Content warnings

Grief. Loss of a child. Parental abuse.

Mother says I’m made of mud, eyes, and a little bit of the past. When she says this, she glances away as though she’s ashamed of what she did, as though she doesn’t like what she made.

I give her a vial so we can collect her tears. Nothing is ever wasted in our home.

Mother also says that I’m precious, a gift, the best thing to ever happen to her. She says this when she’s angry, as though being a gift is wrong. She tells me that she has a hole in her heart. I want to tell her that I will fill her body with mine; I will become her hole, but I can’t. Mother never gave me a mouth.

After she cries for a while, she looks at me, blinks as if she’s forgotten what I am, and leaves the cottage with a sigh.

On those days, I sweep the floor extra clean to remove my muck before she returns. I want her to know I’m worth all the pain and anger and love.

When I sleep, I dream of cloud skeletons, little droplets of white separated in giant stretches of sky making rib cages, tails, spines, hands, skulls, feet, beaks.

The skeletons never talk, but they stare down at me as I schlep up and down the road, careful to roll off the street in case anyone comes down the trail. I don’t want them to realize I’m Mother’s. She’d want it that way. If she wanted me to be seen, she’d take me on her adventures.

In these dreams, Mother isn’t there. It’s just me and the clouds. I keep climbing higher and higher up the mountain, hoping that I’ll get close enough to force their bones inside me, but I always wake up before I make it to the top.

She wanted a normal familiar like a crow or a cat, but they always talked back, so she made me.

On a bright sunny day, Mother says she loves me. She’s crying and her face is red and she paces back and forth like a fire covering a log. I collect the dust that flies into the air and take it into my skin. If I had legs and arms, I could reach up and collect dust near her face.

When she’s done crying, she sits down and holds the picture of the person who looks like a younger version of her. I assume it’s Mother. She strokes the face of the girl, so I know Mother cares about her face so I continue to protect her from the dust. I continue to wish that I had legs to walk and arms to reach, to protect.

She turns to me, and I blink up at her, trying to show her that I love her. I would tell her, if I had a mouth, if I had words of my own.

When I say nothing, she sighs and gathers her bag full of extra clothes and herbs. I know this means she’ll be gone for a day at least.

When the door closes behind her, I slide over to the broom and embrace it. Then, as well as I can, I clean the floor of myself. I take extra care to not touch the picture, so I don’t ruin the paper. When she leaves like this, she wants to come back to no trace of me.

Except this time is different. Because this time, she leaves the fireplace burning.

I almost don’t notice it at first—I think the warmth is from the sun outside trying to sneak through the cracks of our cottage—but when I remove myself from the broom, part of my body breaks off.

The broom falls toward me. I move to the side just in time. The dried mud breaks into pieces like glass. Dust flies into the sky and I consume it, which dries me more. The fire crackles, a temptation, a challenge. If I dive into the flames, I’ll harden. I’ll become more solid, but I won’t be able to move.

Mother left me alone with my death.

I slink up to the table and look out the window. No sign of Mother, only the bright sun and horridly green grass. And the white clouds—skeletonless.

If I stay here I’ll die. If I go, maybe, I can find the cloud skeletons and rebuild myself into what Mother wants. I can become the hole she cries for each night. I can use my new skeleton to shape myself into what she needs, instead of existing as an amorphous creature, with no way to mold myself.

As the fire crackles in defeat, I seep through the cracks of our cottage. Outside greets me in little parts, then all at once.

The sky is too much. It’s bright and blue and overwhelming and everywhere I look it’s there. It’s never been like this in my dreams, and I don’t know where to start. And, below the endless blue, the ground keeps sticking to my muck.

I glance at the bright sun in the sky, but it makes all my eyes sting. So instead, I focus on the ground but it’s filled with so many things—little black things crawling around, little rocks and pebbles, big blades of grass that dance in the wind, flowers, dirt, and flying bugs.

It’s too much, so, I let each eye have a turn until, bit by bit, the world becomes a little bigger than Mother’s cottage.

I start down the trail on the left, but half of my body wants to go back. These two parts threaten to rip apart, but I manage to hold them together with my eyes as glue. To prove to Mother that I love her, I need to find the skeletons of my dreams. I need to build myself into a body that’ll have the muscles and bones to fill the hole in her heart, that will collect the dust of our cottage, that will be what she wants.

It doesn’t take long for me to find a cloud skeleton. I follow the white puffs in the air until they get bigger and bigger. Until they turn into a tail, a spine, a head.

The cloud skeleton stares down at me with a look like no other. I feel so small, under its gaze, like I did when Mother first formed me. Like our first few weeks, when I could see how angry she was when she would come home to the floor covered in dirt. When she’d yell and yell and yell until her voice was hoarse and then she’d cry deep tears that streamed down her face into the vials I held. Not knowing what to do, I’d put the vials in a jar, and put the jar next to the other jars in the back room of the cottage. Slowly, I filled shelf after shelf with her tears, but she never stopped me. Never told me she wanted me to go away.

