Listen to Sofiya read her story:
The Picture

I hate this picture. It was taken when David was 6 months old. I know, he looks much older, but he was always big for his age. He was almost ten pounds when he was born. The nurses were joking about how they were going to just eat him up, he was so plump, like a little rugele. We’re in front of our first house on Davis Terrace, and it’s October so I’m wearing my fox stole. Minnesota autumns already have that snap in the air that signals the winter to come. It’s the last time I wore that stole, too. I pawned it that winter when Peter lost his job and David got pneumonia.

You can tell what he was like as a child too, just from that photo. That frown is more familiar to me than my crow’s feet. The first sign of a crying fit. A colicky baby, always crying. A terrible cry, from deep in his throat, like he was ripping his insides up. Ripped up mine, anyway. That’s when I started smoking. I’d pace that lawn in the picture for hours, rocking David and feeling his little body tense up and get damp from his sweat as I made my way through packs of Marlboro Reds. I hated him. I’d look in the mirror and see the dark circles under my eyes and remember reading poems in the afternoon in the backyard or watching the snow fall from the mud room while drinking a cup of tea. I’d remember and then David would start crying again. I started biting my nails.

I hate this picture. I can see the hate in my eyes and in the way I hold him, like a package instead of a person. I don’t look like his mother, or at least like the mother I was supposed to be. But I’m not ashamed. When he died from pneumonia I cried for a week straight. He was my baby, after all. I loved his laugh. But I heard it so rarely I pretended I made it up. It was easier that way, I could keep hating him, and when he died, I stopped. I stopped hating him and I stopped smoking and I stopped biting my nails and I left Pete. I got a cocker spaniel, but we never got along either. His licking got to me, I felt like I could never pet him enough. Now I have a cactus garden but I never read poems in it. It never snows and I never feel the cold snap of winter.