GINA HAY / SIMIA, CUPID
1.
Mother brings her daughters a picture book from the museum. One charcoal drawing, unlike the others, a shadowy white horse fixed to a shroud of storm clouds. The mother tears Dela away. Mother likes her Dela the best—named small winged thing in Latin. Or, another translation, pleasure, thing that pleases. The sister, Lyko, sits transfixed. A hand presses against the mane. She sits in these heaps of day-clothes. Tawdry rags made to not be windswept. She loves the horse. The mother brings her daughters markers and notebooks. A stack of postcards—the ones of leprosy-clad medieval girls, the ones dressed in frocks and wound headscarves. Or renaissance women with their lyres and armfuls of daisies. All week Lyko and Dela draw horses for each other with their eyes shut. Dela’s child, now four, nods off in the palm of someone’s less dominant hand. When the sisters don’t look down at the paper as they go, the horses manifest as burlap sacks with spider-legs. Fast lines of graphite. Their father used to do this in art school, their mother says—draw horses from memory. Horses are difficult. They’re hard to remember. I remember the first time your daddy drew a well-proportioned horse. But daddy did many things. One week he was a gifted strongman. The next week, a pilgrim. The one after, a name on a discarded, cashed check. An eyeless Slavic swamp-dwelling spirit after that. A bolotnik, the mother says. He pulled me into the water once I got too close to the edge. Then, oh! The curse! He loved to split me in two. Her children are too old now to not have doubts. They’re adults, especially Dela—now thirty. Even Lyko, six years younger. They shouldn’t buy everything sold to them. Especially not this—a father with goose legs obscured below a lily pad. A father who vies for a drowning woman. Still, Dela raises her son to be a similar kind of resourceful—they spend afternoons laminating bird feathers on the kitchen floor. She buys him picture books of pygmy pufferfish. Josef, she says, come here with your book and show me how high you can lift it. Eventually the sisters give up on the horses and draw each other boarding the train. Josef’s smallish rucksack, his nightdress. Dela’s pinkish cheeks. The mother spooning Dela, who lay bunched in this shell. Lyko asleep on her stomach, sprawled an inch from the mother’s back, one hand latched onto the mother’s tunic. The curse, their mother often tells them—her first set of eyes for Dela. The second pair that their daddy’s curse made. Those are for Lyko, who isn’t the subject of so much watching anymore. They’re here, under my clothes, the mother says, gesturing with a hairbrush handle from the top of her head to the nether end of her tailbone.
Josef doesn’t understand his grandmother’s presence in the house. Grandma does not escort him outside—she says he does not need this education the way her daughters do. He assumes education must be flush because she is the most gifted trickster. She steals away his mother at dawn. At this time the two women show him marrowless care. There is more food to be put on the table, they say. They return with the more. Shot ducks or gigged plump-legged bullfrogs. Josef knows his grandma sniffs out obscured things like a bloodhound. When the tympanum—the frog’s external ear—is found to be smaller than the eye, she shakes her head. It’s female, she says. Pity. That frog is not delegged or eaten. The gig pole is removed from the pierced aorta. Dela, on grandma’s orders, leaves to return it to the lake. Do you need another pair of hands? Dela might ask when she returns. Grandma might stand at the kitchen counter so dutifully plucking a goose. A mangy, anemic thing. Dela might drop her chin on her mother’s shoulder. They work in tandem, ambidextrously. Just another four-legged animal. The wings are pulled taut. The goose is plucked until they realize the fat is too tender. He is too lean and must be skinned.
