The Green in Her Teeth

Maya sat across from her mother in the sterile hospital cafeteria, watching the old woman methodically arrange her spinach leaves into a perfect square. This was the new ritual—one of many that had emerged since the stroke.

"You've got..." Maya reached across the table, her palm hovering near her mother's face. "There's spinach. In your teeth."

Her mother laughed, that hollow, wind-chime sound that had become her default response to everything. She didn't try to remove it. She didn't seem to care.

The water in Maya's glass trembled. Someone had pushed a cart past their table. Everything in this place was on wheels—medication, food, bodies.

"They're all zombies," her mother had whispered during yesterday's physical therapy session, gesturing at the other patients with their shuffling walks and vacant expressions. "Don't let them turn me, Maya-bear."

The joke had landed hard. Maya had laughed until she cried, until a nurse with pitying eyes offered her a tissue.

Now her mother was trying to stand, one hand braced on the table, the other reaching for something Maya couldn't see. The spinach fell from her lip, green against the white floor.

"Mom, sit down."

"Your father," she said, her voice suddenly clear, suddenly sharp. "He's waiting. By the water."

Maya froze. Her father had been dead for seven years.

"He's not—Mom, Dad is gone. Remember?"

But her mother was already somewhere else, her eyes fixed on a point beyond Maya's shoulder. She smiled, and for a moment, Maya saw her mother—not this shell, not this slow-building catastrophe, but the woman who had once danced in the kitchen while cooking dinner, who had held Maya's palm against her pregnant belly when Maya was six and announced she was getting a little brother.

The brother who had never come. The miscarriage that had broken something inside her mother, something the stroke had finally finished.

"Spinach," her mother said, frowning at her hands. "I was making spinach. For your father."

Maya reached across the table and took her mother's cold hands in hers. "It's okay, Mom. We'll get you some spinach."

Behind them, a lunch cart rattled by. Somewhere a machine beeped. Her mother hummed a song Maya didn't recognize, and Maya wondered—not for the first time, and certainly not for the last—which of them was really the zombie here, going through the motions of love, of grief, of being someone's daughter, long after the person who had given her that name had already left the building.