undone.
* * *
Tell the tale of the Golden Box.
Once upon a time there was a prince and the girl who loved him. But a wicked fairy stole his memories away and locked them inside a golden box.
Try again. Tell it crooked.
Once upon a time there was a mother and the daughter who loved her. But the truth swept the scales from the girl’s eyes. The mother could not bear to see the truth of herself in her daughter’s face, so she stole it away. And locked it inside a golden box.
What comes back first? Scent. Juniper and bay leaves toasting in a skillet. Your mother’s hands, one mapped with scars, crushing the herbs in a mortar.
Stars, bigger than the ones you know. Magnified until you swear you can see silver star-children coasting down molten rivers, chased by the rippling flags of their celestial hair.
There’s true, your mother says, and there’s story. Both have their uses.
Was her voice ever so patient, her focus so squarely on you? Is this a wish or a memory?
Memory. More are coming now.
Some kinds of magic are for everyone. Her eyes blue agates but warmer. Growing things, the weather. The moon belongs to all of us. Fingernails, spit. You can keep yourself like a garden.
Schoolroom. Hot dust and body spray and uncapped marker. Your teacher stands over you looking at the green mess of your planting. Each child has a box of soil into which they’ve pushed seeds. Impatient, you helped your seeds along. Now your box is jungly with sprouts, days too early. Your teacher—who has a feeling about you, who doesn’t like you and can’t say why—drops your box into the trash.
Your brother, whipping your bare legs with a kitchen towel. Shut up, I barely touched you! Later your mother catches you harvesting hair from his brush and slaps your face, the first time she’s ever hit you. It’s not a weapon, she says as you weep gustily. If you work against your brother, against anyone, it stops.
How could it stop? Bees and clouds and dirt don’t stop. Your pulse goes, your hair grows, your hands and head and heart sizzle with a sweet green static that lives in and around you, that your mother and your aunt call working. You can shape it, direct it, but you can’t say no to it.
You pull out of the memories just enough to feel your fragile body, red meat and star stuff, floating in the hyaline eye of the pool. Someone floats there with you. Someone is holding you tight. Then you’re off again.
Walking through a field at night. Your mother is beside you and the grass is hip-high, parting around you in itching curtains. Again, same field, but you’re taller now, the grass no longer an enchantment but an annoyance around your knees. Your aunt’s just ahead, Carhartts and pruning shears. The moon is a scanted scoop, a day or two from full. Your nose pricks, anticipating the work of separating herbs from grasses in the pale dark.
Come on, auntie. Not even a flashlight?
Not even a candle, modern girl.
The memories come faster now.
Here’s one, a memory from before you could make them, your mother’s voice imprinted onto your infant mind like pine needles on wax. Swim, little one, into the deep, Mama is tired and wanting her sleep.
Stalking through the woods in a sundress, looking for fairy houses. Knock twice on ashwood to wake it, thrice on larch. Leave an offering.
Nightmares after a slumber party. Stripping the bed, laying down fresh sheets sprinkled with lavender water to keep bad dreams away.
Blue flowers shaped like tongues. Something brackish on the burner. Blood beading on your knees. The memories make a flood and the flood makes a river and you’re rising on it, spinning like a leaf, threatening to waterlog and go under.
Someone speaks in your ear. Ivy. Strong girl, clever girl. Make yourself into a fortress. Make yourself into an ark. You’re a safe, you’re a sailboat, you’re a hot-air balloon. Hold tight to your edges. You’re a raincoat.
You don’t know how you do it, but you do: you tuck your mind away. You make it weathertight. You tread the flood and like Prospero you find on it an isle: a memory so clear and crystal-cut you can beach yourself on its shores, and rest.
Freckles. That’s what comes.
You’re little enough that your hair hangs down your back, uncut. You forgot how heavy it was. You’re wearing overalls that belonged to your brother and a T-shirt with a hole at the neck and you’re crouched in the spring dirt. There’s a sticky patch at the corner of your lip that you touch your tongue to absently. Maple syrup.
A boy is watching you. Yesterday there was a moving truck parked across the street and today a boy with curly brown hair and freckles and a Peter Pan smile. He’s spying from the gap in the fence line.