Fiction, David Chamberlain
“Like this,” she says, holding the phone out horizontally and so steady she must tense her forearms and her core. “Here. Take it.”
Her mom takes the phone back humbly, bowing her head, an acolyte acquiring a new sacrament. The daughter walks back to her mark in the corner of the backyard where a tall sycamore bends and bequeaths a lumpy shadow. She sits down cross-legged on a pink yoga mat. Surrounding the mat are curated “set-decorations”: plastic candles, potted plants, and mason jars with weird shit inside of them.
“Should I start recording?” mom asks.
“Yes!”
Mom presses the red circle.
“Hi y’all,” the daughter begins. “Namaste. Today we’ll be going through a simple ten-minute routine. I call it my ‘wake up’ routine—”
“Hold on,” mom interrupts, “something’s wrong.”
The girl bristles, stands, and charges her mom.
“What?” the girl growls, yanking the phone back.
“I’m not sure,” mom says, softly—a rebuked childlike tone.
The girl plays with the phone, her thumb movements so prodigious her mom is amazed; the technological knowledge is instinctual, built deep in the brain folds, a new piece of evolution she never got.
“You had it on time-lapse for some reason,” the girl says, slapping the phone back in her mom’s hands. She walks back to her mark. Sits down.
Take two. As the girl moves through her yoga routine, her mom, bless her, struggles to maintain a steady hand—she’s no cinematographer. The frame wobbles, falls, then rises in steep over-corrections, cutting her daughter out of frame completely for a few seconds before gently settling back again. Upon review of the shaky footage, the girl—now covered in sweat from exertion—is displeased, shaking her head wildly like a tyrannical film director.
“Mom, you have to keep your hands steady. This footage is unusable.”
“I don’t think I can for very long,” mom confesses. “This is a long routine.”
The girl eyes her mom strangely, in a cold appraising way, as if she were sizing up her utility, her potential, like a rancher gleaning the strength of an aging heifer.
“Yeah,” the daughter sighs in sad agreement. “I would’ve liked to post this today but… it probably won’t work.”
“Well, I can try again,” mom suggests.
“No,” the girl says snappily. “I ordered a tripod online that’ll be here in a couple days. I can just use that.” The girl is already walking back to her yoga mat, head bent over her phone, thumbs moving wildly. “Thanks though.”
“Are you sure?” mom asks again. One last try.
The girl nods, starts rolling up her yoga mat and collecting her set decorations. Mom watches. Mom tries to focus on the feeling in her old hands, that weird heavy feeling. Why do they feel so clumsy?
The girl moved back to mom’s house—the house of her childhood—about a month earlier. She’d been gone for nine years—had moved out at eighteen, attended a semi-well-regarded liberal arts college where she studied history and sub-genres of history like: “Pre-Colonial American Collectivism” and “Violent Trends of Capital Acquisition in the American Frontier: Years 1840-1880,” graduated with a B.A. in three years and promptly left the small campus for Brooklyn. The trouble started in Brooklyn. At least that’s what she’s told mom.
The exact timeline is a bit shaky, as far as mom can tell, but there were always smart-talking hipster boyfriends with mal-intent—often from wealthy, Ivy-League families—who slowly eroded her sense of self-worth, degrading her, as the girl put it, to the point of “pure objectification.” These relationships, coupled with a slew of minimum wage jobs that always included the same cast of characters, most notably domineering bosses who were “sexist” and “racist” and backwards in their ways, sent the girl down a slow decline toward mental exhaustion. She didn’t hold onto jobs long. She had no friends. She didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life—actually, she asserted that the need to find a “passion” or “purpose” was a bogus phenomenon conjured by capitalist propagandists to trick people into labor.
Mom worried. Her worry was twofold: she worried about her daughter’s safety and happiness, as all mother’s do, but also about her daughter’s perceptions of the world. In short, she was worried that her daughter was paranoid, and was turning into that specific type of woman she ran into at dinner parties and Sunday brunches who acted as if the entire world were out to get them. A kind of person she despised. The worst part of this kind of person, the mom thought, was that they seemed to actually enjoy the idea of being at the center of some catastrophe; they gloried in it; it made them important, indispensable to a grand narrative. She didn’t want her daughter to become this person.
Mom had urged her daughter to move away from the city. There was no reason for her to be there: she wasn’t an artist or a writer or a filmmaker or a vintage clothes reseller; she had no real connections or family in the area, and most importantly—she seemed to hate the city and its people. But the girl told her that she, mom, was just missing the point. And mom guessed that she probably was missing the point, whatever it was, and wouldn’t press the topic any further.
Two days after trying to shoot her yoga routine, the girl’s tripod arrives. She walks into the kitchen holding the box. Moms at the kitchen counter, toiling over her iPad. The girl plops the box on the counter and starts unpackaging it.
“So,” mom says, not lifting her eyes from her iPad, “I’ve been reading some articles…”
“Ok,” the girl responds dully, cutting open her box. “What about?”
“Well, it looks like you need to post on all different platforms: Instagram, TikTok, etc. Not just YouTube. You’ll grow your audience faster.”
