Decomposing by Shell Feijo
“I don’t want her buried, I want her burnt. But I don’t want her ashes.”
+++
I want her dead. I want her long nails cut to the quick, her head shaved, her eyes carved out to empty bone. I want her right arm with the scar on the elbow broken in half and her feet hobbled at the ankle. I want her stripped of skin and flesh and left only cold winter white bone, with chunks scraped out in periodic places, suffering left visible.
I don’t know what to do with her brain or her heart. One cold, the other conflated with hatred so deep she couldn’t see. I don’t want her buried, I want her burnt. But I don’t want her ashes. I never want them spread in water or let go of in wind.
I want her disappeared. Buried but not in the ground, I don’t want to walk on her. I don’t want the earth to take her back. I don’t want her in the stars either. Or the air. I don’t want to breathe her or see her or remember her. I want her dead.
But I’m not sure about all the pain I want. She is my mother.
She hurt…adjective; physically or mentally injured –used to the point that the word doesn’t reflect the depth of the abuse she inflicted- but there is no word (yet).
She hurt us enough for the tides and the dirt and the mountains and the moon to feel it. Isn’t that enough?
+
Daffodils bloom on my birthday. Green shoots materialize overnight soon after the last frost. Late snow means wilted leaves and dreary blooms. But they show up still. Every March. I come out in the morning, bend down and pick one, killing it, then breathing it in and thanking it for its sacrifice for me. Then I cry because I am a murderer and rub my empty belly to tell her too, “I’m so fucking sorry. I should have protected you. I could have run sooner. I wish I’d told more. I will grow the strongest buds you have ever seen – strong enough for you to swing on the leaves and eat the shoots for food and wrap in the petals for warmth – I will keep you safe.”
+
Scientists recently discovered the exact chemical cocktail of the scent of human death. I read about it in The Independent. The bodies were studied over six months, and the emissions analyzed over and over. Our emissions. What becomes of us.
Flesh to bone to a process of emitting…verb; vent, give out, discharge, release – pushing the breathe from between my breastbone as hard as I can doesn’t get there, how far down I’d have to go to “emit” with the force required to get to her depth.
Flesh to bone to a process of emitting essence. Or nothing. The scent of absolute absence.
+
I planned a backyard garden. I looked up “how to make pallet raised beds” online and started to drive behind Ace Hardware and Lowes, casing them for discarded pallets from trucks of overpriced patio furniture and gas grills. I bought seeds at the dollar store – kale and lettuce and carrots and vegetables I never knew about whose names I can’t remember. I put the packets in a cheesecloth bag and hung them on the hook by the backdoor like a prize waiting to be opened.
Then I threw all the packets of seeds away when a neighbor asked if I ordered from SeedSavers because they are responsible and don’t use anything modified or GMO or some shit. I felt like my dollar store seeds might grow crooked greens that would somehow be as bad for my kids as a Poptart, so I buried them in the bottom of the trash bag and stopped looking for pallets to steal because I couldn’t afford a fucking garden with special soil and mulch and pallets and fancy seeds and anyway, I kill houseplants. Who did I think I was?
I know how to grow babies
And pot
And a tiny shoot from an Avocado pit but not a whole avocado
I think I can grow words sometimes
I grew my body out and out and out, a cloak, for a long long time – I almost killed her with diseases and sugar and pain made manifest
I am growing into some middle-aged woman. A being with no garden, but pallet dreams, and babies so spread out that one is a man who doesn’t speak to me and one is a woman who loves me fierce and the last is my baby girl – still – who talks to me about dinosaurs and love and tells me she is staying with me forever, but she really wants us to plant a garden, and “Are we ever going to get chickens, because chickens are cool and the eggs are good and we will never eat them because they would smell the death on us. “
+
If she died, would her scent linger… verb; persist, continue, remain, stay, endure – sit in my pores haunting me in the shower, as I stretch, walking the dog in the cool evening, during sex, when I cry.
If she died, would her scent linger on me?
+ + +
Header image courtesy of JG. To view his photo essay, "Tiger Patterns," on NAILED, go here.
Shell Feijo is a former foster kid from the streets of Northern California. She lives in Iowa and teaches writing and working class literature at Kirkwood Community College. Her publications have appeared in The Fem Literary Magazine, Utne, Hip Mama, The Manifest Station, and the edited collection Without a Net: The Female Experience Growing Up Working Class, among others. You can find her on Facebook praising coffee and planning her next tattoo.