“Get your bony arse out of bed before I kick it out.” Mama clomps into my room at the crack of dawn, thumping a laundry basket full of wet clothes down at the foot of my bed and flinging the window wide open, like some kind of sunrise-loving lunatic. Threatening to kick my arse, like a criminal alarm clock with big, flat feet.

My mother, Effie Fortune, is the sanest, straightest one of the bunch. After all these years, I realize that threatening to kick my bony arse out of bed is her way of saying I love you. Mama’s the reason I came back to Cape Breton. Not that I had much choice.

I want to tell her that I had that same nightmare again. The one with the flock of birds that laugh at me and the tree that uproots itself to chase me across a swath of black and barren land. The monster branches grab me when I stumble, and squeeze the life out of me, while the birds all fly around cackling. The first time I had that bad dream was one week ago, when I still lived in Toronto. I woke up gasping and retching, and then I vomited all over my bed. Both of my arms dead as doorknobs, my head pounding, and my eyes unable to focus, it took me almost an hour to pull myself together enough to clean up the mess. In the end, I biffed the creamy satin bedding in the dumpster out behind my condo because I couldn’t stomach trying to wash it. Puke-covered designer sheets chucked in a dumpster. Of all the genuinely sad and jarring circumstances of late, that one foolish detail was somehow the final straw. I called Mama that night to say I was coming home.

So here I am.

When I try to speak now, all that comes out is a low groan, which Mama takes as the kind of willfully inarticulate protest she would’ve got from me when I last lived here as a lazy, melodramatic eighteen-year-old.

“You’ve been laying in that bed since you got here. Damn near a day and a half. It’s no good for you. And that laundry won’t hang itself.” She shoves the basket closer to my bed with her size-nine clodhopper.

Again, I open my mouth to say something, but Mama’s already hustling out the door and down the hall before any words make it out. But that’s all right. I didn’t come here to argue with my mother, even though a vestige of my saucy teenage self is alive and well, and on familiar turf. I came here so Mama could take care of me. So I could gather the strands of my life together and weave them into some kind of coherent story about who I was and where I came from, before it’s too late. Before I forget. Before I’m just a memory here.

See, I’m dying.

But where are my manners? We haven’t even been properly introduced! Just let me pull on my fancy pants, flatten my hair, and slide into my smooth, persuasive Multi-Level Marketing expert voice.