Spider

We are sitting at our round kitchen table eating peanut butter toast with bananas, and she, who is six, wants to know about the Nazis (Who did they kill? Brown skin? White skin? Black skin? Old people? Children? The sick? Handicapped? Us? Me?).
“Would they kill us, momma?”
And I say that yes, they would kill us. If we were brave enough to stand and say they were wrong, that their ideas of perfection were wrong, and that all people all people all people are valuable, that they would want us dead.
I say this in my housecoat, in my unwashed hair, with one eye on the clock and one eye on her heart. She smacks her lips, and says that she hopes she would be brave enough.

I think of you. Of your cracked bones and split soul, of those crooked healings we were blind to, the secret brokenness, of your stunning new styles of self-deception, and of the way this one has eaten up those cupped crusts of hope we were feeding off of. The failure.

She asks me what the Nazi symbol looks like, and I trace it out on the table top with my finger, imagining it there between us, black and thick, that unforgiving spider spinning out its sticky perfection.