Sabina

by Margaret Sefton

At five in the afternoon in December the dark skin of night closes in over day. Across the street from Sabina's townhouse the last glimmer of gold, the fire sky, simmers through the pines, the scrub oak, the palms, and she wishes to hold onto that moment of the final sun forever, a diamond in her hand, its flash, its promise. But of course there is no stopping the night. It shuts down a liveliness in her as if it were the coming of age itself, as if it were death itself come unbidden.

He would have called her melodramatic, "he" being her ex, of course. She would have said she was merely acknowledging her reality, this sense of being subject.

And so she plowed through on this Monday, with her experience, in this melodramatic frame, wondering this: What to provide her son for his dinner when he begins his week with her. When the earth shuts down, this is no small task. The weeks her child is with his father she eats only leftovers, scours the crisper and cabinets for anything that would serve as a food source. She is juggling bills and doctors and medicine and a crumbling house and car. She eats things past their due date, sometimes way past. One time she got sick.

When it is time for her son to spend Christmas week with her she knows if she appears desperate or unorganized, she risks losing contact. She must address her responsibilities as dark skies threaten to sap her and so she takes a risk: She texts for her son to pick up carryout on his way home from soccer practice.

"Does your ex think you unfit to parent?" This from her therapist months ago when she was charged to come off of a controlled substance. She was strung out and barely able to carry a thought from one sentence to the next. She sometimes forgot words altogether. And yet this one word rammed through her: unfit. The word reverberated in her skull with no pill to protect her. This seemed unfair, outrageous, even, that she would be subjected to this. She and her eighteen year old had been through worse - the threat of her death and chemo treatments - and come out together, it seemed. She left her therapist, sent her a text and asked her about that word - "unfit" - but then didn't really try to understand her therapist's return text, just told her she wasn't going to come in at this time. Sufficiently vague. But when the sky fell early the following winter, there was no pill to guard against the effects of that hour of darkness.

Though she could speak this December "unfit" would never leave her, she knew. It unnerved her that her ex might see the text to her son to help her secure food. Would he see this as "unfit?" It is amazing how many things come out in a divorce, over a conference table, a smooth blond wood surface in a room across the street from the fountain Sabina described in her first published piece which her then husband proudly framed for her and hung it on their wall. And yet, years later, at the mediation: All the small slights, the things told in confidence, trotted out, the hurts.

But there is also this: Had she not bought real maple syrup for her husband and son when she was married? After the divorce, when she bought an imitation brand to save money so she could buy pancake mix too, and health insurance, her son spoke of his friend's house, where he ate "real syrup." This became for her a secret symbol of families who had not been broken, and almost all families in her son's conservative Christian school were still intact, a school where Sabina now felt like a pariah though she had once felt close to many of the women, where she had even been involved.

Somehow Sabina knew the Jesus of the Christian school would have actually been eating imitation syrup with the tax collectors and sinners, the broken, the unwashed people scrounging to eat in the face of powerful ruling religious classes.

And at the outset of her son's soccer season this year, coinciding with early darkness and regrets, her son greets her after a game on the sidelines and calls another woman his mom. Why do all the dramas of our lives get enacted on fields? Is there so much intensity there, invisible, that we slip into it whether the field be in the shape of a rectangle or diamond? And though things are redeemed, there are also things lost on fields never to be found again.

Still, Sabina's contest has always been with the sky, not a person nor a disappointment related to a person, not a field nor a disappointment related to a field. No matter, she faces the murdering night on this Monday of Christmas week, waiting for her son to bring sustenance, determined to serve pancakes with syrup even if she must boil brown sugar and water over a meager stove for want of money, the little bit of money having been transferred to the carryout and the stores for the gifts under the tree.

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Meg Sefton's work has appeared in Best New Writing, The Dos Passos Review, Ginosko Literary Journal, and other publications. She lives in Winter Springs, Florida with her son and their little white dog Annie, a Coton de Toulear.