Bodily Transformation and Experience

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.