family business
she knew she wasn’t special. she got everywhere and she stank. she wasn’t completely unattractive. the patterns she left on things had a sort of splodgy charm. but you could smudge her face off with your finger and just be left with an old grey-white wall so I guess you’d say she was nothing special. being nothing special meant she spread herself really quite thinly. quite graspingly. trying to do enough to be enough and then ending up just a smear. an irritation. a thing you put up with. like a broken shelf in an old rental flat; you’d never stay with her long enough to bother to mend her. she was a ‘temporary space’. she was a ‘make do’. she was a ‘it’s fine for now’. she was ‘turn the lights down low enough and you notice her less’. she was a low level stain in most people’s lives she knew. and she knew it. people like that always do.
you can’t blame her though. if your mum is bleach what can you expect? if your mother was a thing to be kept out of reach of children, you might end up grubbing around for somewhere else to feel at home, mightn’t you? you might end up spreading yourself across the walls of other people’s homes in the hope that they might just eventually give up and let you move in. if only to avoid the sheer bother of getting you out. you might, might’n you?. if your mother was a threat to the ecosystem cos she snarled up lovely bacteria and named it dirt, you might feel it necessary to make a lifetime of staining. a lifetime of being a mess. of being an ugly mark on a wall for all to see. you might.
but don’t worry. its not a sad story this. well it’s not even a story is it? its a match strike. a flash look in someone else’s kitchen when the lights come in the flats opposite. it’s just a glimpse. but they are ok. bleach doesn’t know what she’s done and is too busy thrashing down other people’s drains to notice. and mildew. well. she’ll get by. that’s what muck does, isn’t it? gets by. so don’t worry. they’re alright. thrashing and getting by. in any case, the end point is just the same. it’s just the same. even if they are not