*
They are visited by a newly divorced woman, a fresh client. Lyko and Dela scatter sheepskin and deer hides across the living room floor. The woman pays up front. She asks Lyko, who is more approachable, will it hurt? Lyko’s gift is the shearing. She glides the straight razor a floater’s width from the woman’s scalp, says, no, girl. No, no, no. She knows to never nick them, and she is a tightrope walker in countless ways. Dela always tells her she used to be a real shepherd in a past life. You have the composure, she says, you’ve just lost your sheep shears and your shepherd’s crook. Your flock’s waiting for you somewhere, baby. Lyko binds the hair in an alpine buttery knot and pretends to dispose of it in the garbage disposal. She stands and looks in while the blade saws at nothing. Her hair, thinning and dark, runs to the sternum because she has not been good. Dela sails arm-to-leg removing excess. She’s strong. Stronger than Lyko. Firmer. Hairless. She applies pressure to the swollen parts—stomach, pelvis, thigh. She spills her weight into the woman who coos and breathes. The mother lays her palms over the sheared head, which shivers, pulls away. A moan. If the customer had a spare kidney, mother might have to cleave that from her. If she wasn’t asthmatic, maybe a sliver of lung. But she has little of herself to spare. The customer did not seem pleased to hear this when the mother told her. Now, she turns and lays on the floor, her arms slump into the nest. Knees move as though considering crawling, then perish the thought. This one’s a drooler, Lyko’s eyes tell Dela as they utter from stranger’s mouth-to-blanket. But the mother has a magic touch. They turn babyish when she touches them. Move like softshell turtles. The woman sinks down again. She sleeps for hours. The hair is moved to a basket, then the basket is hidden. The woman wakes and slings a woolly scarf over her neck. She goes.
*
The mother doesn’t understand older, more naive Lyko. Lyko wonders what her mother might do if she knew where she leaves to. She wears a secret disguise. Deep-pocketed leather jacket, wide belt, and the posture of a man. At night, she meets a woman in the supermarket who doesn’t know her well but does not hesitate to kiss her deeply. At the woman’s apartment, the woman’s coat casts a shadow like a large-winged bat. She moves in tremors—is soothed by touch. Lyko undoes the belt. The girl looks like Berthe Morisot’s brunette, studious, one elbow leaning onto the brim of the bassinet. Or Titian’s Venus, unfazed as she blindfolds the cupid morosely slumped in her lap. Lyko holds the lovely face, the precious fat in the woman’s thighs and stomach. She lashes these parts with her belt then presses her palm to each welt until she feels the woman spill down—collapse linen-to-cheek. Lyko hands the woman her underwear then makes a show of redressing herself. A tensed bicep, a clumsy but intentional big-shoulderedness. She feels the woman watching. In the 9th century, a physician describes these perversions in the child as caused by the nursing woman's indulgence in the flowers of a bitter orange tree, melilot leaves. Consumption feeds consumption. The suckling will feel the itch forever—uncleanliness and its labial spasms. But it is hard to picture the mother closing her mouth upon a fistful of delicate flowers. The female variant of the Slavic swamp spirit, the bolotnitsa, is made by the touch of an unclean spirit. The old hag might ask someone to take her far away from where she is. Then, she might pull them in deeper and tickle them to death.
*
Lyko likes to fool her mother—tonight, on her way home, she will recapture the pardoned frog at the base of the lake, cut through her iliac arteries, the crooks of the thigh. While Dela and the mother sleep, Lyko skulks through the kitchen and smuggles the girl in with the rest. Tomorrow, she will watch her mother gnaw at every anonymous thigh, even the frog that lived but died anyway. Before Dela, Lyko and her mother practiced monkey-see monkey-do: the mother eases the stone out of a plum with a fruit knife and younger Lyko mimics the cupping of the plum empty handed. Lyko laces up one boot and her mother its twin. But the game has finished. When Lyko leaves the house some nights she can sense her mother’s peevish ear on the other side of a wall. The mother refuses to monkey-do. She is brazen, industrious in this refusal. The older woman sits on a rickety swing chair chewing her lower lip. Spare strands of hair go into their quilt for winter. One hand pierces the ventilating needle through the lace cap, the other pulls the hair taut. Pierce, pull, pierce, pull.
