Rewind

The summer my mother is dying of cancer, her collarbone looks like a wooden coat hanger and the soft, flowered pajamas she wears look almost empty. I sit at her feet crying, and I tell her I want to die. In one month, my mother will be dead, but she smiles widely, and she grasps my hands—Don’t worry, she says, we are going to get better. How easily I had let those words spill from my lips. Every day now, I rewind, swallow the words up before they can escape, stuff them back down my throat where they belong.