Emma Baum

By Emma Baum | July 8, 2024 | Originally Published in Beautiful Things

After calling eighteen days in a row, I know not to hang up when my mom doesn’t answer after the fourth or fifth ring. Her phone is chronically lost, and I imagine her elbow deep in the living room couch or emptying her overstuffed purse onto the kitchen counter, one pair of glasses perched in her hair, another on her freckled nose.

When she answers, I tell her about the print of a woman in a boat I purchased from the campus poster sale to fill the still blank walls of my dorm. She asks for a picture. I hear when she sees it, how her breath trips and falls into a laugh before she tells me that The Lady of Shalott hung above her bed, too, when she was a student. I imagine my mom at eighteen, winding the phone cord around her fingers as she talks to her own mother. I long for a landline of my own, for a cord to coil around myself, tethering me to my mother’s voice. I laugh with her, and through the static, I can’t tell where her laughter ends and mine begins.

I give my mom the nineteenth day off. When I laugh at dinner with new friends and my last sight before sleep is the Lady, her boat just unmoored, something in me pulls taut, a caller wandering into another room mid-chat. Then I follow the line back to where all the best parts of me start and listen in.

Beautiful Things is River Teeth’s weekly online magazine featuring micro-essays of 250 words or fewer.