The Pasta Pirate

I was ten years old and on a business trip

with my mother in Las Vegas when she took me to the Pasta Pirate

at the California Hotel and Casino.

Decades before Vegas would shake off

dark wood and dimly-lit dining areas

to lure millennials with

open-concept Cristal-clear 24 hour

DJ pool parties,

my dinner plate was overcast with shadows.

We had come for all we could eat

Alaskan King Crab legs.

As my mother picked up the first white and pinkish

(dead, disembodied) leg she told me,

“Last time I ate so many of these, my hands started to bleed.”

It was then,

as I picked up the first crab part from my plate,

that I felt the dull spikes I had failed to see.

Later, when I had put thousands of

miles and years of

silence between us, my mother sent me a baby book

that she and my father had recorded observations of me in during

my introductory period

on the planet.

Each page listed prompts to encourage them

to remember things about their first born.

There was a section titled, “Baby’s Fears”.

(which I think is a fucked-up prompt, btw).

While the book had been filled

with mostly my father’s script,

this page contained only

a notation in my mother’s hand explaining:

“Nothing. [He] is fearless.”

As I sat there at the Pasta Pirate, working on carefully

cracking my first crab leg,

I wondered if my mother’s hands had bled

because she really wanted to eat that much crab or

if they had bled because

she had gotten too drunk to feel

her own hands.

I am not fearless. But

being with my mother

for years

taught me how to

smile at the dinner table,

appear calm,

and take mental note

of all available exits

in the room.