Communing with My Mother at Home Alone by Margaret Luongo
I keep writing silences into my work, but mostly I remember her sounds—chopping onions, kneading dough, brushing her teeth. The patience in her voice—audible. Singing “Over the Rainbow” in the bathtub. Panic rising—“Where’s the baby?”—when I hid from her. At a party, my ear pressed to her back, listening to the origin of sound.
In a recording from the early ‘70s, just before her death, she tells my sister about a patient in the nursing home where she works. My sister adds sympathetic sounds. I shriek something unintelligible that translates as ‘me’.
Do I sound like her? I hear weary patience, but where are the sweeter sounds? “You see,” my aunt, her twin, tells me, “when you are sick you sink.” We don’t say depressed.
At home alone while unpacking groceries with the radio on, I feel her in 1963, driving my siblings to school and turning the car around while the world whirls. I move in the kitchen, tracing her steps from paper bag to fridge. Across that decade, assassinations unspool. I watch her; I am her. It’s just us, everyone at work or school. What would she say about today and all its silences? I wait for information, instructions, sustenance.
Artist’s Statement
In my short fiction I’ve explored what form can do, experimenting with brevity, the fantastic, and modular sequences—collage-like arrangements, some based in historical research. I’ve been driven by the urge to understand, to imagine interior lives, to speculate about the future. My first story collection focused on women constructing identities despite the stories our culture creates for them. My second collection, featuring stories about art and war, explores the conflicting urges of creation and destruction innate in humans.
My current work—Attribution of Influence—follows similar lines. The title essay weaves together stories about my father’s PTSD and the theme of lost art. Each essay shows the influence of the absent—the missing person, the abandoned places, the objects of desire, and the ghost lives that drive us without our realizing it.
Margaret Luongo’s prose has appeared in Tin House, FENCE, The Cincinnati Review, Five Points, Consequence Magazine, the Pushcart Prize anthology, and other venues. Her story collections, If the Heart is Lean (2008) and History of Art (2016), were published by LSU Press. She teaches creative writing at Miami University in Ohio, where she lives with her husband, artist Billy Simms, and their cats.