The Collector of Debts
BY D. M. SPRATLEY
Though she’s been gone two years now, these people still dig up my mother’s name
from their mounds of debt to be collected. The payday loan rep is persistent
as mint in a garden—as in, You must be her daughter. I say, You are speaking to her ghost,
because it makes him stutter. No doubt he pictures my mother smirking into the phone.
(Inside me, a haint bubbles with laughter. We are neither of us wrong.)
The haint and I sit on the couch and cradle the dog, his hot breath rising and his belly
hoping the ceiling will reach down to pet it. We’ve set the phone aside and the lender
crackles through, his mouth a loop of ecstatic tongues, a list of things we no longer own
and which he says he plans to take from us. What else, we purr, once the house is gone?
so that his voice grows dull with spit and shame. The haint and I pat the dog’s head
delightedly, with the selfsame hand. Yes—let’s call us one—
for when the haint crossed the threshold of this home in spite of the sage I burned,
the garlic anchored in every doorway, every eye open to the world, she fit
herself inside me. (Perfect fit. Hand in glove.)
So when she pats the head of the dog, he sways like a dancer, giddy from our touch.
When she feeds him, he tumbles at our feet and asks for more.
When she lowers my soul into the well of sleep, he lies beside our body,
and he doesn’t dream of her sins, and she doesn’t dream at all, and I dream
that she shouts my name from the bottom of an impossible gorge, the bottom noisy
and inscrutable with chatter. She tells me to throw a rope down into the din, for her escape
from the land of the dead. (Where I could get pulled in.) (And when she calls, I answer.)
