Everything Gone All At Once

It all began with the empty bucket in a corner of the living room that collected the occasional water dripping from the ceiling when Ah Ma was showering on a chair in the bathtub upstairs even though I had suggested that she simply took a bath but no, she’d argued that the volume of the bath water would be too heavy for the floor to hold and then she, and the bathtub with her scrubbing towel, with the soapy water, the bathroom floor tiles, the space she’d been bathing in would collapse onto the floor below where I’d been sitting on the couch scrolling on my phone or worse on Ah Ba while he’d be standing right below her, pulling his nose hair one by one with that special tweezer he’d stolen from her toiletry drawer even though that was eons ago, Ah Ba’s ashes securely inside a wooden box on the mantel of the fake chimney, and then, while Ah Ma unleashed all the reasons she couldn’t possibly just take a bath in the bathtub but would rather shower while seated on the plastic dining table chair she’d asked me to bring up to the second floor bathroom and shove in the bathtub because she was too afraid to slip and fall but refused to have a contractor renovate the bathroom for one of those walk-in showers I’d shown her in a magazine because it would cost too much money even though I had offered to pay for it, water poured from the ceiling knocking over the bucket, and before I could utter a single sound, water gushed everywhere filling the living room, slashing against the window, water crashing unmatched dinner plates and bowls, carried the armchair and the red clock through the cracked window, and ripped garbled screams from my mouth, Ah Ba’s ashes scattered like sand kicked at the bottom of a sea, Ah Ma surged past me holding an empty urn, her bathrobe flapping erratically through the murky water like an abandoned flag, and I’m falling and tumbling in the abyss holding her lost tie belt in my hand, grasping for air, grasping for a last look at my mother.