Remember the day you learned to float. Remember the floor, curled like skin. Remember the porch. Remember the paint, also curled like skin. Remember the hall. Remember the closet. Remember the float. Remember the house. Remember the heat. Remember the hurt. Remember the flash. Remember the rage. Good. Good.
What you do is not so different from what anyone does. You root in someone else. This is how you stay. You live without flesh, but you do not live without love.
You learn that you like riding city buses. They are full of people who feel like you: too tired to be in any world but their own. The woman sitting in the aisle seat pays you no mind when you stop beside her, not even when the whole bus jolts sideways, like it fell in a trench.
She looks like our mama. And just like our mama, she makes you mad. Look at the slant of her nose and her soft pear chin, her skin the shine of an old oiled hog, her mouth as thin and mean as a snake. Rage rises in you like water.
I whisper in your head, fight and slap and girl and this bitch.
It happens quickly, once you decide.
“Excuse me. Miss.” The sound comes out like a rasp; it could be the wind. Speaking is like ripping roots from your not-quite-self, dense and clotted as soil. Killing, though, is easy. You search through what we have sprouted inside of you, a sylvan tangle of jungle vine and forest. Your mind is twined with bittersweet, plumped with porcelain berries. You snap a silvered strand from where it winds along your neck (the place that should be your neck), and you thrust. The woman who could be our mama jerks like someone has slapped her on the back. You twist, and her head snaps from her spine, flops, loose. Her eyes hang open, and still they stare straight through you.
Inside of you, a green twinge, like a crocus nosing itself from beneath the dirt. It hurts. Rooting into someone’s flesh always hurts. Like the dull everywhere ache of growing pains you used to have in your bones, when you had bones. When I would rub your legs until you fell back asleep. This is the same. It hurts because you’re growing.
Someone is screaming.
The city bus stops. Everyone rushes to the doors. You rush too. You follow them down the steps, huddle away from them huddled on the sidewalk. The driver takes out her phone, jabs at its glow. The darkness eats you. Her voice jabbers about blood, accident, monstrous. You are not a monster. You are a flower opening at night. You are a vine twining around another. You are only doing what you must, in order to stay.
The morning you learned to float, I walked you down to the end of our street. You sat down on the curb. You squeezed your hands between your knees. You lifted your hands before your face, as though you were holding a prayer book. You looked down at your hands that shimmered like a sheen of oil on water. Through them, you saw the asphalt street, flecked with pebbles; you saw your ripped blue Vans that used to be mine; you saw, through the Vans, the crumbled inside layers of the street: oily and broken and shifting. You drew a finger down a red and raw line, from your temple to your jawbone. You could hardly take a full breath without feeling something rip, deep inside you. Why am I still wearing shoes? you asked. Do you see me? you asked. Why is this happening? you asked, trying to catch your breath. Your legs were too thin and see-through. Your arms were a blurred brown stain. Only your face was clear.
“She threw you against the wall,” I answered. “Do you really want to know the rest?”
Silty layers of confusion clogged your mind like mud. What am I, you asked.
I reached for the faint outline of your hand. “With me,” I said. “You are with me.” You did not leave. You always were stubborn.
Telling your death shoots a stake through my core. It pierces my heart, pins my words to my tongue. My soul shoots its fingers up and down and through you. Splitting you open, pinning you here. You let my rage burrow into you too, cleaving your skull open where it should be sutured. You let it find the cold soil of your soul, let it bury itself in you. Grief climbs out of me, spiraled and twined with my rage, and nestles in your stomach. When I finish telling, you lift your jaw and turn your head. Blood and bruises still bloom on your cheek. You lift your jaw and turn your head, over and over again, like it is still happening. Like we are still hiding in the closet and Mama is grabbing you instead of me. In the present: Mama is trying to make you go. In the present: you are choosing to stay. You always are stubborn.
You learn what grief can become, if it grows dense and thick and fast enough. It can become a bed, a home, a garden. You learn how want and rage can twine and climb together. Like honeysuckle and sweet rocket, they help each other grow. This is how you stay: you make a bed, a home, a garden of grief.
It turns you back into a living thing, nearly.
You root only in certain women. The ones who remind you (who remind me) of the woman who made you what you are. You see her in more strangers than you’d like. And each time you see her, the woman who might be our mama, your brain stops swirling. The lank drop of hair, slump of shoulders, softness of jaw tugs violence from your chest. You focus, pulling hard on something rooted deep in your bowels, something that wants to be pulled from its bed like a long and fat worm, and you blow. It is like a train coming through you. Cold oil, sweet acid.
And they stop. Whoever they are, whatever they are doing. Maybe their faces twitch. Maybe their arms jerk backward. Like the way your arm broke behind your back. Maybe their lips part to show bloody, cracking teeth. Like the way our mama broke your mouth. Maybe their spine snaps or their hips shatter. Maybe they duck their head and out comes a stream of something foul and black and cold and oily. It looks like vomit. But you know it’s not vomit. It’s blood and bits of their organs, and they float in a puddle around their high-heeled feet.
Yes honey, I say, every time. Good. Good.
