water tour of blue house, for mosquito mother

there are buckets to collect rain so we can fill the tanks when WASA doesn’t deliver: pigtail buckets, halved oil cans, paint pails. the house bloats in rainy season. more water in the guttering. plants that look like sweet potato vines grow up above my parents’ window. and of course, there’s the pool pappy used to lounge in– his browned belly like a toasted bagel and his white hair slicked up and chlorinated. we hoard this water. the dogs drink it and throw it up into croton beds. no one swims but visiting cousins and pappy’s ghost. water that doesn’t escape grows dark moss on the cast driveway. dog pee stains in lines and the smell gets high around noon when the sun tries to turn everything to mist. on other days, the rain blows in if it’s coming from the north. bhowchar. some windows do not close. anytime an argument subsides, i smell like a back room: four separate types of sweat half dried into my shirt. the must of things stored up. nana keeps a dasani bottle of holy water next to our lady of sorrows on the computer stand. we water the rosemary with bong water. i sleep in the room where mum’s water broke. there’s a leak in the downstairs bathroom that someone needs to fix. my father lowers himself into the sewage tank every couple of years with buckets of pool water and a tablespoon of vicks in each nostril. the biggest rain that came down this year flooded out miss moses’ primary school next door. the biggest rain i remember caused a small landslide behind the house. the invasive pine leans at an angle now.

and it’s this dangerous reservoir that you have chosen and turned into a mosquito hatchery. your babies wriggle in the condensed mist of arguments and odd-jobs waiting for the time. you lay at every collection point. no wonder the dengue down the street and miss moses calling the neighbours to put a mild acid in their planter bases. my brother and i flat in bed with fever, one of few times we’ll let our own mother close. is this some kind of cahoots for caring? outside, my father drops five cent coins into our planter bases. they’ll rust, he says, and make the water hostile.