The girl shakes her head, doesn’t respond; she’s gotten into the habit of dismissing mom this way, not deigning her silly remarks with a response. Mom doesn’t understand that to get strategic about this stuff would be to destroy the art, the magic. Also, what the fuck does she know? Some boomer reading a USA Today article written by another boomer about the world of social-media content-creation? They’re out of their depth.
She lifts the tripod out of the box and unsheathes it from its clear cellophane scabbard. There’s a thick, plasticky smell. Rubber too. The tripod’s legs telescope, clicking out to nearly a yard and a half, and then click back to about twelve inches. There’s a fancy little cradle, a black jaw, that is meant to hold her phone tightly, perfectly. No more shaky footage. She sets it up right on the kitchen tile.
Mom watches her fiddle with the tripod. The girl has filled out again, regained the weight she lost, although her hair looks a little thinner now, more brittle, and whatever womanly shape she used to have is now lost—her body a uniform rectangle of hard-pressed fat. She doesn’t look anything like the other yoga girls on YouTube with their cartoonishly perfect bodies and Disney princess faces—not that this should matter—it’s just an observation mom has made. Of all the topics her daughter could’ve chosen to pursue, mom wonders why yoga stuck out. Her daughter never once spoke of it before, had never shown interest in any Eastern mediation or the like, and often scorned people who did. And the spray-on tight yoga pants she chose to wear were very unflattering on her ill-defined, wide backside. Again, just an observation mom has made.
“This is perfect,” the girl says, squeezing her phone into the tri-pod’s grip.
“Good,” mom says like a satisfied superior. “Going to re-shoot your routine today?”
The girl shrugs. “Maybe, we’ll see. The light isn’t right.”
Mom shifts her body and looks out the kitchen window. The sunlight looks much as it did two days ago, falling sweetly over the house and through the leaves of the sycamore, bruising the lawn with caramel-colored polygons.
“Oh,” mom says, nodding.
“I’m going to learn some new routines today, I think,” the girl assures, as if to make up for some deficiency.
“Where do you learn those routines?” mom asks, genuinely curious.
“YouTube,” the girl says.
Mom has to stifle a laugh. Does the girl not see the irony?
“What?” the girl asks, sensing something strange in mom’s expression. Whenever mom thinks she’s discovered something, or feels clever, she gets this demented half-smile and squints her eyes. The girl finds this horribly annoying.
“So you watch yoga YouTube videos and then just copy them to make your own yoga YouTube videos?”
“I don’t just copy them, mom. I obviously put my own spin on them. Anyway, even if I did copy them frame for frame it would still be inherently different because I am the one doing it. And I am unique.”
Mom nods silently, backing down. She’s awoken a young ferocity in the girl that she doesn’t have the energy to keep up with.
“It’s like Matisse said,” the girl continues, “‘don’t try to be original, just try to be simple, your own originality will shine through.’”
Mom stands up from the counter and moves to the fridge, ignoring the wisdom the girl tried to impart and says, “I’m going to start dinner.”
What a bitch, the girl thinks. She sees everything so literally, everything as nuts and bolts. Cause and effect. There’s more to it. She just doesn’t see. How could she? She and the rest of her sad generation were taught to only see in black and white. Her generation—the clumsy, coddled post-war kids who got free reign of the candy store when business was booming. They took everything, left nothing, and now blame subsequent generations for not being able to scrounge up a life on the crumbs left in their careless wake. They don’t understand that there are subtleties, complexities. The girl collapses her tripod in a huff of angry movement.
“I’m not hungry,” the girl says, stomping out of the room.
Mom sighs and shakes her head. Poor, sad, confused girl.
Dad died while the girl was living in the city—toppled over in the backyard gardening. An aneurysm. Mom unknowingly brought him coffee after he was already dead. His body was sprawled out like a crash-test dummy, face down in the garden; mom thought he was playing one of his pranks, set the coffee mug beside him, and spoke to him about errands she was going to run. Very nightmarish stuff.
But when the girl came home for the funeral, mom’s grief was overshadowed by worry for her daughter: the girl had lost close to thirty pounds, smelled strange, like chemicals, and had a bluish-white complexion, almost translucent. She spoke strangely, softly, like she was half-asleep, and swayed drunkenly. Mom feared drugs. So did others. Upon interrogation, the girl, grossly offended, told her mom that people cope with grief in different ways. Mom agreed, and didn't press the topic any further.
After the funeral there was a breakdown in communication between mom and daughter. They didn’t speak for months. Until one February morning the girl called out of the clear blue and said: “Hey, I want to start a YouTube channel. I need your help. I need to come home.”
“I’ll buy your plane ticket,” Mom said.
She cleared a room for her daughter that night.
Mom figured something happened. An event. An event so incendiary and startling that it curbed all of the girl’s youthful notions, stubbornness, and pride. She could only guess at what it was—to ask about it would be to step on an emotional landmine, and she didn’t want to nuke their already precarious relationship. So she wondered. Breakups were par for the course, as were estrangements with friends; her guess was that it involved something frankly illegal—lawyers were going to be called. Did she get in a brawl? Rob someone? A DUI? Or maybe just pregnant? Or, or maybe it was something less sudden and romantic, something perhaps bleaker than all of those things: life just wore her down. After years of treading water, the girl could no longer keep her head above the waves…
Mom would rather her be pregnant.
