Waiting to Unzip

Daisy called it, “Mineral clay.” I swept light powder, and pebbles aside to reach the orange-red layer underneath. The plastic spork stowed after lunch, bent as I carved deeper and collected. I piled a red mound in my palm, added drops of water for the just-right gummy consistency.

I thought of the mineral’s mom took. I’d tried, like her, to swallow one without water. It stuck there. Spikes slammed down my chest. I couldn’t breathe until she brought a cup of warm water. The heat dissolved the clog, but I felt it lodged there, kept burping grassy bubbles across the back of my throat.

My clay fingerprint tasted the same as a fresh cut. I felt the nourishing slime slip down my throat. “Cora, I heard people pay a hundred bucks to get massaged with mud like this in spas.” Daisy said the word massage like sausage.

“For reals?” I asked.

“What for reals.”                             

“For reals they pay that much.”

“Course, people always pay too much for things we get free.”

I dug harder and made piles for her and I. We buffed our bodies smooth. My skin glowed like terra cotta in the late afternoon sun. The fence slats clicked. We saw parts of Frank shifting from one gap to the next. Last came his dragged stick, following behind like a tail, scraping harder and slower as he went. I saw flesh blink over his watching eye. I tugged at my ruffled skirt until after the clicking started up again and faded down the street.

“His hair always greasy.” Daisy had a way of saying things that made me feel guilty hearing.

“Yeah, his dad’s in jail though, so…” because I never how to answer.

“So, he can’t afford soap?”

“Just maybe. I don’t know.”

His hair was always greasy, like it wasn’t a part of him. It reminded me of the looney-tunes wolf in the sheepdog costume. Frank wearing someone else’s skin. He’d unzip someday. He’d unzip the sheepdog. He’d unzip the wolf. Unzipping layer after layer through skin and bone and organ until something else stepped out. If I unzipped, would I be hollow inside? A spacey girl who missed things. Or would unzipping reveal the useless galaxies my mind wandered in, a supernova swallowing everything into its void.

That night I turned the bathwater pink. I placed a finger at a time on the glass, then palms. When I peeled free, prints strung with broken veins marred the glass. I doodled giraffes and lions, Dad’s record mumbled under the door, I wiped my pictures clean when it started to skip. The residual mud-water drops wouldn’t clear from glass, smeared as I swiped. Sediment weight, pulling, lengthening until Dad’s heavy walk broke tension. The grains drifted in jagged strings down the glass.

The drain slowed, congealed with muddy hair. I didn’t get the whirlpool, or the last slurping gurgle. Silt coated the tub but held most to the non-slip sticker shells. I scraped my face on the sandpaper surface. The skin on my back and arms prickled with goosebumps, but my cheek felt hot and raw.

I never know where to look when someone looks me in the eyes. I look at their shoulders, or hair, somewhere close enough to not seem rude. Frank didn’t just look but took something of me back through his stuck eyes, left worms burrowing into my belly button stabbing and chewing to get out.

He invited us over one day, Daisy and me. The couch smelled like spaghetti and spoiled yogurt. The crunchy carpet tingled under my summer-sidewalk scalded feet. We sat on the edge of the seat. We watched a show with his older brother and him. The words sounded garbled to me, “You know, if you watch enough, you’ll learn the language,” his older brother said. I knew about languages. My dad spoke Korean, remnants from his time as a missionary. “What language?” I asked. I wanted to understand. I watched and waited. I wanted the gift of tongues from scriptures. But I didn’t get it that day. “Let’s go.” Daisy said. We didn’t watch that kind of TV in my house, so I forgot everything I never learned of whatever language they were listening to.

Another day we were building a sandcastle at Daisy’s. Frank was helping her brother Duncan wreck it when their mom called them in for sandwiches.

“Don’t touch the tower,” she said. “It’s my part.”

“I’m going to get lunch anyway,” I said, but Frank grabbed my wrist.

“Do you know what humping is.”

“No?”

“I’ll show you.” He pulled me behind the weeping willow, “Lay down there.”

Never mind, I don’t want to know. I felt the strands of grass on my head, when they flattened under the pressure, twigs dug in. The willow tree waved above me. My strained neck ached. His weight felt uncomfortable, and the inside hem of my underwear rubbed. Bulbous roots bulged against my spine.

Long leafy willow strands dangled above my face. My brain drifted to other days in Daisy’s yard we’d pull the vines down to play circus. “Down lion.” Again and again, we’d whipped them across Duncan's back, “Bad lion. Don’t eat the spectators.” My arms felt too heavy to reach. His knees dug into my wrists. The screen door across the yard opened and thwacked close. Daisy and Duncan’s legs came closer and stopped. Someone in the crowd screamed, running from the house. My arms were balloons, light and rising, pins and needles shooting through.

Pounding feet threw dirt into my eyes. Daisies’ mom push-pulled them up the stairs ahead of her. “Cora, go home.” She yelled it to the space above me, “…tell your mom what you’ve done.” She spoke it to the space where I felt my body hovering. But she grabbed the part of my body lying in the grass and shoved it toward the gate. I heard a faucet, the theme song for Rescue Rangers, couch springs, you ok Daisy? The gate clack closed behind me, cars on the street. I scratched dirt deeper into my scalp and into the backsides of my lids. I sat on the stoop, not ready to go in.

Mom found me on the porch, “Wash your hands before dinner.” I looked at them, scratched, bleeding with bits of twiggy bark embedded in the skin, couldn’t remember that happening. I heard Dad’s record scratch into sound. I turned on the water and wiped my hands dry.

“No, really get in and clean.” I used the grains of sand to exfoliate but couldn’t get the orange clay out of the creases in my fingers. The steel wool felt like razors. I scraped my palms until the flesh was pinker than orange. It felt like atonement. It felt like protection. It felt like clean.

Mom set a salmon loaf on the table, leaving the quilted oven mitts on the edges for serving. Green peas eyed me through burnt cheese crust. “How was Daisies?” Chunks of mineral lodged in my throat. My bit lip leaking flavor notes of iron. I rested against the chair's spindles, liking the feel of friction burns. “That Daisy, she’s so nice.” Dad’s record skipped, st, st, st, t, t, t, T. T. T.

I pushed harder into the chair feeling each nub, the chair slid against the linoleum, stuck on a buckled spot, and tipped.

Alycia Calvert is a neurodivergent emerging writer. Probably because her brain won’t let her sit still, she completed an MFA, completed an artists residency in rural France, and began a PhD in August of last year. Her writing and photography has been featured in , the (late) Hecate Magazine, A Las Vegas Writes Anthology, The Boulder City Review, The Double Downs blog, and sprinkled throughout twitter. She writes weird, hybrid things that fall somewhere at the intersections of Flash, Poetry and CNF.