Last Supper
BY GENEVIEVE WATSON
Los Angeles, 2022
As autumn leaves fold in on themselves
like paper cranes, my family holds
a homecoming—it’s strange to call it
a homecoming because the woman
at the head of the table has six days left
to live. That night, the house is feverish
with moonlight. I find my eyes pulled in
by the sliver of her shadow, disfigured
in its contortion, a crescent moon spilling
across the satin tablecloth. By now, she has
forgotten how to cook & her children
never learned, so they bring dishes
from the Chinese grocery store, try their best
to recreate the nights they spent relishing
her lo bo gao. As the table becomes
an altar, I hold a dry tangerine in my mouth
like a sentence I can’t say, a sentence refusing
to be spoken. As a child, I imagined the day
I would learn to coat tomatoes in sugar
like she did. As a child, I imagined
death as a house in flames. But here, nobody says
a word. Plates pile around her
in delicate mountains. In the hallway, a watercolor
sampan careens down a waterfall—even it makes
a muted splash. Somewhere down the street, this reunion
is real. This house is not a temple, the leaves
hang heavy and green. In her paintings, the waterfalls
freeze like faces. But here, obscured
by a mask, I no longer see the vowels take shape
on her lips. The accent that raised me turns
foreign. When I touch her, I touch a ghost, the tenderness
trembles her wet hair, loosing like tangled lace
between my fingers. In the end, a text will break
through the early morning fog, saying it was
clean, sterile and white. My family marks
the morning on a calendar with red ink
but I saw her death before she even died—
that night, through the eye
of the golden doorknob, I watched like a god.
