Resentful

_____________ ___Resentful________________

“Virgin” is an inappropriate term for untouched forests.

As the sojourner knows; the virgin forest is nothing, if not whorish. Even now as sweet, musky, morels overflow his pale, the forest exchanges pollen shamelessly.

¤

         We sit around.

         My mother, for instance, sits at the kitchen table fiddling with a fingernail file over a cup of coffee. She waits for the next meal.

         I sit too. I'm a writer, and the computer's my kitchen table.

         I cook the meals for her and sometimes bath her when she's feeling poorly. I dress her and buy her stupid emery boards.

         We don't talk much anymore; the resentful are prone to silence. At least, that's so in my mother’s case; she's a lover of quiet desperation.  She believes it’s my job to figure her out, to discover what's bothering her presently, and then to uncover the source of her current resentment. And when I do, and I confront her with my discovery, she's supposed to rage at me and release all that pent-up resentment. But she doesn't. She moves on and starts right to work on the next topic of resentment from her thick catalogue of bitterness.

One such time happened when I suggested that she forgive my father for his indiscretions. She calmly got up from the table, made a show of how difficult it was for her to walk, retrieved the coffee pot from the stove and poured us both a cup.

“I did that a long time ago,” she tells me.

         I ask if she wants to talk about it, and she answers with an astonishingly cheery, “No.”

She's supposed to rage at me, rail against me for being a male and therefore implicitly deceitful. She is supposed to tell me what a bastard my father was—a whore monger—and then she should cry, but she never does any of those things.

         And so the game goes. It's her life, and now as my youth grows erstwhile, it is my life too. Perhaps it always was.

         She'll make noises soon; it's nearly lunch, and she's sanded her finger nails to the quick. Besides, the coffee pot's empty. But today, I don't care. I'm in a spiteful mood. I could even consider myself bit resentful.

         I can't stop watching her as she sits at the kitchen table, even to the neglect of my writing. She watches TV, and I try to ignore her. If she should happen to glance in my direction, I will turn to the computer monitor and feign concentration.

         I delay the next meal and sit watching her. I know it won't be long before she climbs stiffly from her chair and moves with creaks and groans toward the refrigerator to make a sandwich. She'll make one for me too, so I understand that I've neglected her again. But I'll refuse it—at least for a couple of minutes.

         Eventually, we eat together in silence at the kitchen table