“He saw him fall onto the messy bed, with a touch of resigned fatigue, sweating, as his froth-covered teeth drew a horrible, monstrous smile for the world out of him and death began to flow through his bones like a river of ashes” (18).
“He observed that on his middle toe--I mustn’t keep wearing these tight shoes--he had a tumor. In a natural way, and as if he were used to it, he took a screwdriver out of his pocket and extracted the head of the tumor with it. He placed it carefully in a little blue box--can you see colors in dreams?--and he glimpsed, peeping out of the wound, the end of a greasy, yellow string. Without getting upset, as if he had expected that string to be there, he pulled on it slowly with careful precision. It was a long, a very long tape, which came out by itself, with no discomfort or pain” (15).
“The dampness will come to rest on his brother’s side, circulate through his body like a concrete current. It seemed to him that the dead had need of a different circulatory system that hurled them toward another irremediable and final death...when the dampness begins to run through the marrow...” (20).
“His hands were now intensely cold with a long, dehumanized coldness” (22).
“Wasn’t it just as possible that the buried brother would remain incorruptible while rottenness would invade the living one with all its blue octopuses?” (23)
“He could hear the cricket’s song growing weaker until it disappeared from his senses which had turned inward, submerging him in a new and uncomplicated notion of time and space, erasing the presence of that material world, physical and painful, full of insects and acrid smells of violets and formaldehyde” (16-17)
“I thought about the tumor that had ceased to pain in his stomach. I imagined it as round--how he felt the same sensation--swelling like an interior sun, unbearable like a yellow insect extending its vicious filaments toward the depths of his intestines” (18).
“He lifted his eyes and saw that the railway coach had emptied out and that the only one left, in another compartment of the train, was his brother, dressed as a woman, in front of a mirror, trying to extract his left eye with a pair of scissors” (15-16).
“The barber finished his work and with the tip of his scissors closed the corpse’s eyelids” (22).
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.
Eventually, she reaches the crest of my eye socket, and climbs into its fleshy pink corner. I press my thumb over the dying flames and they are extinguished. My mother builds a cocoon of my eyelashes and she closes her eyes to rest.
I have been dreaming in the hot red morning and the long purple night. I have seen her behind my eyelid that covers her like a blanket. She has eaten her way out of the cocoon and I can see the tiny creases of her body swimming on the globe of my iris. She looks like a child and I want her to be big again, and to hold me in her arms. I begin to cry and her pool becomes a sea. I want to reach for her, but my eyes have no hands and panicked, she is swept away. It is a fat, blue tear and it slugs across my face, moving largely in a straight, wide line. It drops off my chin, with my mother pickling quietly inside, and then breaks against my shoulder. Another tear is on its way and my mother scrambles to her feet. She scratches up thin, dry flakes of my skin and busies herself building a wall along the length of my arm. She hunkers behind their nearly translucent shadow, but they are decaying faster than she is. The crying comes fast like a big, galloping rain, and I think the trees are breaking outside my window. The tears eat up her wall and swallow her, too. Then they sweep themselves off my skin and under the floorboards, leaving my mother crouching in a little box made of salt. The box glitters wickedly and all the little threads of starlight that happen to touch it are burst into crooked grains on the bedspread. She eats the salt and it makes her bitter, and very, very sad. I have been watching her, and I am dreaming.
When she has eaten all the salt, she is puffy and light like the little birds that we used to catch in the winter and roast on bitter green flames. She stretches her long, wrinkled neck, and lifts her arms that look like wings, they are so hung with her swollen skin. She gathers up a great burst of energy and hurls herself into the air, spreading her wings with a triumphant chuckle. Her flight is wavering, but she sustains it until she reaches the long, smooth expanse of my abdomen. There she tumbles into a long ridge of my flesh that is crawling with flowering vines. They have been growing there for a long time now, and the little white bugs have made tiny cities in their leaves, smaller even than my mother. I hope that she will find a radiant flower to nest in for a while, but now she is traversing a piled mountain of vines. They have tender thorns and she climbs them like a ladder. When she reaches the top, she builds a crooked nest of petals and stems and sweet blue nectar. She curls up there and rocks gently in the steady wind of my deep breath. She is glowing, subtle, phosphorescent, and I am laughing in my sleep.
It is morning and I am running in fat golden droplets of hot, clean sunshine. I am rivers of yellow and I am dreaming of blue tiles and dark caves with the curling hooves of lambs hammering inside. I am shaking in my sleep and my mother is afraid again. The sunwater is soaking her vines and she is not stable. She flaps her wings frantically and leaps from her nest, but she is too frantic to fly. She falls into a run that she can’t stop and is swallowed immediately by the gaping mouth of by bellybutton. I feel her there, curled up like a fiddlehead fern, and I know that her heart is still beating. It is small but I can feel it, stammering in tiny knives, in all my giant limbs. She sleeps there, and I am sleeping with her, and we are dreaming the same dreams.
My stomach is a monster now. It bellows and there are fists pounding at the inside of my skin, pulling at my ribs, wearing my large intestine like a feather boa. My belly is rising and falling like waves on the ocean and my mother is hunkered low in her hole. My body is an ocean of heartbeats, and I am a pounding monster, with my mother whimpering beneath my skin. She clings to the tiny nub, far below the surface, where many hundreds of years ago my umbilical cord held me to her with veins and blood. But her withered hands are not strong enough, and she is flung into the air, spinning windless like a breath of pollen, and falling limply to the crest of my knee like the scrap of a well-worn blanket. She stands there for a moment, and looks at the writhing mess of my belly and gazes into my face from many miles in the distance. She is so small, but I can see her expression, clear and crisp as the frost on the windowpane that hangs beside the bed. It is bright and intense like coals under a fire, but she is not angry, and she is loving me, and even more, she is loving the monster that is living in my belly, the monster that wants to kill her.
“Mom?” I am asking, but my voice is enormous, and laden with fire that chases her away from me, down my leg, into the little nests between my toes. My belly smooths and rounds itself, a still globe between me and my miniature mother. The fire is gone, and I am waking into a day broken teal like a wave. I want to call for her, but I am afraid to speak again. I twist around the bright mound of my stomach, and look for her in the well between each of my toes. They are all empty except for the smallest one, nestled sweetly against my left pinky toe, holds a tiny glass bottle. The bottle is filled with clouds of fine red string and snuggled in their center is my mother’s still, little heart. I wrap it in her tansy blanket and hide it under the bed.
I am standing in a small room that is cluttered darkly with things and stories that were never mine. My stomach protrudes from myself like a balcony, and I rest my hands on its hot, red surface. I can feel the heart that is living in there, an enormous heart, and I hate it for killing my mother. I pour dirt on the ground until it is covered past my ankles and I build a garden with wide, yawning flowers. I pluck them off their stems and lay them on my stomach so I am a blanket of stunning, sleepy blooms. I remove every thorn. The baby kicks and I hate her. I rub my belly gently so she will be peaceful and still. I crush up the flowers into a lavish balm to soothe my baby and scent the room with a soft tansy sigh.
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