*
Mother’s tiny face teeters through her hooded cape and boxy sunglasses. The hairdresser has come. Dela watches her from the hallway but resents the girl’s desperation. The wig box is opened. Look at the lace, the woman says. Did you make this one special for me? The hag in the doorway doesn’t falter. Sure I did, sweetheart. The winnings go into a pouch of Dela’s making, a skinned hare on her mother’s lapel. The mother will pierce the city to gather for them, bring back a pint of milk or some other relic. Dela recalls fleeting images of foreign things—hearts of palm, split pea, cherry tomatoes—in the picture books, they are dewy and lit. Her mother will not bring these back. Dela loves Josef, who is like her Swiss army knife—he’s the reason she can feel time. His boy hair fans across her shoulder when he sleeps, curled into some inconsolable carcass of rags, unusable, mother says, no use in cutting. His grubby hands (so small) could find Dela’s elbow, her knee, anywhere. She wishes the produce was hers to offer him. She might try a taste, but she’d let him eat all but a lick in any life except this less fortunate one—this one, he will spend eating like a bird of prey. When Dela’s mother brings her to the forest, the daughter pictures the landscape beyond their usual trail. She imagines Josef in the cloak of a pilgrim, breaching its threshold.
When Dela started talking to men, she was twenty. Every time her mother sent her out alone, she dragged her feet. When men talked to her, she always talked back. But they seemed alien with their hands the size of fiddler crabs. They wanted to do things like sit in cars with other men. They all waited to touch her until the rest of their flock turned skittish and migrated to other rooms. Dela felt lucky to be touched. And she was a girl, and they didn’t know many girls, they said. But we like them very much. She liked parts of them—the odd way they showed affection as though she were a skittish cat. Like affection was a thing that must first be shown to her from afar then delivered someplace close where she could choose to take it. Her mother didn’t like them. But the one time Dela did bring a boy over, she found the mother strung across his lap on her stomach, her muumuu swept across the floor, her slippers still on. After he left, the mother dressed Dela in her muumuu and said, Dela, sweetness, you look so nice. This is ours. This is our muumuu. She had Dela and Lyko take turns trying it on, taking it off again, holding one another’s forearms and bending such that the fabric would drape and transfer from one sister onto the next.
*
The black bear Dela and the mother brought home this morning is cut on the kitchen floor. Dela saws the sternum in two. The good meat runs along the spine. She cleaves this into parts on her butcher’s block. Lyko sits down beside the doorway and half-heartedly aches with the muscle memory. Need something? Dela asks. She’s flushed, covered in wads of coarse hair, her knees bruised from where she’s sat kneeled at the creature’s front paw. No, Lyko says, I remember the butchering. She feels her mother, the push-pull of the needle, the cap, the hair. The woman knows catch and release better than anyone. Today, Lyko knows their mother is far away, past the gate, a hitched breath. In her absence, the house feels like an unpainted stretch of rooms. Lyko spent finite mornings with her mother in the thicket. She knows where to find the plumpest birds and how to track elk. Dela inherited more of the mother’s gifts. These worlds are bygone now—young skin sometimes grazes against elder skin, the texture like rice paper. A dogged lurch of cattle onto a barren field. She doesn’t know what this feeling is or where to put it. What do you do with the hide? We used to bury them, Lyko says. She feels coy. Of course she knows what her sister does with the hide. Lyko is the fly on every wall. Of course Dela sees Lyko, how she stands displaced in all corners of the house. Dela pulls a serrated switchblade from her back pocket and flicks it open.