You use their bodies to plant your roots; you ground yourself in flesh. You live on rage, you grow as garden. You grow so wide, bodies scattered across the city. It does not matter that we never find our mama. It does not matter that she tried to pluck you from your life. You stayed, you did not allow yourself to be plucked, and for a while, that is enough.
Until you find her. She is on the bus that you climb on last, at night, the one that circles the city as you dream about skin, teeth, meat, bones. She does not see you; how could she? She destroyed everything of you there was to see. She is not how you remember: young, and strong, and mean. This woman looks old, and soft, and desperate. But your soul trembles at her mouth, your spirit quivers at her fists curled around two plastic bags. You have been looking for a ghost, you realize. You have been chasing a memory. You were not prepared for this living thing, its wasted horror.
You force yourself to look out the bus window. You see your face as the women you’ve killed might see it, slack and blank and violent. Your skin is the color of her skin, brown and yellow and ashy as chalk. Your eyes, like hers, are black and round as a sheet ghost. The bus jumps a pothole, and in one slim moment you are flying like you’ve caught the edge of Mama’s anger, and you know the sound your body will make when it splits, right down the middle.
You find yourself standing above her, ready to twist, ready to plunge. But you cannot do it. How could you root in a world so miserable? How could you twine yourself, forever, inside her?
You fall apart. You are still just a child, after all. You cannot grow, if you cannot root.
We built your first home inside me. I wake up with bits of my teeth breaking off in my hands. Skin flakes in raw patches from my fingers. Without new flesh, we are rotting inside.
Remember the day you learned to float. Remember our mama, her mouth curled like a wound. Remember our mama, a monster. Remember the closet where we tried to hide. Remember the hall. Remember the house that hid what happened. Remember the porch like a tongue to a mouth. Remember our mama who ran when she saw what she had done.
You start dismantling. You are not ready for how much it hurts. Deeper than body—you have no body. It is your soul that is sewn to this world. The clot of dirt that would be your nose crumbles first. Your cheekbones next. The matching notches in your jaw dissolve, your whole sturdy jaw bone, all the fiber and loam collapse in itself; the leaf of your skin sags and drops into space. It’s only a matter of time before the whole jungle of you will scatter; your ribs will float, and with them, you will float too. You pluck and pock and pop as roots snap all over the place, ripping themselves from inside of you. The pain is colossal. How can you hurt so much, when you are made of so little actual material?
You still know the way by heart. You step onto another bus. You can barely think straight. You get off at the first stop. You get to the house that kept everything hidden. You slide up the porch, like a lizard, like a snake. You open the door, you move inside.
Slick spider webs of memory greet you. A bloody jungle of love.
Hello, you say. Your voice shudders from the air: from above me and in front of me, rumbling the floor beneath me. I cannot see you anymore. You are a dimming shadow, even to me.
Remember me, you say. Not an ask; a command.
Sometimes what is happening is always in the present. Our mama is the monster, I say, but we are the ones in the closet. She slams open the door to find us, because she is in her rage. I cover my face with my arms when she grabs you. I do not offer myself in your place. Her mouth is like a wound, and you are like a rag doll. She turns into an animal: biting, clawing, ripping at you. When she is finished, her mouth is bloody and her arms swinging. I do not go to you; I do not want her to see me. She bursts through the house cawing like a blackbird. After a while she leaves. She slams the front door behind her. I watch you from the closet. I am a hole through which hopelessness passes. There is a white, hot, pulsing hole through my middle; it burns me from the inside out.
When I come out, I can see that something vital in you has broken. Your body isn’t moving. I see your soul floating. You are four feet above the ground. Your head is knocking against the ceiling. Stay, I asked you. Stay with me. And you stayed.
Come, you say.
Right now, in this present, you focus. You twist something inside yourself; you make it long and thin and sharp and sticklike. You think rage. You think love. You think float. You remember killing, and killing, and killing. You let the memories fill you like a forest, almost as though you are alive.
Your skin draws back from your cheekbones. Your lips fold over your teeth. The house starts to shake. The glasses covered in dust in Mama’s china cabinet rattle like hands pulling on a cage. The room is full of a bright light pulsing. Spirits, the word is at your throat, and there they are, coming up through the space between spaces. Warm and full of a bright burning light, with eight thin arms and nine long mouths. Each one doubles as it erupts into the room, and each double doubles—
yes yes and yes they whisper—
each arm reaches for you; each mouth is fixed on you. They will grab your tendrils to rip you from earth, they will rip you in thirds with their teeth. In each of their mouths, there is a light too white.
Come with me this time, you ask. You say.
You know my answer, what else could it be?
You twist, and I feel something twist deep inside of me. I feel my spine bend, then snap. My torso is crushed and gutted. My head lies a few feet away.
Pain blooms bright as a flower. Tendrils snap and curl and unfurl and die. A billion bright eyes cut at our soul, mouths of pointed teeth tear at our vines. Don’t be afraid, honey, you turn to me and say. This is how we leave.
Once they begin to wither and burn, we let go of the last of our roots. We lift, finally, fast and free and light as air. We learn to float.
Originally published in Midnight & Indigo: Twenty-Two Speculative Stories by Black Women Writers (Midnight & Indigo, 2021)
