First Monologue From Last Year’s Playwriting Class

My mother believed in everything. She prayed daily, sometimes for hours at a time. I remember her anointing the doorways with oil bought from the Church gift shop. She spoke in tongues and flopped like a fish on the stage when our pastor put his hand to her head. She doesn’t have a pastor anymore. Now she stays home and performs fire ceremonies in the living room and talks to the wind. She whispers her secrets into a rock and buries her rock into the earth. We will be driving pass a mountain and she will point and say “That Mountain knows more about me than anyone else.” She knows her past lives better than I know my current one. She had died before, back in colonial times, by being burnt at the stake—they thought her a witch, isn’t that something? Now she is here. Now she is my mother. Once she told me of a dream she had and I was in it. I was being taken over by something, by some dark presence. So she knelt by my bedside and began to pray, then her mouth was sewn shut to stop her from praying. But she didn’t stop—no, she kept going. She rocked back and forth and prayed silently for the salvation of her only son.