Sarah Ederer

BASIC NEEDS

Listen,I could tell you about the hot cat shitThat lay in the hallwayJust outside of my mother’s bedroomNestled into itself on the floorLike a sleeping dog.I could tell you that,Like a sleeping dog,We stepped over it carefully.Like a sleeping dog,We walked past it every day andMost of the timeWe ignored it.I could say that we treated it like a part of the backdropA landmark of homeHanging in the air under our nosesLike a soft-baked pretzelComforting and familiarAnd you might think that I’ve said enoughFor you to understand just how outrageous the situation wasBut I haven’t.The truth is,The cat shit never bothered me that much.Not at first.There was a brief moment of disgust,Sure,But that moment would endAs quickly as I could take one stepAnd get over it.Then I was in another room and,As far as I was concerned,The cat shit was gone.What bothered meAbout the pile of cat shit in the hallwayWas what I suspect would bother anyone:How shameful it wasTo be living that way.But that shame wasn’t something I could accessIn the folie-a-quatreThat was my childhood home.I became aware of the shame much later in life,Found it wafting over me one night,When my own family’s dogHad an accidentAt the foot of my bedAnd I got up to clean itwithout thinking.It was an automatic response:There’s shit on the floorIt must be removedRemove it.It struck me like a freighterThat I had been robbed for sixteen yearsOf something I felt that I was entitled to,But never received.I couldn’t quite put that thing into words,But it amounted roughly to“The right to not have to step over piles of cat shitEvery goddamned day of my life.”Then the shame arrivedIn its fullest form:A revelationAbout the burden of secrecy.I had spent sixteen years of my lifepretending that the pile of cat shit wasn’t thereWaiting for meWhen I got home from school.I got so good at pretendingThat sometimes I wasn’t even awareThat there was a pile of cat shitWaiting for me,For my mother,Outside of her bedroom door.But the cat shit was always there,Lingering,An ornament of a broken home.The cat shit was thereWhen I kissed my first boyfriend.The cat shit was thereWhen he fingered me in the car outsideAnd I lied and said my parents were homeSo he couldn’t come in.I stepped over the cat shitAnd fell into my bedAnd dreamed of him kissing me,Touching me,Touched myself to the thought of itAll while the cat shit,Sun-dried and brittle,Shifted with the floorboards,With the weight of the house,With its damned foundation,Settling lopsided into the holeWhere the previous owner’s septic tank wasUntil it eventually collapsed.I spent sixteen yearsFalling into someone else’s shit.They kept twelve cats I never wantedAnd they asked me“How could you not want them?”As if I was cruelThey called me Bob BarkerI repeated it so many times:Spay the damn things.You can be buried aliveBy a certain kind of loveOne that I’m not so convincedIs kind at all.But the cat shit wasn’t what bothered me.Not really.What bothered meIs what I lost under the hordes of cheap, dysfunctional garbageThat my mother compulsively liftedFrom flea markets,Dollar stores,Yard sales,And clothing exchanges.A book of nursery rhymes,A keyless trumpet,A mummified tangerine,And a dressmaking dummy,Buried under soiled laundry,Buried under moldy dishes,Buried under childhood photosIn frames with broken glass.Buried somewhere underThe junk that nobody wantedWas my family.It became difficult to distinguish between the two.I wondered to myself,Standing next to a puddle of cleanserAt the foot of my adult bed,Why I had never cleaned the cat shitIn my childhood home,Why I stepped over it every time.A form of protest, maybeA sinking sense that it would never endThat twelve cats could shit faster than I could clean it,That flea markets,Dollar stores,Yard sales,And clothing exchangesNever ran out of junk,That I was a childWho had a right to somethingThat I never received.—from Rattle #78, Winter 2022
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

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Sarah Ederer: “To me, writing poetry feels a bit like lancing a boil and sending a ‘thank you’ card to the pus. I tend to use free verse narrative fiction to tell the untellable stories of people marginalized by the taboo nuances of a life lived under oppressive domestic conditions. I hope to help make experiences that might make one feel unintelligible to the world a little more easily understood by emphasizing the humanity and dignity of the protagonist.”

Related* “Housekeeping” by Rachel Lynn Nevins * “Pets” by Tom C. Hunley * “Wild Me” by Sarah Freligh