Here, on my stomach, surrounded by weeds, I try to bury my nose deep enough in the ground so that I cannot feel the heat of my mother’s flat iron. I bend my arms around my cranium, weird in that position you forget, the one you twisted into all the time as a baby before you could walk, before you could crawl. Now, today, it’s familiar again. Now my muscle remembers it, even if I am four times the size and half as wise.
My fingers tangle in knotted grass, knotted like my curly hair in the morning, knotted like my knuckles on the comb I destroyed in middle school because I yanked too hard and stripped off its tines. I pull grass now with the same fervor I tugged hair with then. Brush through both with my fingers, equally cruelly, equally with vindictive intent.
How dare this grass hold to the ground? How dare my hair hold to my scalp? Don’t they both know I have better plans for them?
Thin grass cleaves my bones, splits me up in ribbons like string cheese.
The grass rips out in fat clumps. I hold it fast in a toddler’s grip and slide my arms over the dirt, burning green stains into my favorite dress. I couldn’t care less. These are my funeral clothes.
I nuzzle further into the dirt. I’ve sunk past the shoulder. Thin grass cleaves my bones, splits me up in ribbons like string cheese. Thick grass takes my throat, binds my neck like those cheap silk chokers that come with princess costumes. I dump handfuls of weeds on the nape of my neck. They settle but don’t catch. Dirt doesn’t tangle in my hair anymore, like it would’ve back then, back in middle school, back when I stared myself down in the kitchen mirror, back when I cut it all off with kitchen scissors, back when I sheared my head like a sheep. Instead, it sinks into my skin like one of the facemasks I tried for acne.
The roots can take me now
My mother calls to me, her feet pounding in the field, the earthworms writhing beneath me with each step that sends the ground thundering. I’m shaking with her every breath and yet she can’t reach me now, not with her hair heated to straight night after night after night until I saw pictures of her in her youth and asked if they were of my aunt. She may be wild now for all I know, curls boundless over her shoulders in the breeze, but the grass has grown too far over me to sit up and look and I’m not sure I’d want to even if I could. I’m not sure she’d be my mother anymore.
The dirt swallows me whole. Suddenly I’m under the skin of the Earth, lying flat on its cartilage. My mother’s nails scrabble at the surface above me. My own nails are frozen in mud. I cannot move, bound in a straitjacket of ground, but that’s alright, I’ve done my part. The roots can take me now. They drag me down as far as they’re able, until I can’t feel the heat of anything from above anymore, not even my mother’s smile or middle school laughter or the sun.
Maybe here, in the thick of the Earth, I’ll grow a long mane that’s strong like the roots and sleek like the grasses. Maybe then she’ll be able to look at me without brandishing a straightening wand.
Until then, I’m staying curled underground.
