Page 4 of Daughter of Rot

Isela brushes Olivia’s hair into a high bun and douses her head with hairspray, she combs it back neatly with no regard to how hard she’s pulling.

Olivia’s crying is obvious as her face turns bright red every time. Isela ignores the tears and notices the buttons on her own blouse are mismatched. Olivia runs out and catches the bus by the time Isela fixes her shirt. She walks into the kitchen and sees Olivia has left her lunch behind.

That’s what I get for thinking I could bring a grateful child into this world.

THE HOUSE DREAMS

The house dreams of uprooting and starting over by the ocean. It wants to smell sea salt and blue whales. It longs to absorb the wisdom of what the ocean has to say. The house wants to die in a drowning accident. In obsidian waters, the house pictured itself slowly pulled toward the ocean floor, water rushing through the front door, windows exploding, photographs floating, oxygen depleting, losing sight, losing thought, and bursting with the vibrant boozy colors of DMT before succumbing to the light.

The house wonders if it could become a ghost. Maybe the ghost version of itself could manifest as another form. A mystical transformation into fog or a cloud or an earthworm.

The house dreams of everyone who lived there before. They sit at a long round dinner table which reaches into the ether of white light past the house, past the forest, past the town. The former tenants are adorned in rich ruby red flowing fabric, feasting on towering piles of flower petals. The children graze dandelions and sunflower petals from the table with their faces buried in the piles as though they were little goats or cows out on a pasture. The adults eat crimson roses, lavender from the stems, white jasmine petals, yellow and pink lantana bundles. Petals cascade out of their mouths as they speak to one another in gibberish. White-tailed deer and painted turtles stumble in and eat from the overflow. Flower petals fill the house up and spill out through cracks in the walls, through the windows, through the front door and the back door.

The house used to dream about being born. It started out as a perfect round violet seed, planted in the dead center of a meteor crater where silence penetrated the hollowed-out curve and bustling migrating flocks flew around, but never over. The fruitful womb beneath the crater was cosmic swirls of glittering stars and the constant sound of soft static. The violet seed sprouted into spiky green and yellow wild grass that spread in a spiral and filled the crater over time, mimicking a giant bed of moss. It became an open wide mouth, trapping any creature that found itself trying to gnaw or pull at the green and yellow for sustenance.

The house dreams about fetuses buried beneath the roots of the oak trees outside. When they are born, they crawl into the house like ants on a mission. Their backs are covered in horse-hair mushrooms and baby tooth moss. Their palms and soles of their feet are bursting with the tentacles of a sundew, secreting mucilage, leaving sticky trails behind. The baby creatures crawl up the walls and they suckle on the ceiling until it softens and falls in on itself. They eat through glass and adobe and they make their way into the garden where they devour the hibiscus flowers and the bees and the crickets and the roses. They chew through the thorns and the bristles. They sniff the dirt, snorting and yipping at it. They are maddened and wild and they grunt like small piglets. When they are finally full, they dig into the soil until their bodies are buried. The tops of their heads sprout into tremendous trumpets of sun pitcher plants.

The house dreams of death. White light fills the insides of all the rooms, beaming up into the sky, imitating a sunburst. Ethereal music fills the air. The house turns into stardust and spreads out into a never-ending universe.

What a delight, thinks the house, to fade away into nothing.

IN TEN YEARS TIME

According to Olivia (age 8), the wind whispers secrets that you can only remember in your dreams. School is not an escape from her mother, it’s merely a break. Fathers hold no superpowers, they may as well be ghosts as they become lost in alcohol and secret phone calls. They do not haunt you as they can only haunt themselves. Feathers under your pillow are good luck. Candle flames can speak to you if you listen close enough. No one can save you, even if you’re a child. Especially, when you are a child. If you see a fawn in the morning, you’ll have a good day, but if you see one at night, a curly horned creature will follow you home. If you tell your mother fairytales, she will call you a liar. There’s no such thing as a happy ending, little olive. If you tell her the truth about the constant scream in the back of your mind that twists your guts and makes your head feel like it could combust at any moment, your mother will laugh. You’ll get over it as you get older. Things could always be worse.

According to Olivia, mothers lie. They say anxiety isn’t real. They use silence as a sword. They say you’re making it all up. They compare your inescapable inner pain to theirs. After you turn eight, they gawk at your body and prod at your arms and belly and squeeze at your face, pull at your hair. They treat you like an inanimate object. Not even a doll. You become a thing. A possession. A vessel. A void.

According to Olivia, the role of the daughter is to escape by any means necessary. Ten more years until she gets to the magic number. Ten more years until she can finally be free. Olivia has learned that mothers are swarmed by outbursts. She knows how to clean up after the violence to make it seem like it never happened. She knows to stay silent. She knows to lock herself in her room under a blanket fort with her books and a flashlight. Every so often, she begs the house to look over her, to keep her safe. The house responds by dimming the lights and opening the windows to Olivia's room as if to say, you can go anytime you'd like.

According to Olivia, making a wish should be simple. Olivia wishes for things like sour candy, ice cream, tres leches, and books on bird migration, portals, monsters, and more than anything she wishes she could understand why she feels a deep demoralizing fear when her own mother tells her stories about daughters who should be seen but not heard.

NO SABO TREES

The oak tree doesn’t know its original tongue. Its trunk with splotches of pistachio green lichen creaks in a rhythmic click click click click as its branches claw at the cloudless sky. The oak tree transmits messages in greens, reds, oranges, yellows, and browns. A language of sorts, but not the first. Like a bundle of the human nervous system, the oak tree’s roots spread out and tunnel through the earth underneath, threading into the mud, feeling its way to nutrients. A dialect of mystics. An undeniable connectedness.

Oaks are prone to optimism even as they reach for mycelial ghosts. Their roots reach for any echoes of their ancestral past. In the world above, water vapor bursts from the bark of the oak tree on cold mornings, like an exhalation of relief. The water vapor articulates a story about birth and death and the cycles which link them together forever. The oak is thankful for the water. Gratitude is soft reciprocation.

What was your first language?

Olivia asks with her hands on her hips, squinting as she looks up at the canopy which sprinkles her with tiny bits of sun. The tree isn’t sure. The tree explains that 124 years on this planet means nothing.

A flash of lightning. One heartbeat. A word left unsaid.

Was Spanish your first language?

No. Not Spanish.

Nahuatl?

Olivia knew Nonantzin and Onkan. My Mother and Where?

No. That’s not right.

The tree tries to explain that the way it speaks to relatives is not through direct sentence structure, but more like a song, an ethereal wave of sound that shifts the air. Colors mutate. Sound becomes gentle. A quiet eruption of pheromones and fragrance, but it becomes more complicated as the lineage becomes more interconnected. The tree assumes a tiny human can only understand so much.

Olivia pats the tree on the trunk, sticking her fingers between the gaps of protruding bark. How old are your siblings? The trees that guard the house.

They are children! Anywhere between fifty to seventy-two. They were small before. Just like you. We were here before the house existed, before the house learned its first word.