Mud

My mother made me from the wet earth in her backyard. She told me how she toiled desperately late into the night, sculpting my body with the focus of a surgeon with a heart in their hand. Ironic, considering how my body doesn’t house a heart. She sculpted what she knew human beings had—two legs, two arms, a torso, a head—and all the extra details she bestowed upon me were to mimic either my father or her own design. A perfect mixture of them both. But still no heart. My mother didn’t care, nor did my father. What they saw, they saw as a gift from the garden. Once I was finished, they took me inside to the kitchen, wiped the excess dirt from my face, and said I was perfect.

I was none the wiser of my lacking innards. I looked just like a child, and, thus, I was treated like one. I was given toys chosen lovingly by my mother; I was lifted by my father’s strong arms so that my little body could see the sun. My skin was as silken and fresh as soil, smelling of new growth in the way tender, upturned roots did. I remember feeling something back then, but the feeling was fragmented, like looking through a kaleidoscope, a single image broken up into a multitude of color. I guess that abstract feeling was what made me believe I was human. My early childhood was never just one memory, but a tightly linked chain of colorful moments, all of which were of my parents. I look back now and realize that was my purpose: to be a link between the two of them, something spun and woven into a bind that neither of them could break. Maybe that was why my mother decided to make me. Maybe I was made to keep her and my father together after something broke their previous link apart. Yet I will never truly know why, because she had a real child after five years of having me.

My sister was born screaming and kicking her way into the world. I don’t know why my body decided to betray me then. While my sister slowly learned how to open her eyes, mine turned yellow at the edges. Her bones strengthened while mine began to weaken. As her skin grew accustomed to the sun, mine took to cracking at the slightest amount of temperature stress. When she took her first steps, bold and joyous, I watched from a corner of the room, my legs too heavy to take me much farther than the front of the house. Our mother did what she thought was best to preserve me. Whenever my face cracked or my legs started to sag, she would pull me out into the garden and slapped some extra mud and minerals on my blemishes. While she tended to me, she would reminisce on how, in comparison to my sister’s wailing arrival, I barely made a sound when I was scooped out of the dirt; how tiny my body was compared to my sister’s; how my head had hair like coiling vines while my sister’s naturally came with strands as soft as goose down. Though I was still too young to recognize it as my own fault, I could tell the effort of keeping me alive was beginning to frustrate her. If only I had a heart like my sister, then maybe it would have been easier to care for me. However, a child who thinks she’s human doesn’t question why her parents suddenly seem tired of her. She just knows that she still wants to be held to the sun.

It had become harder to move my limbs, but I did what I could to keep my parents from being entirely sick of me. I was not something worth parading around town on sunlit walks anymore; the heat would crack my skin and make people stare and gasp. The sun was for my sister now. So were the toys that were first gifted to me. I no longer needed them, now that all my time was spent trying to hold myself from crumbling into unsightly dust. My parents never vocalized their upset when they would find dry clumps of dirt on the hardwood floor, but that didn’t mean I was blind to their exasperation when they looked at me. I learned to douse myself in mineral water, re-sculpt my limbs, and keep silent as I cleaned the mess I hadn’t meant to make.

And yet, I still thought I was human. It wasn’t until after I had to go to school that I would even think otherwise.

My father was concerned about my intellect. I could clean, sure, and I learned to cook too, but my speech tended to hesitate, and my voice had a single tonal value. I made for annoying conversation, something he quickly grew tired of. He certainly tried his best to correct me, coach me on using the right words, but I always sounded off. He and my mother both thought it was best if I learned from others my age. Perhaps then I would miraculously get better. Before my first day, I braved the act of looking in the mirror. That was when I finally realized what I was—a face of clay. I came to terms with it after the sight made me cry; crying made my face sag further, and when the tears dried, my skin flaked worse than before. To preserve myself, I simply made up a game at school: if I was not human, then I would become as many human beings as possible. When I came across a girl with freckled cheeks and frizzy hair, I would drench my face in water and mash up my features to look like hers. When a boy told stories that made other people laugh, I would wet my lips, hook my fingers into the corners of my mouth, and pull my face up into the friendliest, funniest smile. I did this game countless times. It got me through school despite how much it unnerved my peers. I never meant to frighten them; in hindsight, it wasn’t surprising how my appearance made people keep their distance. My voice never got better in that time, either. When I graduated, I was left with nothing but my aching, flaking body and the gaping hole in my chest.

I took to night walks after that. During the day, I stayed within the house, cleaning and cooking and looking after my sister when our parents were too tired. At night, I was free to roam as far as I could push my legs. Sometimes, that was just my mother’s garden. Other times, I mustered up the strength to walk around the neighborhood and admire each sleeping home. That was when I met her. She was not much older than me, sitting in a lawn chair, her head tilted back like she was basking in the moonlight. The yard she sat in had a fence covered with soft pink roses. The perfume of the flowers was sweet in the night air, and I stopped just to smell them.

