Remedies.

I kept the aloe plant on top of the microwave I hardly used. The way my building faced, the kitchen got just enough sunlight for it to breathe in. I liked to think having a little plant there gave me better oxygen, recycled the old stuff I inhaled and exhaled through the apartment. I could imagine it swirling and undulating like the clouds on a weather map you saw on the news. The plant occupied a little ceramic pot, painted with yellow sunflowers. His mother grew several of them, and once they developed, their lance like leaves reaching far past the edge of the pot and onto the sill, she would uproot them and plant them in soft clay rich soil in their backyard. Sometimes I think about the plants there on the sill, amongst the plethora of medicine bottles, all different sizes and colors like little trinkets. I think of her there, wrapping her plush hands around a coffee mug, sipping tea, watching her little plants in the window amongst the bottles, wondering when a relapse would hit. The first time she had an attack, he was at work, he told me, and the hospital had called him first, telling him his mother had been brought in from her job unable to move her arms or legs. He wiped his face with the back of his hand when he told me, fingered the aloe plant that his mother had just given us, a note attached telling me to snip and end off when her son burned himself on a pan or with hot grease. I thought about how intuitive mother’s are when, that night, searing a soft shell crab for us, the little monster cracked and spit hot juice onto his wrists. His mother told me later how she would go to the backyard when him and his brother were little, and their baby skin pulsed red on their bare backs and shoulders from playing in the sprinklers for too long, how she would take her gardening shears that she kept in a neat basket next to her gloved, patterned with lilies, and snip an end off, rubbing the cool, gel-like secretions over their bodies. That night I did the same, snipped of an end with kitchen shears and made him sit still in his protests. I coated my fingertips in the fluid, thick like sap, and rubbed the sores there in little figure eights.

I think about his burns, those little boils and blisters and I think about his mother, and the lesions on her brain that make her body attack itself. I think about how she cooks dinner and gardens and does everything for everyone but herself. I think about pain seizing some parts of her body while others buzz and go numb, as if there is a short circuit somewhere. I think of her rubbing that aloe over her sons’ bodies and I water the plant she gave me, every day. It’s tentacles reaching just past the pot now, out to me. This is how I remember.