Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.
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How to Come Out to Your Mother By Dylon Jones Best if she's alone. When you tell her, but also: always. Her loneliness will lick at yours like a dog does a wolf, hackles a riot, paws tensed on the ground, wet nose steaming. Or perhaps it is the other way around, the recognition jumping from you, through centuries of cages and woods and whips, along the staircase of genetics, back to her. If you still live with her, good luck. Avoid in-person revelations, tears of love or hurt or hate spilled salty on the living room couch. Move out frst. Find four walls, and then, if you can, four more. Put 100 miles of road between you, or 200, or three. However many exit signs you need to approximate the distance between your heart and your skin. If someone's touched your skin, arranged your accelerando heart for two (or more) percussive bodies, bless you. It will not make it easier. Go ahead and pace like you always have. Walking forward without leaving should be familiar by now, the circle you wore in your frst bedroom's shit-brown shag the same circle you wear now in your dorm or apartment or house. Te same circle you wore after your father took you fshing and the boat rocked and you said — Dad, I can't see through the water — and you heard — Hush, you'll scare me of — but really he said — Hush, you'll scare them of — and you wondered the diference and hushed and slipped the hook of your line when he wasn't looking and tossed your barbless bobber out over the flmy green surface and pretended. Go ahead and pace like when you think about that night he shoved your mother onto her bed, where you lay. Where you slept beside her every night, instead of in your own room, even when you grew too big, because she worried, without you, he'd open the door, with- out you, he'd beat the door down. But he beat the door down anyway, splintered it, left it hanging from one hinge as he pressed his knees into her stomach and wrapped his big cracked hands around her throat and tightened and twisted. Te mattress tilting you toward their weight. Bed frame creaking like when you lie down to sleep. Bed springs screaming like when you fuck. Te cords in her neck like cello strings beneath his hands, her lungs scratch- ing out their precious last, bone-thin: Call the police. Call the police. And you didn't, you didn't call the police. Something switched in him, he let her go, took his fsts to the living room. She jumped straight to you, heaving, and took your face in her hands. Spittle trail- ing down her chin. And you knew by the blood moons of her eyes that she still loved you, she didn't love you any less. Even though you didn't call the police. She wrapped your favorite quilted blan- ket around your shoulders, sidestepped the kitchen — where he sat smoking Winstons in the dark, cigarette ember the only sign of him — and marched to the old red Bonneville — the engine already running in your memory, though it couldn't have been. She drove you to your great-aunt's house. Hazel, with long blond hair, who called you My Little Pet, which you liked. You liked to