I removed the yellow nail polish my blunt friend said looked like toe fungus this morning in a dimly lit room (my preteen daughter hovering nearby on her phone) not knowing the sick butter shade had stained the flesh above and below until some hours later when my daughter and I went shopping for a book for her language arts class at an outside galleria where I had taken her as a baby to play in the sprinklers surrounding the marble gazebo - her laugh, her brazen, carefree laugh- I'll never forget it - but today she's a leggy box of subdued dynamite, a reflection of my lessons and failures, and I walked ahead knowing the dread she must feel at being seen with her mother, and the September sun (stubbornly hanging on for football season) spotlighted the rotten lemon tone of skin I thought I had wiped away and I wondered if I had removed it too late or if I should even have bothered.
-Erin Passons, 9-2015
