Shell had bought the house because she felt closer to benevolence there. It was a blue shingled house surrounded by trees. There was a parking lot down the road, but other than that, there was nothing else to compromise her position. Shell loved the trees that encircled her. She felt them move above her, and she was deeply aware of the circle of tree roots underneath the house. To her, it was a hallowed space of roots and trees and vegetation tangling and whispering. She could hear thick veins touching each other. She could almost see the ancient networks of communication lighting up. Shell knew the times of the day when the trees ate sunshine from the sky. She would eat at the same time, hoping that she’d soon feel like she was an essential fixture of the treed lot.
It had been a long time since Shell had felt essential. Life had been hard. Her mother had beaten her up earlier in the year. That had been the last straw. Shell drained her savings and left her family home, closing her eyes to the trappings of violence and poverty. She’d lived in a motel until she figured out how to purchase the little blue house. It was falling apart and needed a lot of work. But she didn’t care.
Lingering in the windows, shutting doors softly, creaking down each individual stair, Shell felt as if she was re-discovering a secret life that had been waiting for her since the day she was conceived. The walls were faded and peeling. The kitchen didn’t function properly. Nothing was in its proper place. The furniture seemed skittish, shy. But Shell assured herself that she loved it all. She hoped that this was where she could come to terms with herself.
Having been suspended in amber for most of her time on earth, Shell recognized that it was time to face the truth. Face reality. She had been living in an illusion. Her family was not real; the pain she felt when her mother slapped her and yanked her hair was not real, her little siblings covered in snot and chip crumbs were not real, and the father who had moved away and in with his brother was not real. None of that was real. Only the blue house, the green grass, the wild garden, and the trees sheltering her from the world was real.
Did she remember the little cat that escaped screaming down the street? Did she remember the light mustache on her teacher’s lips as she played the clarinet? Did she remember the future feeling of sun coming up greenly over the mountainous horizon? Did she remember driving in between tan hills? How they got bigger and bigger as her family drove deeper within? How they stretched up to something her mother called heaven?
Did she remember the stinging feeling of ocean on her poorly shaven legs? Did she remember the pair of girl shoes she’d bought? Too wide? Too beautiful to send back? Too beautiful to destroy? Shell had forgotten them at their house. She’d planned to try and cut and glue them to fit her huge, narrow feet. But now they were just as unreal as the rest of the family home. She hoped they would survive her mother’s fury when they were finally found hidden under Shell’s childhood bed.
Shell didn’t want to remember those old things. All she wanted was to creep through her plot of woods, marveling at the dense silence. The echoing silence. There were mushrooms that surprised her at the base of pines. There were leaves that never fell from their boughs. The green of thick scum on the pond shocked her with its brilliance. It looked so thick, so sturdy, that she thought it might support the weight of her foot. But it was a ruse. The pond was deceitful.
The pond reminded her, unwillingly, of a dress fluttering from her mother’s closet. It waved to her from the closet, always beckoning, but she never got to touch it. Her mother hoarded her clothes, guarded Shell from the dresses and high heels. It wasn’t that her mother even wore most of the clothes. She was saving them for a rainy, smaller, thinner day. Cotton dresses, polyester sweaters, nylons, stained slips. Old dirty things. But still Shell wasn’t allowed to touch.
The screaming spring wind reminded her of the family home. Everything had screamed in that house. But, here, Shell could close her eyes and scream without consequence. The trees understood. The pond didn’t ripple. Birds looked thoughtfully down at her. The decibel didn’t disturb them in the slightest. The rabbit that lived behind Shell’s blue house was big. Bigger than any rabbit she’d ever seen before. Shell dusted glitter along her cheekbones in the bathroom mirror. She hadn’t been allowed glitter in the family home. Shell reminded herself that it didn’t necessarily mean that Shell was real. It didn’t mean that she existed. But, regardless of existence, she could try on clothes that she’d bought from the thrift store across town. It meant she could finally explore what she could look like.
Did she remember when her mother told her (meanly, cruelly) that if she wanted to wear a bathing suit in public, she had to walk around the block in her underwear first? What was the lesson to be learnt there? Shell never attempted it. The distance between her and the life she wanted was too wide, too frightening to bridge. And, even if she had made the walk, would her mother have even followed through on the promise? On the threat?
Shell reveled in the clothes from the thrift store. But after a few days, Shell realized that the clothes were not capable of true transformation, no matter how she tried. Cinched the waist. Pointed shoes made her legs longer. A push-up bra cupped the skin of her chest like lover’s hands. Everything was desperately sad. The blue of one dress was so light, lighter than turquoise, a Disney princess blue. The shade of an Alice dress. The shade of Jasmine’s top . . .
Of course, the mirror didn’t reveal a princess. Emotionally, Shell felt like she was drowning in a murky pond. Emotionally, physically, spiritually, she felt that they all were in the green, deceitful pond.
Shell had never been happy. How could she be? There was so much festering within her. Her mother obviously had seen that from the moment she was born. Her mother called Shell hairy, ugly, strange, difficult to look at. