by arianna kanji
edited by liam mason and alloe mak

I have somebody else’s tongue but hold it like my father clutches his mid-morning paper and wipes the sweat from his brow, erasing the wrinkles that spread crevices across a blank canvas. The sculpture of my face collects itself at the bends. Like the marble of the statues in a castle crumbling from an empty pressure—like something incomprehensible. She sits there. My mother’s casing encloses upon my open wounds as if plaster against the crumbling walls of my old playplace rusting in the backyard. Rounded tips of plastic pink towers. Twisted patterns fit only to be crawled upon by many-legged beasts. She was never supposed to last, anyway. Neither were her creations.

Restart.

I fall upon a bed stained pink with something that leaks from my ears. I break open puddles like lips and slip secrets under the demon’s tongue. Alien skin spreads itself thin over my shivering bones. Chew gum until it burns, they told me. Spray paint nasty messages on walls that reek of a king bowing down to shackled servants. Something unholy. Something satanic. Would she have minded, anyway? My mother’s hands used to crinkle as she kneaded the dough and slipped little circles into the oven. I’m lying. I never saw her hands. The constellations of veins spinning wheat into gold and flour into cookies never quite flashed along my sky.

Wrong. Restart.

I stuff food in my mouth like it’s the only remaining creation of the old woman sitting only a few feet away from me. The sharp, burning curry clips the upper portion of my mouth, and I half expect her to rub a wrinkling hand along the bend of my jaw and mumble about my skin whitening as we speak. Her eyes aren’t here, though. Something’s caught them in jars—model ships doomed to a false ocean littered with bits of plastic. I reach through the folds of before, pages of textbooks flipping into pictures, and as she catches my eye, the make of my bone flashes through her pupils. Something electric. Something not quite there. Somehow, she sees a different face sewn across my own with rusting needles and callused fingers. A simple grin stretches my flesh apart. For once, she thanks the bleeding. My mother used to smile the same way.

No. Wrong. Restart.

The camera light blinks. Once. Twice. Three times. Like the beating of a heart, or the ticking of a watch twisted around my brother’s neck, it flickers on. A girl with rosy cheeks and shining eyes peeks through the foreground, the blurry screen coming into focus on her wide grin. Reaching through the folds is the shimmering band hugging her wrist, an action of motherly love that’ll soon pass her by. Does she know—eyes pulled back by tight ponytails, sheets stained pink and ink crossing her lips—that the seams will soon rip? That she’ll be left scared and exposed on the world’s stage, nothing more than a pale pink band to show for a love she never even laid eyes on? 

The shackles on my wrists are weighing down the blood, bones, and flesh. Some might say I’m trapped, in a way, rewinding the laughter until it bubbles in my throat, but that would be a lie. I’ve never even heard her voice. They say I have my mother’s eyes, that the child I once was had the same rosy cheeks and crinkled temple. They say not to fear it. But is it wrong to wonder if she’d look through me with those same false-ocean eyes?

No. Stop it. Restart.

There’s a sickness in my bones. If I were one to believe in a cross or a book, I’d be kneeling in regret until my legs stained red, but my skin is flaking off and it’ll dirty the shining couch cushions. There’s acid in my lungs and exhaust in my stomach—I’ll cough and they’ll set my dress on fire. I’ll linger near the edges of repent, my skin folding over into scales, but there’s something so forbidden about setting the truth down on a bench and watching it leak into the drains. Who knows where it’ll go? Down deep into the ground, where the heat will mold it into emblems of bare bodies twisted in agony? A Greek tragedy of sorts, where all I’ve ever desired was hidden in the walls of crumbling pink towers? The hands that built my home pressed a solitary mark to my forehead and vanished. I’d see my mother’s face in the reflection of a river blood-red, knees to the ground, dress gone up in flames. I’d reach to press my fingers up to her temple, but they’d merely cut through the icy water.

No. Stop it. Stop it. Restart.

We used to ride bikes on weekends. The wheels would bound against gravel as we’d twist along sidewalks and through unruly games of ball hockey. There’d be wind, silence, and the pressing ache of calluses. Two years ago, the brake attached to the railings of my bike malfunctioned. A violent twist, and then water. Deep blue chills cut through my skin. I survived. The bike didn’t. 

I’ll walk through the memory sometimes, past the soaking wet body of a terrified child stepping biblically out of a freezing lake, past a scream that rattled a ribcage and shot something unfamiliar into my throat, past the acres of land I sped through while unsure if I was going to make it out alive, and down the quarry to the mangled remains of a bike. Her name was written on a little tag that I’d been told to get rid of, the same way I’d been told to clean out the dirt before stepping on its peddles. But my mother’s dust littered its bare bones. Exposed. Vulnerable. She’d been mine to love. I could almost see her amongst the rocks.

No. Stop it. This is too much. Restart.

Perhaps somebody should have joined her. Unmangled the bike and pushed themself up the forestry. Savored the taste of blood and salt swimming in the inner crevices of their mouth. Clambered towards her in burry-eyed pain. Laid their head against her cold shoulder.

No. No. No. Please.

It all leads back to the video. The smiling, the laughing, the rosy red cheeks. Pictures of a childhood she’d always be able to treasure. We’d always be able to look back on them and smile. I’d never even seen those rosy red cheeks. I don’t know if I want to.

No. No. Stop it now. Stop it. 

She’s hiding in the floorboards, in the shutters, in the flower bed never watered and the soil always dug in by halfway-tied-up shoes. My mother pressed herself into the sharp angles of my cheeks until the water ran. Until the watch came undone. Until it all decided to implode.

Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.

I have my mother’s tongue. It holds itself like a mosaic of everybody who told me otherwise. I have the tongue of a dead woman rotting against my gums. Within me are the roots of a girl hidden in polaroid pictures and fake smiles. A stranger whose fate I am destined to follow.

No. Wrong. 

I will forever be my mother’s child.

No. Wrong.

I will never be my mother’s child.

Restart.

I have three assignments due yesterday and the other at 11:59 PM. There’s a half-written article sitting in my computer for a theme I’ll never truly be able to grapple with. There’s so many things on the horizon—butterfly wings and clay figurines and closing the window when the evening gets chilly—so much to accomplish in a twist of the earth. My wounds have healed plasterless, and the tremor in my hand lessened to a mere murmur. 

I say the excuse is religion. I say the excuse is music. Technically, both are true. A songbird sings in the trees, and already-burnt incense is stuck into the ground. I can hear it in the wind. Not her voice—even I couldn’t conjure up a fable like that. It’ll all end up collapsed in the backyard of a patchwork-quilt family eventually, anyway. A many-legged beast scurries onto the twisting body of a rose and settles into its familiar scent, a long-gone boat finally crashing against a sandy shore. The thorns get caught on my sewn-on flesh as I set the flowers on the ground, clutching them like my father would hold his mid-morning newspaper.