and the apartment would have slowly filled with laughter and with love.