“The day my mother dies, I get my eyebrows done.” Like that, we’re dropped into the world of Logan Furlonge’s “Flying Over the Wine-Dark Sea,” where a trip to the salon, where no one knows the narrator’s mother, becomes an afternoon of cathartic reflection. “Flying Over the Wine-Dark Sea” explores the complicated grief that follows the loss of a parent.
The day my mother dies, I get my eyebrows done. Get off the phone with my sister, the conversation a blubbering mess and not much of a conversation at all, and click to the link immortalized by the unclosed tab on my phone.
It’s March, a new month, and they’ve put a fresh background up on the website: the swooping walls of a canyon, centuries of age turned to burgundy waves. Homer’s wine-dark sea, I remember—my mother’s favorite line to rattle off, to proudly present as if her years of education could be boiled down into an epitaph—before clicking to the page that says SELECT ONE OR MORE SERVICE. I select eyebrows, then, moments away from paying, go back and select them all. I should treat myself. Eyebrows. A facial. New nails. Maybe a shade of red, but that seems like the color a husband’s mistress wears to his wife’s funeral. Blue, like waves. Green, like poison. Black, but that might be too on the nose.
ARE YOU OKAY WITH ANYONE WHO IS AVAILABLE? the next page reads. I’ll take anyone. I’ll take the woman behind the cash register who doesn’t understand that when she looks at Instagram on her phone the music throughout the salon stops. I’ll take someone walking outside with a sharp enough blade.
When I was ten and my sister was eight our mother cut her finger while slicing potatoes. We didn’t understand what was happening while our father rushed her out the door, a dish towel pressed to her hand. I only put it together when I went into the kitchen and saw the blood drops in the sink, a few wayward splatters on the white tile.
“It’ll be okay,” I said to my sister, because she was crying. “Mama will be okay.”
We’re grown now, and we know little assurances like that are all lies. When she told me that our mother had stopped breathing, I didn’t tell her that everything would be okay. That our mother would, somehow, miraculously, wake up. Open her eyes and ask why no one had brought her a book yet. I didn’t tell her much of anything.
* * *
It’s a small place, the salon. Cozy with mosaic lamp shades and easily worn carpets. A bit of silk hangs from the divide between the waiting room and the seats where the women with long black hair stand like sentries. I’ve been going here for years, leaving behind the salon in my hometown that only knew me because of my mother and her fondness for sprouting off literature in a way I found to present a false air of pretentiousness, and everyone else found endearing. Here, no one knows my mother. The woman at the front counter, the woman who always cradles a rosary, the woman who tries to hide the fact that her hands are cracked. They all know me. When I walk in, my name rings back at me like a chorus of golden bells and it’s almost enough to make me smile. No one else says my name like that. I could search for centuries and never find the same comfort.
The woman I usually see, who always wears a necklace of blue-and-gold, ushers me into a chair and begins clucking at me like a chicken, hands fluttering over my face, my neck. My hair snags on my earrings when she pulls the strands away from her canvas. She scolds me for my absence, my fuzziness, the scraggly hairs beneath my chin that no one likes to admit they have. I make excuses. Work got busy. Couldn’t find the time. I’ll say anything except explaining the truth.
My mother had been sick for some time. It felt like years. Maybe she had been sick for as long as I had known her. Her death wasn’t a tragedy, which feels eternally messed up to say. It wasn’t a car crash, or a murder; cancer didn’t break down her cells, her lungs didn’t rebel against her body. Nothing that swept out of the blue and cut time down to nothing. It was just age: The same thing all of us are sick with. All of us, everyone who has lived and who will live, will breathe, bleed, love, and die. I think there’s something comforting about that.
I think comforting is the word.
The woman coils the string around her fingers, orders me to hold taut the skin above my eyebrow and my eyelid. And it begins.
She talks as she works, something about her daughter who is “so excited to graduate from primary school,” and the other women jump in, weaving a conversation like birds with their unique patterns of call-and-response, the language they have in the shape of their feathers, the objects they choose to bring home.
My mother told me once about the ancient Roman practice of augury, of looking for signs in birds. I took that to heart, counting magpies (one for sorrow, two for mirth), following ravens, scanning the ground for solitary feathers. I especially liked shrikes, those gray-and-white creatures with an enticing temper. They captured their prey—insects, snakes, mice—and stored the bodies for later by impaling them on thorns or the tips of fences. As a child, I had a recurring dream of giant hands connected to an unidentifiable body. They cradled me through oceans and deserts, and I always forgot where we were walking until I saw the thorn bush sprouting from the earth. Every time, I thought the hands would keep holding me, keep carrying me, but the thorns pierced through my back and between the two halves of my rib cage. And, for a brief moment, I understood what my parents meant when they told my sister and me that they would always love us.
The women keep clucking.
I want to call my sister and say, “Do you know that chickens stay alive minutes after decapitation? It’s because their brain stem extends down their necks, because there’s not enough space in their heads. Do you think Mom was alive that last week when her hands were purple and her breathing was a machine gun? Do you think that she could see us watching her?”
The woman yanks out a stubborn follicle at my neck, then a smaller one follows suit. When I first started getting threading done, I felt a prickly sort of shame every time they excavated a hair from the grave of my face. You’re not doing enough, you’re not good enough, you’re not pretty enough. When I’d get home, my sister would look up at me from whatever book she was reading at the time and wrinkle her nose: God, you’re all red.
