Sometimes things grow
How fast are bat wings? Does the tooth fairy plant baby teeth to grow adult teeth? Ami imagined her wobbling incisor in a gleaming white field, red in the middle where nerves used to be. Do plants have ears? Do millipedes have milli-eyes and if peacock feathers filled pillows could a princess sleep on them? I filled her breakfast bowl, washed tomatoes for dinner, her questions burbly as the stew. I fastened her shoes, smeared sunscreen on her nose. Purple knapsack, skinny striped legs. If I stop for a minute I lose the ability to move.
Ami pouring her own cereal, making her own eggs. She waited until sun clawed all the way across the floor to my throat and I wake, coughing. Her fingerprints like tulips on the water glass by my bed she carefully carried with both hands so it wouldn’t spill. She chattered musically to a corn plant without ears. “A corn plant without ears,” she yelped, another joke I don’t get. It’s been years since I fell in the backroom of Jinny’s. The blood in my head sludges my limbs, I suffocate in my own resin. Ami forges my signature on school documents and credit cards. She calls me from school, her formal voice colliding with her childish questions. If pillows were stuffed with lashes would I dream of eyes? The electricity is still on thanks to Ami. She gets decent grades. The school only called me once when she slipped on a field day and broke her ankle. You need to come get her they said but I didn’t know where they were.
Some people shouldn’t have a child, my mother said when I was one hour and twenty minutes away from delivering. “Some People” is me. Some People never grow up, Some People are stupid as shit, Some People should not be born is what she really meant when I was plastered to a hospital bed about to give birth, her racer-road mouth propped into a smile for the nurse. Thank god you’re here, please take care of her and the child. She didn’t stay long enough to even see the baby. Your grandmother is dead I said when Ami was old enough to ask and maybe she was. I wouldn’t know.
Ami packed her own lunches, got a part-time job. The electricity stayed on, food appeared and didn’t rot. When I felt better I made it all the way to the kitchen, different than I remembered, darker, as if wet. When Ami came home I gave her pancakes and syrup, the only thing I still knew how to make. She stabbed her fork in the warm puffy rounds but didn’t eat. I’ll clean up I lied and went back to bed, my brain bouncing off my hot skull.
Sometimes she dressed me up and brushed my hair all the way down to the place where my waist used to narrow. She led me into the government offices where she lied I was mute. Just nod in the right places, shake your head in the right places, for god’s sake don’t mix them up she pleaded as we pushed through glass doors into beige rooms with greige carpets, everyone in lanyards behind counters almost as tall as my head. I clung to her hand so as to not fall. You see how she is. The bob-haired woman tapped the spot of our exchange, my shaky signature for our trickling benefits. Ami smiled on the sidewalk and let out her breath. You did well she told me, the first I’d heard that in my life.
After my fall, barely awake watching the spray of passing cars like searchlights for the lost. The smell of physician wafted above the whir and beeps of medical machinery. She’ll get better but not like she was, the doctor said. She was always nothing my mother said and flicked on a smile so bright the doctor was sure he had misheard.
Sometimes I dreamed. Monsters, slick and green with purple eyes and tongues like fire. Sometimes of vegetables, an ordinary kitchen knife sliding through them making neat rounds and rectangles. The hand on the knife is always smooth and pretty, there’s music in the background, the song is always soft. If I listen carefully I hear a ball in the background and Ami’s excited voice calling did you see me did you see me to the rosebush because roses have ears. The gap in her mouth is proof of the tooth fairy’s crop at least for other kids under another sun.
When did she stop coming home? Middle school? High school? Was her hair long or short then, did she have the small glinting chip in her nose that caught the light when she turned? She made me pancakes with syrup and melon sliced into geometric shapes and sat one last time on my bed watching drizzle melt diamonds on the window. Shadow and plaque invaded greater swathes of me. My resin thickened. Strangers lifted my arms, pushed damp cloth over my skin, smoothed hair cut to my shoulders, her last act before leaving. Inside my head only Ami’s old chatter drifted above the quicksand. Does mud go to heaven? Can birds learn to read? My skittering heart raced like squirrel toes. Ami’s song swelled as it finally burst. Her old childhood skipping-rope chant, she sang it so loud and never tripped. Everything dies, but sometimes things grow.
Eirene Gentle writes and edits, mostly lit, mostly little, usually from Toronto, Canada. She’s happy to be published in some great journals.
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