I’m having those dreams again. They always begin with the sound of tearing, not fabric or paper, but a horrible wet cracking. A chest cavity pried open. Splintered ribs bloom like petals with all the flesh carved away, raw and red. It’s almost beautiful.
But the ghoulish images that loomed in my childhood mind no longer strike the same fear into me. Now, the fear has dulled into annoyance, the shock into routine. I don’t even flinch as it redoubles behind my eyes.
Instead, I distract the mind by imagining a nefarious psychoanalyst’s office, his pipe in one hand, and The Interpretation of Dreams clutched in the other. His scrutinizing gaze unreadable through the sheen on his wire-frame glasses.
“When did the dreams start?” he’d ask, already scrawling notes despite my silence, which always meant more than any response. He wants to tease the things out of me that I can’t bring myself to say, whatever dark slithering creature lives below the surface. It’s cliché, a cheap substitute for real therapy. I’m lying on a tired grey chaise lounge and watching the ceiling through a smoky haze.
But there is no subconscious to my dreams, just the old autoimmune response to what I’m already convinced of. A pulsing, red warning. I’m back in the place of danger. Besides, everyone knows Freud was a quack.
When I left home at nineteen I had no intentions of being back by twenty-one. My peers are all growing up and moving on while I retrace my steps backwards into childhood.
I crouch over boxes on the floor of the small upstairs bedroom, slotting familiar books into unfamiliar spots on new IKEA shelves. Coming back was self-preservation—or self-harm. Either way, the money had run out and the lease had ended.
My mother comes in without knocking, a stack of laundry under one arm. “Tell me if these are yours or mine,” she says, shifting the laundry on her hip. “It’s hard to tell—with the size.” There’s a sharp knife in her words. An accusation as her eyes flick down on me, assessing.
I school a tight expression as she passes me the jeans. I flip out the waistband to show her the tag. “Have you ever bought pants there?” I ask impatiently, wringing the denim in my hands.
She clicks her tongue, and throws the rest of the pile onto the floor next to me. “You can just say ‘yes’. I don’t need the attitude, especially when I’m doing you a favour, washing your clothes. You’re an adult, you can wash your own clothes for all I care.”
I don’t mention how she insisted on washing them, or bother calling out what she’s really saying. Nor can I comment on the way she enjoys this, the theatrics of it: gracious washing and folding, checking pockets for receipts, checking the numbers, a performance of care. Sizing me up and keeping score.
I learned through her eyes how to measure up deficiencies: hers, mine, random women in the supermarket as I sat in the cart with my knees to my chest like I could mold a childish body into something small enough to slip her notice. It’s a language we’ve always shared, this ritual comparison, reminders that neither of us would fit into her wedding dress she wore at the age I was now. Flipping through photo albums, she could be my ghostly twin, if not for her sharp and hungry body, where mine was soft and indistinct. She slips each picture from its sleeve, delicate and silent like mourning a loss. I would watch her turn the photo over in hand to read aloud the date on the back, times before me. I open my hands to receive each one like communion, running fingers over edges worn soft and feathery.
“Having a baby changes your body so much,” she said, mournful, looking past the photos at her reflection in the warped plastic film. “It changes everything.”
* * *
“You thought your mother wanted to eat you?” Klara repeats with a careful, nervous laugh— she’s playing psychoanalyst today, except there’s no pipe and no fainting couch. Just the two of us sitting across from one another in a coffee shop near campus. I watch my chai latte sweat a ring of condensation onto the coaster until the paper bloats. It was nine dollars and somewhere over 300 calories. Everything is too loud and the lightness of snow outside makes my eyes throb.
I stir it without drinking. “When I was ten,” I say.
We lived together all semester, but this is the most we’ve spoken in weeks.
I told her of the dreams like it might bring us closer, but in having admitted this aloud, I saw its delusional and paranoid quality. Could see in her eyes how a conclusion was forming. I wished to swallow the words back up even if it meant choking on them.
But the dream-memories from that time were resurfacing in my mind, shimmering below the surface of every insignificant daylight interaction. The wounds achingly fresh again; anything that made me bend felt like it might rend open the weak stitches. I feared what might happen when I stopped holding myself together, if I gave up the strict illusion of control and let everything spill out. I squint out at the grey snow-slush on the street and see the contents of my middle slicking the road a vibrant red.