Lyko isn’t a natural. The bear is stubborn like he wants to be whole. The old saying— every animal has enough brain matter to tan his own hide. Lyko moves to invert the ears, motty and tough. They give too much and release in her grip. She turns the creature fur-side down and struggles under the weight. Dela scatters a bed of salt on the body. Here, she says, feed it into the skin. She moves Lyko’s arms across the pelt like a buttery stroke. Lyko crawls over its surface in her frock, on her knees. The salt tears through the linen. The salt needles at her legs as she coaxes the bear. The sisters soak the pelt in vinegar. They know to move to other rooms once the bear is submerged. The mother comes home and Lyko doesn’t come near the hide. She comes to watch from doorways—Josef clings onto one of Dela’s legs as she flutters across the fleshing beam—a large wooden frame that stretches the bear as it dries. Dela turns, winks, turns back to the oiling. The hide is tattered. Even from far away, it looks more meager than anything Dela’s severed. When the mother sees it, she pinches its edge. She holds it far away from her. Oh, Delly, she says. As she moves to detach the creature from its frame, Lyko stands in the doorway. She watches the mother’s back—a shoulder blade juts out as she kneels at the back paw. As the mother rises, the notches on her spine unravel like macramé. Immortal hero shrew. Oh Dela, the mother says. She releases the corner and turns to Josef. In this light, his face is so much like the mother’s. Dela imagines blindfolding her mother. How it might feel to revoke her gifts. Bad luck, the mother says. Horrible luck.
*
Dela gathers Josef. She moves him onto her back. She mimics what she thinks Lyko does. She tears up a wood plank, steals one of those button-up shirts, a pair of those industrious slacks with pockets like knapsacks. She summons a decisive body language that she has never seen in real life. She carries Josef along the highway, then o, into the thicket. He exhales in harmony with the clamor of the trucks. His arms hang limp around her neck. A vacant ranch oats past, its horses presumably sheltered in their stables. They reach the freshwater marshes, a stone’s throw from the stretches of private farms. Half of the year, the blue herons perch at the mouth of their lake. Dela’s mother is keenest on the branches. The young. Dela lifts Josef onto the ground and oers him a ashlight. Lead the way, baby, she says.
2.
Lyko meets a tall woman in the park. She’s there with her child, a blonde toddler who leaps through the grass. The girl drags one end of a jump rope behind her. Soon, the woman slips away through an arched doorway, puts baby to bed in some tiny corner of some colossal apartment. Lyko feels small in her leather pilot’s jacket when she sees the wooden rocking horse, the cedar alphabet blocks. She tips down the horse at its head. She watches it rock. The woman wants to be hurt halfway every time—to be gripped then released. Lyko brings down the woman’s riding crop on her back, penetrates her with its base. She likes these women most—the ones who do not move to touch her.
When Lyko returns, she finds her mother’s turned back at the wigmaker desk. With Dela gone, Lyko must be the one to dig her thumb into a woman’s scapula. That morning’s sedated woman does not stir when Lyko hands her mother the forceps, not when Lyko holds the lips apart, only an inch when the mother weans the wisdom tooth from the alveolus. Lyko knows this feeling—the ease in giving scraps away. The mother’s brow doesn’t budge at her daughter’s familiarity—Lyko’s loose hold on a hip bone, its instinctual migration to the woman’s lowest rib. This creature sleeps defanged for two days. The mother is obscured, quietly pacified by her work. She organizes her needles. More hair is pulled into the quilt. The quilt overflows, is partially emptied and reluctantly closed. Lyko is the only one to show grief. She moves to the suspended bear hide. She presses herself against it, arms outstretched. She stalks around the sleeping woman like a hunter. When the woman finally wakes, she rocks in place for a long time. She whimpers through the cotton fill. Lyko pours the teeth into her hand. They are light as shucked pearls, heavy rooted and almost unbelievably whole. Thank you, the woman says, then, Oh, god.
*
That night, Lyko removes the ragged bear pelt from its post. She wraps herself inside, sits its head atop her shoulder and moves to the bed. The mother turns to lock eyes with the bear, then slumps back down on her side. Lyko advances, drives her forehead into the mother’s back like a bull. She feels that old muscle, hardened by the rowing flux of the needle. It softens the heavier she charges into it. She pushes harder still. Against a sail this slack, it could only be shadowplay. A tantrum. Lyko groans and collapses at her spine. She moves her face against the nape and holds. The mother will not fight the cub today, she realizes. The mother will not fight the cub ever.
