I\u2019ve brought craft scissors to your funeral\u2014the blunt ones you left in my room. I rinsed them with distilled water, followed by a tap-water wash, then a few squirts of distilled water again. My brown hands are pasty white, the latex gloves cling to the skin like drenched tissue. I\u2019m not wearing safety goggles. Mom said they\u2019d be overkill, and, for once, I agreed.<\/p>\n
The killing was over. It had left your body behind.<\/p>\n
The polished wood of your casket glows under the stingy sunlight sifting through stained-glass windows. It\u2019s dressed in yellow honeysuckle, white baby\u2019s breath, and noxious hemlock\u2014their hues quarreling to eclipse your ghostly purple face.<\/p>\n
I pluck a hemlock and study it related to your waxy skin. I wonder if I should flag someone down and warn them of its virulence, but my brain can\u2019t seem to bridge its synapses. The neurochemical just won\u2019t bind with the receptor, and I don\u2019t have enough oxytocin in my veins to care if someone dies of hemlock ingestion.<\/p>\n
I think my brain is doing me a favor, but that\u2019s me being poetic again. The brain is me; I am the brain; we are not separate entities. When your mom clutches her heart as she sobs, I ask her to clutch her head instead. We don\u2019t love with our hearts, I tell her. The heart is an involuntary muscle; it will pump through agony and elation. The heart doesn\u2019t care\u2014it\u2019s not its job to.<\/p>\n
Your mom is unimpressed by my presence. It doesn\u2019t come as a surprise to me. I\u2019ve been visiting your house every day for a fortnight, ever since they pulled your swollen body out of the green lake and placed you on a metal bed to decide what to do with this\u2026 creature they\u2019d fished out. You were stripped of your name, turned into an orphaned lake monster\u2014a Loch Ness monster of sorts. Your new name is body. Your new home will be an urn.<\/p>\n
My persistent visits to your home have been my futile attempts to talk your family out of giving you to the fire. I showed your mom my hypertrophic scars\u2014those purple bumps on fibrous skin un-mended by even the most bullish keratinocytes. I told her how you always pushed me in front of the flames in the chemistry lab, laughing when the Bunsen burner licked at my skin, apologizing on your knees when the burn hurt more than expected. You\u2019d smear Neosporin on the red skin with trembling hands, eyes welling with guilty tears, and I\u2019d relish your soft touch, pain forgotten.<\/p>\n
I have your scars, I said to your mom. Your son owes me a debt. It must be repaid. And what I didn’t say: Let me wear his skin. Let me take his fingers, his nails, his palms. I\u2019ll make you a new son with it.<\/p>\n
Your mom insists: family has precedence over the decision to burn or bury. So I explained to her how we all come from FUCA\u2014the First Universal Common Ancestor. I\u2019m no less you than they are; we\u2019re intertwined by carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, looping through our bodies with Van der Waals forces and ionic bonds strung within crystal lattices. I\u2019m not your mother, sister, or daughter. I\u2019m what remains after the jaundiced surface of blood and creed is effaced: an ancient creature born in water, traces in the twisted ladder of your genes that tell us the universe is often a serendipity, scarce a providence. If they burn you, they\u2019ll be spitting on billions of years of evolution. If they burn you, they\u2019ll turn you into nothing again.<\/p>\n
Your mom insists the body is merely a vessel to the soul, that if I believe in the right god, I\u2019ll meet you again. But your family\u2019s heaven is segregated. It\u2019s a place where we will have to crane our necks to look at each other\u2014you elevated in the frothy skies, me walking the barren ground, our white and brown skins distending in a peculiar liminality.
\nI\u2019ve told your mom I won\u2019t have you like this.<\/p>\n
I am a woman of science\u2014of atoms and quarks that toil to keep me conscious, to keep me me. I will have you in my bones, not in fables and whispered prayers.
\nThat\u2019s why I\u2019ve brought scissors for you, not flowers.<\/p>\n
My experiment with you is unorthodox, sure, but that\u2019s the way of science; it is often crueler than it seems. That\u2019s why we wear white coats and buy prime-quality bleach.
\nStill, I\u2019m your friend before I\u2019m a scientist. I don\u2019t reach for your hair at once. I allow my gloved fingers to float over your violet face, mapping memories in my amygdala: your button nose pinched between my pudgy fingers. Mouth\u2014a grin, a sneer, a frown\u2014kissed by every girl at school but me. Golden hair haloed by crackling firelight; a reverie of heaven and hell brushed away by my hands.<\/p>\n
A thought crosses a synapse, firing an electric impulse that ripens my taste buds: I should eat you. We should all eat you. We should bury you bare in a shallow grave and plant a seed in the fine soil. It should be the seed of a fruiting tree\u2014lemon, if possible; mango would do too. We should water you and tend to you like gardeners. When you soar into a tree and bear fruit, we should eat it and taste your sweetness on our bitter, blasphemous tongues. We should make you one with us\u2014protein, carbohydrates, fat: the things that made you would now make us.<\/p>\n
A gasp inflates my lungs, the abrupt asphyxiation flooding my eyes with a burning moisture that tells me: I have work to do.