* * *
I think my fear was born in trying to reconcile her: the woman whose body had sustained me, yet who I was certain wanted to take me out of it. What grew from that fear was a secret, solemn certainty that she intended to eat me. She wanted me smaller; any photo taken prefaced with “suck it in!” Yet, she never cooked a healthy meal, never offered an alternative. I didn’t know any different as I could not recall seeing her eat. She must be so hungry.
Fairy tale logic took a physical form, and each plate set before me was part of a long husbandry, an anticipation of future satisfaction. Why call me a pig if I were not livestock whose natural conclusion was slaughter? I started dreaming of my body cracked open, how it might be prepared, cooked, and served. I took the fear as a premonition.
I soon outgrew that phase, as my fixation flitted to some other childish fear. Yet the truth was simply waiting there; my mother was slowly eating me alive, gnawing at me with her words. And hadn't I taken from her first? I stole time like a life sentence, claimed her hair and her face as my own. Maybe it was her right to retrieve it bite by bite.
* * *
I thought moving out would help, that I could be someone new. I kept waiting to feel that newness overcome me—to be swallowed up by it. I wanted time to pass and to miraculously become someone else. Chrysalis liquified and reformed.
While I waited, I spent the year as a ghost.
Through the thin wall I listened with a starving, haunting jealousy as Klara and her boyfriend cooked together. I avoided the kitchen when I knew she was home. Hating the thought of being caught in my consumption, I cooked at weird hours. I ate hunched over the counter then obsessively cleaned the surface, erasing traces of life.
I swung between two extremes, both just as shameful and joyless. Some days were methodical, weighing out each ingredient and logging them religiously. The next bad day: a hole, impossible to fill. I binged peanut butter on a white tortilla, cream cheese on a plain bagel, instant oats, white rice, vegan chicken nuggets, every type of cereal: bowl after bowl, or dry crumbling fist-fulls straight from the box, whose forgotten marshmallow pieces twisted into sticky dust between my body and the sheets of an unmade bed.
That summer, without school and in between jobs, to keep myself out of the apartment I walked the city for hours in a daze. I stood in the supermarket under the buzzing fluorescents with nothing playing in my headphones. When I finally caught my reflection in the glass of the frozens section, it was something I’d been chasing. I looked sick, still fighting against what was eating me up inside. Moving away to escape my mother’s judgment hadn’t solved anything. The sickness, the daughter of her sickness, was inside of me. A creature slithered below the surface, swallowing its own tail, both so hungry and so scared of the bite. I could squint and see it.
* * *
That year my grandfather died. We stayed with him all summer, the sombre feeling hung in the air like a held breath as the cancer took its time in wasting him.
In the meantime, I shared a double bed with my mother. In the silent dark of that airless room, a small revelation: we rub our feet together in the same way, one foot cradled in the arch of the other. I imagined the silent act of self-soothing passed silently from her body to mine, genetic and unsaid. Each night as I repeated the innate little action, no longer a subconscious comfort, but something beyond my control. How could I articulate what else she passed onto me? The hurt and hunger that demanded flesh and waited with an open mouth. Its sharp hooks reaching from her own mother into her. She knew what hurt the most from the same places where her body ached. My grandmother commented on her weight at his wake. I watched my mother stand with arms crossed over her middle even as she wept for her father like she had to keep herself from cracking open.
I wanted her to look at me and notice what she’d done— to wait by my bedside, to hold her breath for me as I wasted silently in my own way.
* * *
Later, after the books are shelved and laundry sorted, I sprawl on the familiar bed and watch the ceiling fan revolve.
She enters again, this time bringing a cup of tea, and setting it wordlessly on the nightstand. Orange pekoe with milk, over-steeped and unsweetened, but she made it for me all the same. So I sip it, swallowing a scalding mouthful. The bitterness isn’t poison, even if it’s slowly killing me all the same; it’s just how she’d been taught to make it. I understand. I almost love it.
Olivia MacDonald is a writer, artist, and editor. She holds a BA in English and History from the University of King’s College where she edited for academic and literary journals. Her academic obsessions include digital culture, the history of science, and popular depictions of science in fiction. She is currently a student in the Master of Publishing program at Simon Fraser University and Co-Editor-in-Chief of Bitter Magazine.