That’s how I know she loves me.

“Why are you here?” the skeleton beams down at me, light seeping through the holes in its body. Now that I am in its presence, after such a long journey, I can hardly hold my gaze with its eye holes.

The skeleton waves its wispy hand with the breeze. “Talk,” it says and my mud parts to reveal a mouth of sorts.

“I…” the taste of letters in my body feels strange. I am used to consuming them, not making them. I want to thank the skeleton for giving me this gift, but I need more. “I need a body.”

“You have a body.”

The skeleton doesn’t understand that I don’t need this body. I need a body that can stop dust and hold brooms and go outside and be near fire and love Mother.

“I need a body that can fill the hole inside her.” I hope that, like my dreams, the skeleton will offer me its body or even a part of it.

“You can fill her hole now,” it responds.

“No.” My mouth feels broken, though it was just created. “I don’t have the strength to fill it. I don’t have the muscles to mold myself, or the bones to stretch up to where it sits in her heart.” I pause, then say the truth. “She would love me more with a body.”

The skeleton muses. “You’ll need to create a whole being.”

“But how?” I say but the cloud skeleton is already floating away too fast for me to follow.

Still, I chase it until the ground drops away. And then, when the skeleton has disappeared into the blue, I head back to the cottage with all my eyes down.

I’ll have to find the parts somewhere else.

I decide to start with a skeleton. Something to give me form. Something to give me muscles and limbs to mold into the hole inside her.

It is easy enough to find what I need. After all, Mother is a witch; she uses body parts to make potions and spells. She has a collection in the back of the cottage, in jars of various sizes. By taking the jars inside me, I can take the contents out easily and return the empty and mud-covered glass to the shelves.

I start small. I start with the tip of a finger. A simple bone. I push it into my mud to hold for safekeeping. Then, I collect more. A human skull. And then, after the skull, I find a ribcage, feet, knees, and a spine. I push them all into my body to keep them safe, tucking them into places that make sense until I’m ready to truly construct myself. I push more and more inside, taking jar after jar until there’s nothing left but the jars full of vials full of tears.

Once I have my skeleton, I harvest organs and muscles from the gravesite near our cottage. I already have eyes, but I need lungs and a liver and a spleen and intestines and a brain. Using my bones in a particular order, I’m able to hold each organ in a safe space until I’m ready to become a whole being.

Mother doesn’t seem to notice. She’s too busy leaving the cottage or looking at the picture. She hasn’t even noticed that sometimes when I’m focused on helping, I hum.

The last thing I find is a heart. It’s midsummer now, almost a season after the cloud skeletons, after the fire that almost dried me out. Mother seems sadder with every moment, but while she stares at the picture, I rummage in the back room of the cottage. If I can find a heart, I’ll be complete and I can build the hole she needs. I can force my body into a shape that can reach and fill her heart.

The organ I find is small and shriveled—a child’s heart—but it’ll have to do. It barely moves within me, but I manage to get it trapped between the rib cage. It floats in my mud, easier to hold than the brain.

The heart hits me like the sky did on the day I left. The heart makes me cry. Makes me willingly lose water, something that could kill me just like the fireplace. I push back the pain and force my body to bend, to shape, into the shape of Mother. I need to be tall enough to reach her hole, in control of my bone and muscles enough to bend them into the shape she needs.

Mother hears my screams. She calls down the hall and into the room. She takes in me standing there, the heart jar in my mud-caked bony fingers. Behind me, tears sparkle clear inside the vials.

“Mother,” I speak, my voice gravely and soft.

She looks around at the empty and empty-looking jars then turns back to me. “What made you… why are you…” She’s lost the ability to form sentences like I’ve gained words. Suddenly, without any reason.

“I want you to love me. I want to fill the hole in your heart so you can love me.”

Mother takes me in her hands. My eyes reflect in hers, some of them the same color as the girl in the picture. I’d thought the image was Mother, but with my brain and heart and body I now know that it was her daughter. The child she lost, once.

I know now with my heart that she hurts. I know now with my body that I’m a replacement, I hope, a desire to bring back what was lost. I know now with my new brain that she’s crying because she’s both happy and sad at the same time.

I don’t move to collect our tears. Instead, I let them run down my drying skin.

She made me of mud, eyes, and a little bit of her daughter. And now, I’m a bit of her and a bit of me. A bit of who I was and who I am.

I embrace her with my whole body. I hold her with my arms, reach her with my legs, feel my lungs, pressing against my ribcage, pressing against her. Both her parts and my parts—who we were and who were are—intertwine.

I am a gift, and a present, and I’ve made myself with a little bit of her.

END

Camden Rose

Camden Rose is a queer author who loves seeking out magic beneath the everyday world. Her works have appeared with FFO and Heartlines Spec. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her spouse, black cats, and collection of books and board games. Currently, she's reading "When Eve Chose Us" by Tia Tashiro.