She cannot shake me loose. She cannot squeeze me out.
She cannot dislodge me by jumping off the chair in the parlor, no matter how many times she tries.
Nor by belly flops onto the mattress, even if she can feel the hard edge of her traveling trunk beneath each time she lands.
I am as determined as she is—maybe more so—even though I am nothing yet, just a bud, a floating branch, a wand, a thing without mind, without thought, without memory, without even, in the common parlance, a top or a bottom, limbs, digits, a head. I am nothing but pulse and root and will.
I got the will from her.
She has, in that regard, nobody but herself to blame.
Together we go down the cliff, she and I, down into the many-branching warren of streets piled with the whitewashed cottages of fishermen, and from a woman who lives there, my mother, in her most serious attempt on my life, purchases a small pouch of dried herbs—hellebore and juniper leaf—from which she will later make a tea that will make her very sick indeed, sick for a whole day and a night and another day, with only Mary to nurse her; my father, the entire time, is at William Cloverdale’s shop guiltily perfecting his creatures by night, crafting fanatic numbers of glass eyes by day to make up for what he stole the night before, imagining—when he dares imagine anything—that she is in the arms of her lover. He doesn’t imagine her vomiting into the slop pot, with frantic Mary holding her head, until there is nothing left to vomit; and then vomiting some more—deep dry heaves from the very bottom of her physical and spiritual self, yielding nothing but bile; though this is, in fact, what she is doing.
For a day and a night and a day.
And when she is done I am still there, my roots, if anything, dug deeper; still hard at my work, at my mindless replication: CGD’O.LD’O.CGD’O.LD’O.
There is starting to be something more to me now. From my single bud other buds have grown, though all of me, yet, is little more than potential. Pulse and root, will and potential. CGD’O.LD’O.
• • •
I have said I do not like my mother much, and that is true. But I don’t blame her. I would have wanted to kill me, too, if I were she. For it is true that I have ruined, am ruining, will ruin her dream of going to find her Papa, the only person in the world she truly loves, the only one she can ever love, thanks to some strange, misshapen budding in herself, some small filament gone awry at the core in the making of Clotilde that no one now can ever change, not even me. What consternation she feels, sitting up in her bed after the tumult of the hellebore and juniper leaf, so weak that she must actually accept Mary’s unwanted ministrations, the watery soup, the weak tea, the spoonfuls of mildly colored and tasteless porridge! Propped up on pillows, gazing impotently out to sea.
• • •
It’s possible, of course, that she doesn’t know what I am made of. This, though, I can’t say for sure. I don’t know, can never know, just what passed between my mother and that long-limbed, hyalith-eyed man, Thomas Argument. I can see, though, how it would bother her—not knowing, exactly, what it is that grows inside her, sapping her energy, generating, with its waterlogged backflips and somersaults, waves of gut-wrenching nausea and grief. CGD’O.TA—a monster in potential and in utero, a gangling, spidery creature with a calculating smile, wrapping itself around her innards, robbing her of her opportunity, making a mockery of her life . . .
I’d worry about that, too, if I were in her position. Giving birth to a monster. She dreams about that sometimes, in the long nights when my father isn’t home.
A cruel-eyed monster. A monster with flippers. A monster without a head—just a bud with a gut, devouring her future.
It’s voracious, in her dreams. It never stops eating.