The Weather Inside Us

Maya sat in the beige room that smelled of antiseptic and forgotten things, counting out the pills into her mother's palm. Seven tablets, all different colors, like a rainbow crafted by pharmaceutical companies. The vitamin D supplement was yellow, shaped like a tiny tear.

"These will make you strong, Mom," Maya said, though she wasn't sure anymore what strength meant when your own brain was erasing itself like wet chalk on a sidewalk.

Her mother, Elena — who had once climbed Kilimanjaro, who had once taught Maya to read by tracing letters onto her back with a fingertip — stared at her hand. The creases in Elena's palm were deep canyons now, mapped by seventy-six years of holding things: children, husbands, dreams, failures.

"My hands used to be beautiful," Elena said suddenly, the fog clearing for the first time in three months. "Your father used to kiss them. Every night before we slept, he'd kiss my palms like they were something sacred."

Maya felt her throat close. It had been five years since her father died. Two years since Elena started forgetting things that mattered. Six months since Maya had placed her in this facility, each visit a fresh betrayal.

Outside the window, lightning fractured the sky, purple-white veins threading through storm clouds dark as old bruises. Thunder followed, a low rumble that seemed to come from inside the walls, from inside the hollow spaces between them.

"You look like him when you're worried," Elena said, and then she smiled — really smiled, not the confused, empty smile she'd worn for months. "Maya. My Maya. Have you been here long?"

The vitamin D tablet fell from Maya's fingers and rolled across the laminate floor, a small yellow thing trying to escape the room, escape the moment, escape how much it hurt — this lightning-strike clarity that would vanish as quickly as it had arrived, leaving them both in darkness again.

"Not long enough," Maya said, and took her mother's hand, and pressed her lips to those deep, beautiful creases, and held on until the storm passed.