by Olivia Treynor
When I turn eighteen, my mother gives me her body (cobwebbed, seamed, yellowed like a white door gone rot) and tells me to put it somewhere safe.
She asks when I’m standing in our kitchen, my body half bent over the sink, cleaning caked dishes.
“There’s something I need you to do,” my mother says.
She’s standing behind me, weight all balanced in her left leg, arms long and translucent. She doesn’t look much like a movie ghost: she’s wearing a blue striped blouse from Costco and discount flip flops too big on her doll-sized feet, and her port-wine birthmark still wipes her chin.
I don’t jump when I hear her voice. There’s no fear in my body, seeing her. Looking at my mother, listening to her voice slide through me; it’s instinctual and concrete. Of course she is here.
I don’t know how to explain it any way but this: when I was a child and my mother spoke of her youth or of rotary phones or of tugging at bread dough for three dollars an hour, and I asked where I had been back then, she would grasp my hair lovingly and inform me that at that point in time I had been just a small glint in her eye.
And that is the fact of it, that I am made of her, a russian nesting doll of my mother’s body, and so when she’s standing in our kitchen, walls painted the color of toffee and plagued by my childhood crayon ramblings, there is nothing surprising, scary. I am of her, which is to say I am her.
So I walk my mother to her body, buried two miles from our home. I used to hold my breath, walking past the cemetary with all its death. I feel the same childish, creeping shame,
holding my mother’s almost-hand in my blood-warmth-flesh-tone fingers and feeling my own pulse like a blinking, obvious heartbeating in her nothing embrace. I pull my mother towards her gravestone, a flat sheet of marble, feel the watch of the mausoleum across the flower-strewn greenness and fight the rush of embarrassment that we put her so completely in the ground like a dead thing.
And then I remember that she is a dead thing, and that I am her alive thing, and we are each other’s, even now, as I am reaching to make way in the dirt for my mother’s body, the body she has given me, the body I am returning her to, even now, as the grass parts under my fingernails and I make a womb for my mother to come into once again, yes, we are each other’s.
Olivia Treynor is a Barnard College student from the upper half of California. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Yemassee, phoebe Journal, Canvas Literary Journal, and elsewhere. She loves lakes but is scared of the ocean. You can find her tweets @yeehawoliv and more of her work at oliviatreynor.com.