Lily Facsimile by D. W. West

They’d done a good job on the skin, hair, teeth, nails, but there was something about my eyes. A missing depth. That’s how you put it to the priest in confessionals the following Sunday evening. I was waiting in the foyer. The walls are thin.

“But she is your daughter, and you love her.” Love was so often the hammer the Father used to pummel you. He beat you bloody with it.

Still, when I woke, my sculpting was evocative. You cried.

I watched you, confused, my memories painted in watercolor. “What happened to me?” I asked.

“A miracle, my child,” you said. You twisted the filigree ring on your right knuckle. Amethyst, my birthstone. Your face shuddered with relief. “You died. But you’re back now. You’re safe.”

Even then, when I was just a swirl of implanted impulse, I could feel your love, wrapped around me like a straitjacket. The pressure felt good.

I became potted plant Lily, fit for indoors only—your rules. There was only home and church and lessons at the kitchen table, with you circling from me, to the stove, and back to me.

I smiled with painted lips. It was my job to smile for you, I knew. Gums, teeth, gums.

“Everyone in my life has left me,” you would say as you stirred a pot, rummaged in the oven. “But God gave you back to me.” You would squeeze my shoulders. “Now, read that part again?”

Bible verses played silvery hot on the back of my eyelids. Jesus’ gauzy eyes peered down from the mantle.

“You rose again, just like Jesus,” you said to me. “You have that in common with him.”

I wondered if Jesus’ memories were painted in watercolor, too. If God’s love felt like a straitjacket.

My room was filled with journals lined with glittery ink, clay figurines, stuffed animals, posters and stray, cracked seashells, an exhibition of “Lily: Before.” I tiptoed through it, examined each specimen, feeling like a graverobber. Old Lily haunted me like a ghost.

My clothes, at least, were all new. Pastel dresses and ballet flats. Old Lily wore overalls, a jagged, boyish smile, and chopped hair. I knew from the photos pinned to the walls.

Sometimes, I would escape from her—from you—beyond our ripped screen door, to the tall pines and dry brush, the rocks and rustling of chipmunks.

It was in the woods that I first saw the boy. He stood on the path to the creek, short, shaggy hair, lanky frame, and a familiar, elfin face. We noticed each other at the same time and then stood, frozen. Something passed between us, electric, a recognition, like looking at my own reflection in a rippling pool of water. I didn’t know what it meant.

“Shit—” he started, reaching towards me, but I was already running, a little deer, turned tail and fled.

You boxed my ears when I returned, then kissed the top of my throbbing head. “Don’t scare me like that again.”

At dinner, I asked you, “How did I die?”

You put down your fork. “Why would you ask me that, sweetie?”

“I want to remember.”

“There’s no need. We have so much good, now. Let’s just eat.”

I picked up and put down my own fork once, twice, three times, plink, plink, plink. My plate was empty. I could not eat, but I liked the sounds silverware made against imitation china. I couldn’t always make you listen, but I had my small annoyances. They would chip away at you.

Your forehead wrinkled. “Please stop that.”

“I want to know.”

You sighed. Then, “There were—people, sinners. Convinced you you were not… my daughter. You… left. Had an… accident.”

Plink, plink. “I don’t understand.”

“There are many things on God’s earth we cannot understand.”

Funny, thinking of you now, how ignorance reflected sometimes turns to truth. I suppose it’s proof something out there in the black has a sense of humor.

For days I picked at it like a wound, the memory of that boy, bright and clear like a fresh polaroid against Old Lily’s watercolors.

You probably think I bolted to the woods the moment you left for the store. In truth, I hesitated on the threshold for a long time. Thinking of your smile, your lessons, the amethyst on your finger.

But eventually, my feet carried me into petrichor and pine needles.

I didn’t expect to find him again, but he was there, like he’d been waiting, perched on a rock, legs akimbo. He smiled at me, all gentle. Gums, teeth, gums.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I’m River. You’re Lily. Right?”

I shivered. “How do you know?”

“Because I am you. Or, I guess, technically, you’re me. The little girl she wanted.” The word ‘girl’ dripped acid.

“I don’t understand.”

“What did she tell you?”

I didn’t have to ask who he meant. “That I died. Then, came back. Like Jesus.”

I watched the emotions fighting for a place in his expression, like snakes writhing.

“She told you that?”

I nodded. Then, I said, “She lied.” I’d meant it to come out as a question, to pull my inflection up. But my words came out flat and solid as the boy in front of me.

River shrugged. “Yes,” he said.

It was dark. I knew I should go back. Back to my safe and secure, potted plant life. Where it was my job to smile for you, gums, teeth, gums.

Where you loved me like a straitjacket.

Where Jesus gazed down from the mantle.

(Did God lie to him, too?)

I said, “Who am I?”

River held my gaze as he answered. “I think you have to discover that for yourself.”

I rubbed my hands along my arms. “I need to find out.”

River smiled again—all crooked and sad—and held out his hand. “I can help. If you want.”

Forgive me mother. Forgive me God. Jesus.

I reached for my ghost.

END

D. W. West

D.W. West is a writer and scientist living in Brooklyn with her loving partner, scrappy dog, and untold numbers of pet shrimp.  She has words in the Manawaker Studios Flash Fiction Podcast and was long-listed for the Uncharted Magazine Novel Excerpt prize in 2023 for her manuscript, Netweaver.

• Website: https://dwwest.ink/