\nI straighten my aching back before avulsing two strands from your waxed hair, clumped together like dried sap, slipping them into a plastic bag. I use the scissors to cut the bangs off your forehead and let them join the strands. I sequester the bag of your pilfered remains in my pocket.<\/p>\n
My autopsy has concluded; I should leave, but I stay, fighting the urge to kiss your embalmed forehead. It\u2019ll be cold and waxy, and I won\u2019t wash my lips ever again. Plucking the remaining hemlock, I tuck it into your hairline, trying to hide the places I\u2019ve desecrated.<\/p>\n
I step off the platform with my legs trembling. The bones beneath my left breast pound to the sound of your mom\u2019s wails. She is still clutching her heart.
\nI let her be this time.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
My dad gave me eighty dollars for new textbooks. I used it to dig your grave.<\/p>\n
Half the money was drained by bone meal and citrus fertilizer, half by coco peat and a soil pH test kit. The lemon tree seed itself cost only a few cents.<\/p>\n
Two hollow graves embellished my garden; I interred your hair in one, the other I kept desolate as a control. Mom tumbled down into the control when she was turning off the porch lights a few nights ago; her patella fractured, and she couldn\u2019t walk for a week. I can\u2019t say I was remorseful\u2014I needed the garden untouched by men and women of God while you grew.<\/p>\n
Your mom came over to see my mom. They talked about everything but you\u2014unless they counted your ashes as you. Your family disgorged the silver ashes into the same green lake they\u2019d found you in. I don\u2019t know what sentiment haunted them to do so. The lake is dammed. They\u2019ve trapped you in the water you floundered in, the one that wouldn\u2019t afford you a lungful of breath. This soul of yours your mother spoke so fondly about, if it exists, it haunts the water molecules perennially. You are the nameless, homeless ward of a dammed lake, a nothingness that weighs heavy on my chest.<\/p>\n
On her way out, your mom noticed my work in the garden. She asked if I was alright, running her hands through my matted hair, and I closed my eyes, trying to feel you in her calloused hands. I could abandon it all if I could feel you in her: the percolate-encrusted fingernails would finally be washed, the matted hair would be brushed down into the braid you liked to flick around, and the garden would be razed to the ground to build an altar to worship your mom\u2019s hands.<\/p>\n
Alas, your mom\u2019s touch was just that: your mom\u2019s touch.<\/p>\n
I opened my eyes to her tear-stained face. I\u2019m going to make it all right, I told her. She left me with a prayer for my soul.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The lemon tree has taken hold in the soil, inches above your hair. It\u2019s sprouting fast\u2014faster than when you first hit puberty\u2014looming over me like a church steeple. The tree is not a steeple. It is a canopy, a cupola of variegated leaves adorned by green, unripe lemons. I dug a hole posterior to the tree to observe how deep the roots had reached, and, just as I had predicted, I found them embedded in thick, wet mud.
\nThe riverbed was fueling them. It was bringing your fragmented bones and pulverized teeth to your new self in the tree. I\u2019d set your hypothesized soul free.<\/p>\n
It was weeks before the first true lemon ripened in the tree. I\u2019d been camping in my garden for months, half feral, barely human, when I saw it. I didn\u2019t put my gloves on while handling it. I didn\u2019t even secure it in a plastic bag. I snapped the lemon straight off the bough with a tug that catapulted me into the control grave. I think my femur cracked\u2014or it could be my tibia\u2014making my left leg jut inward. I crawled out with one hand and one leg, coughing out coco peat and bone meal. There were stars in the early morning sky\u2014blue, black, purple, small mirages in my vision that showed me your crooked grin. Your grin spoke in fractured tenses: god, scientist, monster, water, fire, love, me, you, you, you, you, you.<\/p>\n
I followed your voice like a maudlin snail across the porch to the kitchen, where my mom flung her prayer mat at me, screaming and scrambling to get Dad. I glanced back. I was leaving a slime of sweat and saliva on the tiles.<\/p>\n
I kept crawling.<\/p>\n
In the kitchen, I stretched my arm to pick a glass off the table. One shattered; the other landed safely in my palm. My legs spasmed, a searing pain barreling through my nerve cells. The adrenaline kept the true pain at bay\u2014the one that\u2019d come if all this failed. The pain of a failed scientist, of a failed lover, of a failed believer.<\/p>\n
I lay on my ribs as I cut through the lemon with a glass shard, its pale nectar meandering down my wrists. I squeezed each half into the glass. Lemon seeds swam in the murky white liquid, floundering, flailing, breathing. I drank it all in one go, letting the juice seep into my gums, into my gut, into my cells\u2014to rejuvenate me, to recreate me, to replenish me.<\/p>\n
To be me.<\/p>\n
My mouth tried to find you in the tangy flavor of the lemonade. I flicked my tongue over my gums, but it was all lemonade. I gritted my teeth, grinding the seeds left behind in my mouth. They tasted bitter, leaving an aftertaste that smelled of your strawberry shampoo.<\/p>\n
The crushed seeds stirred in my stomach. I pushed them down to my empty womb with gritty palms. Something scratched my tissues, something that felt like my name on your lips, something that transcended serendipity and providence.
\nI let it take root inside me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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