3.
In the cave, everything is new. Josef sleeps curled on Dela’s chest. The cave has an end with no give. A quiet rush of wind tunnels through. Dela sweeps Josef through the cave every day. She lifts him by the arms and hugs him to her chest. She rests her chin on his head where there used to be vernix caseosa. His muddy hair slips down her back and she remembers when he was all lanugo-down. She says, sweet animal, here is a rock and here is a dip in the rock. He mumbles back, rock, or dip. She lifts him into the dent and out. He fits in every crag perfectly. It’s like he was made to be put inside. She says, here is the light, and points at the mouth of the cave. He runs to the edge where light turns to shadow. She imagines a vulture circling, so she leaps ahead, wraps her arms around the child’s waist and harpoons him back in. They’re low on water already. We need to build a fire to boil the lake water, she says. Her mother never taught her how to build a fire. She hands Josef a marker and says, draw mama a couch, a lamp. He sprints across the wall and draws a long line. Couch, he says. Then an outline of his hand on the rock. Lamp. She sighs. You know what fire looks like, baby? He puts his fingers in his mouth and drops his pen. It looks like this, she says. She presses her palms together and lifts them over her head like a great big spire. It moves like this. She sways back and forth in place. It’s orange and red and blue and very hot. He finds the orange marker. Fire, he says. He draws a heavy flame, climbs a slab of rock to stoke it taller. Then, fire! Fire! He sets the couch on fire, then the lamp. Dela moves to lift him off the rock but he squirms and kicks in her arms. Fire! She frees him from her grip and he cowers at the base of the flame. My love, she says, maybe draw us some water? It looks like fire upside down, baby. It’s blue. She scrambles to find the blue marker and brings it to his hand. He shoulders her away, lets out a confused cry, a groan. Fire, he says again, his cheek pressed against the cave wall.
Dela harvests juniper berries and wild chamomile. The child makes fire. He doesn’t sleep or eat. He stomps around like loose thunder. He will not let Dela touch him or put him to bed. Soon, the whole cave will be on fire. Dela used to read the almanacs, twinge at the forewarnings—broods of cicadas and silverfish. Now her child moves like a blight. Baby, she says, her hands bear a corpus of dandelions. Please. He nears her, snatches a dandelion and lays it on the floor. He pierces it with a stick until it’s spread, martyred onto the rock. When he finally collapses he sleeps with his back turned to her. She crouches beside his head, says, sweetness, darling. She cuts his hair, matted, already grown down to his lowest rib. She steals it away. The nearest farm, miles out, has a water tower. She can barely make out her grip on the rungs as she climbs. She fills a bottle and drinks like a dog. She lets her weight drop against the bars. She wasn’t made for this part of the world. Metal doesn’t have an untapped kindness. How does one ever know what they’re wrung up against? The farmer’s front door is lit. Dressed in dark, heavy-winged moths. Dela lays Josef’s hair on the step. She knows when she returns, the mother will wrap the quilt around her, cling to her underneath. The feeble old woman will be unshrinking under the weight of care. Dela appreciates at least this—static, motionless hold. Dela watches the moths whose abdomens extend beyond the wings. There’s a cluster here—closest to the light.
Gina Hay is a Dutch writer from Curaçao based on unceded Coast-Salish lands (B.C., Canada). Find their poetry and prose in Glamcult, PRISM International, the Literary Review of Canada, Grain, Foglifter Journal, CV2, and elsewhere. Their chapbook, i float like a bad girlfriend, was published by Rahila’s Ghost Press. In their spare time, Gina is a lesbian mud wrestling tournament organizer. Find them on Twitter @rolex_mash.