When mom picked the girl up from the airport, she saw no visible signs of trauma on her daughter. Mom half-expected the girl to roll up in a wheelchair or else be towing an IV bag. But the girl looked normal. In fact, she looked healthier than she did at the funeral. Nothing about her hinted at anything tragic or destructive. Her demeanor was calm and quiet; there was some maturation apparent in her voice, her presence.
Whatever happened, if anything, would remain a fascinating mystery to mom, something like Stonehenge or Easter Island. Clues might rise out of the fog of history every now and again, little leads she could piece together like swathes of fabric in a clumsy patchwork quilt, but the full story would always be obscured. All mom could do now was be grateful her daughter was at least physically okay; all mom could do now was try to help her daughter move forward.
A few days after the tripod arrives, mom, from her upstairs bedroom, watches the girl set her tripod in the backyard grass. It’s not quite noon, early for the girl, and the sun cuts under the sycamore in clear rods of light, reflecting off the girl’s yellow and salmon colored yoga outfit. The girl looks like a circus act, mom thinks. What with all that makeup and those wild, hi-lighter colors and her brittle hair pulled back into a bun that looks like a clotted bulb of dryer lint. Maybe this is why she can’t keep a boyfriend?
The girl winces as she tries to keep her tripod steady; the ground is uneven and the wiry legs of the tripod sink into the wet earth, tilting the tripod, making it crooked and unruly. The girl cusses to herself and stabs the tripod into the ground like she’s planting a flag. She grunts with exertion. With the tripod finally secured, the girl inserts her phone into its little cradle and hits record. She runs across the yard to her yoga mat where a sudden metamorphosis takes place: her typical dopey, deflated posture goes away, replaced by something regal and serene and a professional smile unfurls across her full cheeks. Mom is impressed: there’s something here. The girl begins her routine.
Mom watches the girl do a couple of the most typical yogic poses—downward dog, cobra, sunrise salutation, etc. The poor girl struggles to complete even these beginner moves. Mom cringes as the girl, failing to maintain an easy position, topples dumbly onto her side, a cow tipped. She lies there unmoving for a moment, her limbs stretched out straight like a dog lying on its side. Mom can’t help but think of a beached whale. Why couldn’t the girl have gotten her deft, spry genes? Instead, she had to get her father’s bulk and big-bones. Her wrists and ankles wide and un-feminine, her bust more a product of a large, protrusive ribcage than anything else. She was such a cute girl.
With her face red and her thin hair soaked with sweat—so soaked that it consolidates into a ropey gridwork, revealing much of her pale scalp—the girl gets back up on her knees, her chest huffing. She starts the routine over again. This time, as she moves through the routine, her tripod lists, slowly tilting forward until it finally crashes silently, face first, into the grass. The girl, so concentrated on her routine, doesn’t notice. Mom looks on like a helpless bystander witnessing an imminent disaster. When the girl finally finishes her routine, she looks up to smile at a camera that is no longer there. Her cry of frustration is so loud, mom can hear it clearly from her bedroom.
The girl rushes across the backyard and yanks the tripod off the ground. In her fury, she jams the tripod back into the earth with many violent, wrathful motions. As if out of spite, the tripod does not stick into the ground and falls over, slowly, mockingly, fainting drowsily into the grass. Now the girl is outraged. She bites her lower lip; she grunts. She picks the tripod up again, an angry lioness grabbing her cub by the scruff of its neck. She slams the tripod into the ground with such force that one of its flimsy legs bends sharply and then snaps with a bright, surprising crack! —the severed leg pinwheels across the lawn. The girl steps back in mute surprise, saying nothing. The tripod falls over again, dead. It will never stand again. The girl weeps.
Mom’s seen enough.
Stepping into the backyard, mom asks the girl if she’s alright. The girl, unable to speak, her cheeks wet with tears, simply points to the tripod as if it were a corpse she stumbled upon. Face down in the grass, dead, just like dad. Mom nods, understands.
“It’s ok,” mom assures, “it was a shitty tripod anyway. You can get a better one.”
The girl continues to cry, shakes her head.
“Why don’t I try holding the phone for you again?” mom suggests.
The girl shakes her head, mumbles that mom isn’t steady enough with the phone.
“No,” mom says sternly, confidently, growing into that lofty space only mothers can occupy. “I can be steady. I’ll be steady for you.”
David Chamberlain is the mind behind the popular “From My Mom’s Basement” podcast—an anthological podcast of short-stories and novellas, all written and narrated by himself. The podcast is currently in its fifth year of production and boasts forty short stories in its catalog.
David was accepted as a contributor at the 2022 Yale Writer’s Workshop, where he worked under the novelist Trey Ellis (Platitudes, Home Repairs). He has written and won several dramatic writing contests, including the University of Utah’s Film and Media screenplay competition, and has had a short screenplay fully produced. He earned his B.A. in Playwriting from Utah Valley University in 2019.
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