Matryoshka
I had only wished it once, and I was a child then, full of quaking tears. Then, I made lakes that were homes for my poisonous desires, and my mother took pity on me, and let me fence them in. Now, she has no pity and I have no poison. I do not cry, but my belly is a boiling ocean, with my mother drowning inside. We merge and I feel new teeth drop to the bottom of my sea. They dissolve there and I feel the life that they held unwind into my own red tributaries. We separate and I chomp viscously at the cool, soft place she has left behind.
Our house is jammed with small rooms, blooming darkly with things and stories that were never ours. Her hair is long and straight and it is everywhere. It streaks the walls and the tables and the bright plates we used to eat on. Her head is hairless, and there comes a point in the middle of the night when it glows.
I wove my mother a blanket out of tansy blushes and the yellow film that is inside the strands of my hair. I put it over both of us when we sleep. I am still growing, but my mother is shrinking. She fits in the well of a large saucer now, and her wrinkled skin drapes around her bones like a leather pouch. She sleeps in the curve of my neck or a tangle of my hair. She shudders in the night, and it feels like the tremoring of leaves. When I sleep, there is an autumn wind in my chest, and my bones are made of brown and crumbling brush. Her heart beats quickly when she dreams, and I feel the distant throbbing in all my giant limbs. We are asleep together, dreaming the same dreams. My face feels rough and dry, and she is living there, in our dream, in a little house built against the swell of my nostril. She has a fire burning inside the house, and the smoke is crawling up my nose with sharp clawed hands. The fireplace crumbles into rubble in my pores and the fire is burning the house. My mother leaves quickly, wrapped in a scrap of her tattered tansy blanket, and she begins to hike up the round rise of my cheekbone. She follows the smoke like a river. She is hiking for weeks, the folds of her wrinkled skin trail behind her like the train of an elegant gown.
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Based on Jamaica Kincaid’s “My Mother.” What a trippy, great story!