“Hey there,” she said.

The different faces of my schooldays flashed in my brain, but I was unable to pick which one I should present to her. I stood, silent, despite my best efforts.

“Nice night, yeah?” she said calmy.

Hastily, I pushed at my throat to match her tone. “Oh-oh, yeah,” I nodded. “Nice night.” The words tumbled from me like gravel. It made me want to scratch out my eardrums.

“I always try to get out for a bit,” she said, a small smile quirking her lips. “And the roses smell so much better after the sun goes down, too.”

“That’s true,” I said, smiling in return.

She pushed herself up from her chair and made her way over to me. I found myself beginning to twist my features as she came closer, a habit now more than anything. Grabbing fistfuls of my hair, I yanked at my roots to stretch them down, trying to match the length of her brown waves. My scalp felt paper thin as I scrubbed my fingers against my cheeks, creating smudges that mimicked the sun-kiss glow of her face. She stopped right before the fence gate. I looked back at her, rigid against the sting in my scalp and raw pulse in my skull.

“Even at night?” she asked, folding her arms across her chest. The button-down shirt she wore bunched up and slid down slightly over her shoulder. The tattooed wing of a dragon poked out on the exposed patch of skin, faded to a blue gray.

“What are you talking about?” I said by impulse. I scratched around my clavicle, chipping away at my flesh until there was an awkward divot shadowing her ink.

She raised her chin up, exposing her neck to me. A dark crease was etched across her throat, callous and flaking. My crooked replica of her sagged as she showed me her left hand. The bone of her wrist was chipped like a cliff face worn away by the sea. Neither of us spoke for a while. We just stared at each other, a carnival mirror reflection separated by a fence full of roses.

“I thought you were human,” I managed to choke out. I couldn’t bring myself to say much more. What little there was of my voice had shattered under the weight of what she had revealed. The more I looked at her, the more I wanted to tear myself apart, rip away the ugly mimicry that was heartless no matter how hard I tried to make it feel real.

She regarded my desperation with a mild expression. “I grew my own heart.”

“How?” I asked, my question barely a whisper.

She unbuttoned the top of her shirt, peeling open the fabric. Roses bloomed from her, a garden of her own making. “It took me a long time to find them,” she admitted. “Sometimes they wilt; sometimes a few of them end up dying.”

I refused to touch her roses, although I longed to snatch as many as I could to stuff into my empty chest. “Can I have one?” It was a childish question, meek and restless. Regardless, it was all I wanted to know as I felt my face crack and scatter dust around my feet.

“Hell no,” she laughed. “These are mine.”

I drew back, lowering my head.

“They come when they feel welcome to,” she said, buttoning her shirt back up. She turned to admire the plentiful fence between us and gently touched one rose. “This grew when I went to a metal concert.” She pointed to another one. “That one came from putting blue eyeshadow on for the fun of it.”

“They grow that easily?”

She snorted at that. “Trial and error,” she joked.

My gaze shifted to the dry pieces of me that had flaked onto the sidewalk. “I don’t think I was made for trial and error.”

“What were you made for?”

“My parents,” I said, turning back to her.

“So was I,” she confessed. “The problem was, they knew about their own lives—how to live and breathe in their own way—but forgot that the earth doesn’t breathe like they do. We need some extra water and extra minerals, and our own kind of light. That’s all.”

“If I grow my own roses,” I said, hopeful. “Will I be able to live like my parents.”

“Do you want to live like them?”

My focus turned to her chipped wrist, then to her cracked neck. “I would like to be human,” I insisted. “I would like to live with less pain, less emptiness. Do your roses—”

“The roses don’t stop the hurt,” she cut in, a sharp sadness in her confession. “That’s what happens when our mothers put their blood, sweat, and tears into sculpting us: we end up being defined by that type of agony.” Her voice softened then. “But the roses make it more bearable. They add to the definition; bring a new meaning to it. And if that growth isn’t human onto itself, then I don’t know what is.”

“Where can I find my roses?”

Beyond the neighborhood rooftops, the night sky was turning pale blue, the horizon, golden. We both looked to the dawn; while I winced against the light, she let out a tired sigh. “I spent years staring at the bathroom mirror and only seeing mud,” she said. “I started looking like a person only after I decided to live with what brought me fulfillment, not satisfaction.”

“Aren’t fulfillment and satisfaction the same thing?”

“Maybe,” she said as she moved back to her house. “The roses come around once you figure it out.”

I thanked her for the conversation, the first real one I had in over a decade. She wished me luck in return. Then she opened the front door and closed it behind her.

A year went by before I finally saw my first rose. It came from me complimenting a girl’s painted nails, rather than try to mimic her. The next one grew after I got a small tattoo of a flower on my ankle without my parents knowing. The one after that bloomed when I sat alone in a café, simply because I wanted to. My skin still cracks from time to time, and I have my days where I would rather lie down than walk. But my chest is full of roses, and when I look in the mirror, I can see a human being.