The House of Paper Mountains by Amalia Mora

The piles of paper have become mountains in Betty’s house. Some of the papers are stacked into bags that look like boulders, and often they erode and turn into spilled valleys. But they are always with her, these shifting geologies of envelopes and notes and index cards.

She knows her daughter Lorena doesn’t approve. What if there is an emergency? Lorena always asks. How will I get to you?!

Betty feels awful. How much longer can she expect her daughter to wade through this strange ecology to reach her? And she has to admit, her aging legs—their delicate and thin origami—can’t traverse the indoor terrain like they used to. 

Individually, the papers are doctor appointment reminders, bills to be paid, lists of medications, requests from charities: Save the children! The planet! Yourself! Collectively, they are her excuses for missed doctor appointments, for unpaid bills: I can’t find anything in this mess!

Betty is aware that it’s not the papers’ fault. She feels bad about blaming them, for making them complicit in the lies she tells herself, and so she is always very nice to them. For every paper that meets its demise in the shredder, she spares twenty.

One afternoon, Betty heads to the recycling bin in her driveway. She is so rarely outside these days that the hushed, late summer breeze feels like a foreign whisper on her skin. She rummages through the bin with the fervor of a mother rat searching for her young in a flooded burrow.. She opens her eyes wide and pulls out an overflowing bag.  

She is so lost in her excavation mission that she doesn’t notice her daughter pull up to the house.

“Mom?!” Lorena says, walking toward Betty in the driveway.

“Oh! Hi honey,” she says, tail between her legs.

“What are you doing? You said I could throw those away.”

“I know,” Betty says. “But these envelopes have my name and address on them.”

Lorena reminds her mom that names and addresses can be easily found online now, but Betty doesn’t care. She wants to shred the envelopes—it will make her feel safe.

Later, Lorena removes stacks of notebooks from the couch, a few of them tumbling onto the floor. Their weight has left a depression in the cushion, and Betty and Lorena sit in this hollow and drink tea. They use two piles of magazines as makeshift side tables.

Betty playfully imagines a prayer she might say to the paper gods: Thank you for my daughter, who humors my faith though she doesn’t believe. And forgive her for the notebooks—I will find their scattered ghosts and build them a new, sacred mound.

When Lorena shifts her weight, a bag full of shredded bills on the couch topples over. It spills its multitude of soft confetti onto her feet.

Embarrassed, Betty immediately recants her prayer.

She turns to Lorena with apology in her eyes. “I’m gonna get better,” she says. “I promise.”

Lorena takes Betty’s doll-sized hand in hers, gives it a squeeze. “I know, Mom.”

Lorena stays a bit longer to watch Betty’s favorite mystery program. The episode is about a Catholic girl whose sudden waywardness is unexplainable until it’s connected to the unsolved murder of another girl who’d been molested by her priest.

Betty feels a thousand paper cuts rip inside her heart. She asks Lorena to shut off the television.

“Are you ok?” Lorena asks.

“Yes,” Betty says. “I’m just…tired honey.”

After Lorena is gone, Betty surveys the room, imagining her piles cleared away. She can already feel the pang of their loss—they have always listened so well as she recites the myth of their creation: how in the beginning, there was an unspeakable tragedy and out of this came a world of paper mountains that kept the tragedy miles away.

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AMALIA MORA — Amalia’s writing has appeared in Sonora Review and Terrain.org, amongst other publications, and her play, “In Community,” was commissioned for Teatro de la Calle’s New Works Festival. She is a flash editor at Lunchticket, and her performing arts journalism was most recently published in Flaunt Magazine. Amalia is also the founder of the multimedia project, “A Eulogy for Jane Doe,” which honors the lives of unidentified women in the United States and along the US/Mexico border. She received her MFA in creative writing from Antioch University and her PhD in ethnomusicology from UCLA.

Art by DYLAN MANNING — Dylan is an artist and comedian and co-founder of money money productions, a comedy production house. She is a micro micro influencer on Tiktok with a whopping 23 followers. If you act fast you can be her 24th follower. Find her @imdylanmanning on Tiktok or dylan_s_pickles on Instagram.