Genesis
by Emily Hunt Kivel

My mother looks just like her father, and I look exactly like my mother, which in turn means I look exactly like my grandfather, who, I’ll point out, had a dowager’s hump and a wart over his eyebrow and a purple vein like a spider spread across the left half of his face for more than a third of his life. My brother looks like my father, which is ironically more, well, a lot more, like a woman. Black eyelashes. Mole on cheek. My grandfather died only at sixty-one, speeding recklessly between one place and another but he had lung disease anyway. My mother keeps a picture of that unholy looking man on her nightstand, and I squint at it in the dark from the two twin mattresses my brother and I have on the floor. I dream of headboards. That face looms above. I suppose that’s what we have to look forward to, my mother and me.