Ashes In The Vase [Wraith]
Every year it starts the week before, when the grocery aisles bloom with pink and white ambush,
Card racks yawning wide, covered in pastel lies about perfect mothers who never swore, never drank, never pushed.
You stand there with a basket full of normal life, staring at row after row of scripted forgiveness and soft-focus hugs,
Every card shouting in glitter that love is simple, that gratitude is easy, that nobody’s mom was cruel or hooked on pills or shrugged.
A woman next to you grabs a bouquet without looking, eyes already wet, talking on her phone about brunch at eleven,
Her voice keeps cracking at the edges while she jokes about calories and mimosas like this isn’t her second year pretending mom isn’t living in heaven.
You drift sideways toward the flowers, rows of jailed roses sweating under plastic, stems drinking the same recycled water from a shallow tub,
Some heads already browned at the tips, petals curling like they know what it is to hold a family together and then get tossed in the trash after the meal, no one bothering to scrub.
The sign above the display screams that this is how you prove you care,
Buy the bundle, sign the card, show up with a smile, swallow anything you actually needed to share.
You pick up a rose, thumb grazing a thorn, and the sting feels honest in a way the slogans never manage,
A bright red ache that doesn’t pretend this day is healing instead of just a fresh bandage.
Back home, the table is set like always, plates in the good pattern you never use except when guilt is in season,
Someone ironed the cloth last night while watching reruns, cursing under their breath at stains they couldn’t explain or reason.
There’s an extra place laid out, knife and fork aligned for hands that stopped coming years ago,
Napkin folded just right, chair pushed in, a little performance in case her ghost decides this is the year she forgives the last no-show.
In the kitchen, you stir gravy like it did anything wrong, listening to relatives move in low orbit around each other,
They talk weather and recipes and medication doses, skipping every jagged detail of being raised by a human being and not a greeting-card mother.
Someone cracks a joke about how “she’s watching from above” and three people flinch in perfect sync,
Your aunt refills her wine glass to the brim and laughs too high, cheeks flushed an angry pink.
Later, the dishes stack in the sink like broken promises, soap bubbles trying to hide the mess,
You dry your hands on a towel that still smells like last year’s roast, like perfume and sweat and the aftermath of “doing your best.”Then the house quiets in that thick, almost holy way, everyone scattered to couches, rooms, cars, phones,
And you stand in the doorway to the dining room, staring at that empty chair like it owes you back pay on a lifetime of broken bones.
The vase on the table holds the roses you finally bought, stems sliced, petals perfect in the overhead light,
From a distance it looks beautiful, almost cinematic, until you move closer and see two petals already bruising at the edges, losing their fight.
You remember the hospital room, the machine that breathed in little gasps while her chest barely tried,
Remember how Mother’s Day fell three days after the funeral, and you still caught yourself reaching for the phone before you remembered she’d lied.
You remember other years, other kitchens, her back turned, you washing dishes small enough for your hands to drown,
Her cigarette burning in the ashtray by the window, smoke writing curses in the air while she told you you were dragging her down.
Sometimes she kissed your scraped knees and tucked you in, sometimes she broke plates and called you names that echo even now,
The world insists you pick one version, saint or monster, then clap along to the slideshow, take a bow.
Nobody posts pictures of the scars in their Mother’s Day captions,
Just brunch shots and dying flowers and carefully curated interactions.
Still, if you turn down the volume and swipe slow, you can see the tightness in jaws, the too-bright smiles,
Little kids clinging for dear life to women who aren’t ready, adults clinging to memory or guilt for miles.
You skip the scroll, walk outside instead, night hanging low, the air thick with lilac and lawnmower and leftover arguments that never got their names said,
Streetlights hum above you like tired beehives, each porch offering some variation of this ritual, every house with its own quiet unsaid.
In one window, a woman in a cardigan holds a framed photo to her chest, shoulders shaking,
In another, a grown man sits alone at a table with a store-bought cake, one slice eaten, the rest untouched, phone dark, hands quaking.
Down the block, kids run with sparklers left over from some other holiday, bored and loud,
Their mother yells from the stoop to watch the street, to come in soon, to not burn the night down with their crowd.
She looks tired enough to fold in on herself, hair escaping its tie, shirt stained, eyes half-shut,
You catch her gaze for one long second and you both nod, acknowledging that love is sometimes just showing up and not getting in a cut.
It hits you then how this day is built like a trap with a soft lining,
All that sugar layered over bone, all that praise hiding the grinding.
For some, it’s a gentle sunrise, pancakes in bed, kids in flannel, an easy joke about getting old,
For others, it’s a gravity well, pulling every unresolved ache into one date circled in bright ink, hard to hold.
Back inside, you kill every light but one, leaving the roses in a cone of yellow on the table,
The house around them a shadow box, silence stretched thin but stable.
The flowers already droop by a fraction, as if the weight of being symbolic is more than their stems signed up for,
Their scent thickens the air with that sweet-sour edge you get right before rot, right before the floor.
You sit down across from them, hands flat on the cloth, and talk to the empty chair,
Not the polite memories, not the edited flashes you trot out for relatives who pretend they care.
You say her name like you’re testing a sore tooth,
You tell the whole truth: the nights you wrapped her in blankets when she drank too hard, the mornings she forgot your birthday, the one time she showed up to your show and cried in the back, the way she died without ever saying “I’m sorry” clean.
The room does not strike you down. The roses do not blacken or burst.
Nothing moves except your chest, ribs flexing against a grief that never really left, just rehearsed.
You cry a little, laugh once, swear more than any holiday movie would allow,
Then you raise your glass of tap water, just for you, just this once, and say, “You were a mess. So am I. We existed. That counts somehow.”
On the mantle sits a cracked picture frame you keep meaning to replace,
Photo inside half-faded, her arm around you, both of you blinking against sun, neither smiling in the same space.
The light from the single lamp shifts, catching dust motes that float over the table like lazy spirits with nothing new to report,
You watch them drift through the glow, tiny ghosts of skin and cloth and time that fell away without filling out any court.
The night stretches, slow and heavy, but not entirely hopeless,
More honest than the commercials, less cruel than the old script that said you had to confessTo being grateful without qualifiers, reverent without question,
You sit with the mess instead, grieving the mother you lost, the mother you never had, the mother you wish you could have been given, without any forced lesson.
Mother’s Day in misery, they’d call it, if anyone bothered to market this side,
The version where you send no flowers, buy no cards, and still sit at the table with both fists open wide.
Where you let the ghosts come in and sit, not to haunt, not to pretend the past was fine,
Just to admit that love and damage can share the same spine.
By midnight the roses have started to drop a petal here and there,
Soft little thuds on the tablecloth, quiet votes for wear and tear.
You don’t throw them out yet. You let them sag, let them be mortal in the lamplight,
Somewhere between shrine and garbage, just like the memory of the woman who taught you how to fight.
Tomorrow you’ll toss the flowers, wash the dishes, pack the chair back against the wall like any other day,
The world will move on to the next sale, the next holiday, the next reason to act okay.
Tonight you stay right here in the crack between Hallmark and hell,
Breathing, existing, not wrapping this in a bow, not pretending you can tellWho was right, who was wrong, who gets forgiven first,
Only that your heart still beats, messy and stubborn, in a body that survived the best and worst.