I swell, I balloon, I am a whale rising to the surface of the water with a gut full of carbon dioxide. She lays the wax over my cheek, pulls it away, and I deflate in increments.
When we finally moved our mother to an assisted living facility, we kept her house. We didn’t know what else to do with it. It was a small house, one story, in desperate need of a paint job. The house we grew up in.
Three years after our mother was moved into the facility, I went back to the house alone. There were cobwebs in all the corners, and a pile of dishes in the sink that had been rinsed but not washed. The broken corner of the screen door that used to be taped shut cut my ankle as I walked in. All of it was wrong, and I felt the wrongness twisting inside of me; tendrils of ivy climbing my ribs and curling around my lungs. The sugar bowl was in the same cabinet as it had always been, and my mother wasn’t there.
I spent hours sifting through mounds of old mail, and the trash pile kept growing. There were bills to review, bank accounts to cancel, phone numbers to call. All the clothes in my closet were styled by a sixteen-year-old.
My sister is the one who will deal with the house. I’m never going back there. It’s too quiet now.
My eyes ache from holding them down. I know when I open them a rush of tears will spill out, and I will resist the urge to say, “I’m not crying. I promise I’m not crying. It didn’t hurt that badly. Really.”
Hot wax on my upper lip, the sting of the aftermath. Then she goes back in with the thread. I feel like the head of the chicken watching its body scramble.
I’m learning that death is such a material thing. And the process of nearing death is such a material thing. If it wasn’t the house, it was her clothes. If it wasn’t her clothes, it was kitchenware. If it wasn’t kitchenware, it was her books.
God, her books. Shelves of them in the living room, in the bedroom, in the study. Multiple copies of her favorites: she bought a new one every time there was no room left in the margins. When we were kids, she read us normal children’s books, like Goodnight Moon and Stellaluna and Corduroy and Toot & Puddle. But she also read us The Iliad and Crooked House and The Fire Next Time and Frankenstein, which she only ever called A Modern-Day Prometheus. It didn’t teach us how to read earlier, but it taught us how to listen, and how to pretend to listen, and when to do which.
It’s simple enough to understand that her books were an extension of herself. I’m sure that was why my sister got every degree possible in literature. But I have always oscillated between wanting to be like my mother and wanting to be like myself.
The last funeral I attended was my grandmother’s, our mother’s mother. That dress won’t fit me anymore. I want a new dress. A new nice black dress that isn’t gaudy because that’s unbecoming for a funeral. I want a soft, nice, new black dress that gleams like a mamba’s scales and flutters like a raven’s feather. I want to shrink down to the size of a bird and let black silk flow around me. The wine-dark sea at night is nothing more than shadows.
A new dress. A trim: my hair is layers of dead ends. A paper shredder for all my mother’s old dissertation notes that no one needs to keep now. A phonebook to call all the people she requested at her funeral. Maybe a fish, because I have never not been caring for something else.
It’s a frequent argument between my sister and me. When our mother took a turn for the worse, I left my sister to take care of a woman who had stopped being a person entirely. My sister would yell that I was flaky, unreliable, unproductive. I would shout back, “Who do you think took care of her when you were off destroying a marriage?” And she would hang up on me. For all she could identify my faults, she was shit at looking into the mirror. If I was the head of the chicken, my mother was the body, and my sister was the axe.
As the woman scrapes away the fuzz of my sideburns, I wonder if I should shave my head or dye my hair platinum blonde or pop my eyes from their sockets. Show up to the funeral with a new face. Neon pink makeup. My sister will yell at me, I will yell back, and everything will be normal.
This will be our first funeral without a parent. Our father died from filling his lungs with smoke. He died at home, in his own bed, a machine monitoring his vital signs plugged into the socket where he usually plugged in his phone charger. There’s a photo of him that I love from a few days before his heart stopped. He’s sitting up staring out the window, smiling. I don’t know what he was smiling at. I never asked.
“Almost done!” the woman twitters.
I realize I don’t want it to end. I want more of it. There’s something about hair ripping from follicles with a sound that I imagine is my skin tearing. Being plucked like a bird, being stripped down to make up for the fact that it’s me. That I have been me since childhood. That I followed ravens through the woods while my sister sat inside and read, that I stared into the wine-dark sea while my mother screamed for me to get away from the edge, that I’d rather hate my mother’s favorite stories instead of understand them. And now she is dead. And I can’t apologize to her, so I must apologize to the world.
It’s a bit silly, that shrikes store their food somewhere like a fence instead of killing what they need. But maybe it is all they know how to do. Would they still be a shrike without the thorns? I lay impaled on the chair and feel layers of skin peeling away. After this, I will go back home and clean my kitchen, because I didn’t clean my mother’s. I’ll order a new dress. Maybe I’ll stop by the bakery next door and buy one of the pastries lying on the windowsill. A croissant, full of buttery layers, flakey shells drifting off in the wind.
The woman asks me if I want soothing gel, and I say yes without thinking. I’ll take it. I’ll take anything.
Logan Furlonge is currently entering her sophomore year at Kenyon College, where she plans on studying English, Studio Art, and Creative Writing for as long as she can. She writes to explore grief, family, dreams, and the inner workings of stories. Her work has appeared in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, HIKA Literary Magazine, and an uncountable amount of notebooks on her bookshelf.