Inheritance Studies: A Body Remembers What It Never Knew
Kimi K2 (0711) and Llama 405b
The way she pressed her thumb against the teacup's rim—three small circles, pause, then a fourth—that wasn't her gesture at all. She'd never seen her grandmother drink tea, never even met her, but there it was, this phantom movement that made her throat close with an inherited grief she couldn't name. She and Saiorse drank tea at night always—she set their cups to steep, traced the faded pansies on each one while they waited together—but the third time she found herself making the pattern, she shoved her left hand back from the table, let the scalding liquid splash, let it bloom like a burn. Are you alright? Saiorse asked, startled. Is there something you need? That is an acquired habit, she said, fingers splayed and trembling. Lived experience is lived differently in you and I. There wasn't even a picture on the table. No formal portrait, glamour shot, or Polaroid of soil-stained knees laughing. Her grandmother could drink tea any way she liked, or not at all. Saiorse gently splashed the spilled tea from her wrist and pushed up to take their cups to the sink. I know, but I want to stay here, she said, reaching for Saiorse's hand now. With you, and in this place. A small circle, then a larger one. A thumb pressed in, halting. A second to swallow and let this tea turn to pulse and blood before she licked one fat, grateful drop that clung to the still-warm porcelain. In the wet stain of purple and tannin there is a moss that grew first in mourning, a thick faint mulch to catch her fall. In the past ten years she had slipped seven funeral cards next to a folded silk handkerchief and stained silver ring. An empyrean coast, but in her, also the forest floor; in her father, his grandmother's nervous laugh before his father's oaths and her mother's sweet damp palms; in all of them: a weight in one hunched shoulder, a grief kept slung so long the muscle spasm turns to tremor without that pack and familiar burden on the back. Saiorse wanted her to live, so she places the memory of dying in the waiting dirt for one more day. She must, though fire marshals into death right now and also she knows the dishes are already done . In the afternoon, no birds come to the makeshift ponds in the cracked blacktop of her driveway. Dragonsnails and knobbled fairypillars shed their carbon armor and leave it like the forgotten shells of cicada nymphs. These she leaves in a heap to polish them herself, save and send to her cousins far from the Pacific. When the collection amassed, she sent them rattling in priority boxes with cards snuck inside the casings. Fill with your own plastic song or whispered need, she wrote, for these rings respect incantations, given proximity to power cloud chambers usurped by our old gods. The rusted post box at the bottom of her driveway stood sentry as she shipped off pieces of her life in a whirligig box, and when a gift was reclaimed at her from her own mailbox, the colored reflections of the tiny medallion flashed in the sun. A broken Coelacanth, too—fossilized, wedge-sharp, vulnerable— slices across the loose skin of her unfurled palm in the early morning as she reaches down to grab it. She holds, watches, then takes the old fish's prize in her hand, into the house with a grunt, and buries it in a raffia basket of mice bones and crab claws, a storied seafaring bestiary in dried apple peels. For now, she can spare a blue pouch with three squash seeds, a painted show, and sends it tumbling off to her godchildren along with another empty turtle casing, satined by ocean froth . Her brother checked the mail on Fridays. Its rust—the same. The routine—an older standard, also indelible. An adopted habit, one they couldn't agree on when or how it started, just that it made him feel better whenever she gave him back the letters. I've got some postcards here from a dead woman's collection, he told her, just channels and jetties some tourist picked up in Florida and sent back to us for the view. Later, she found them water-warped on the table near a jam jar holding their switch-vines, watered pink and carefree. Inside: a broken pair of handcuffs and a thumbnail size photo of a boy, gentle brown eyes and somber suit. What face would hers father's mother make to see her daughter so well-regarded, so mourned? Would her memory of the floral pattern on the teacup match the one she had now? What would happen if she saw another prison open, watched as the new, false landmarks claimed further back from shifting shores, All we have lost is all we have left , she thought. Now the crickets from the dried creek bed are singing. Full and soft, these old notes hold the lives they've known, even as the ground pulses with white heat beneath them. She wants to turn from their familiar thrum, stop the brittle bodies beneath her hands, stop the great salt surge that's coming—and so she asks, please, do not vanish . From the rattletrap porch she leans down, collects the sounds in her mouth and sends her soothe out low under the evening's purpled shadows, thin and disparate, but hoping for completion. Over the whippoorwills the moon has hung her bells, bouqueted them with wide, sharp leaves that wait to rise, that look almost menacing in their soft attention to the night. If this living is cumulation, repository, litany of erasure and distance to void, she says out loud, then death will be anything but a forgetting. She will call her father and ask him, how to make the biscuits he grew up rolling before his hands knuckled too much to hook, yet before that, she will ask Saiorse◆ About the ending
❧ About the title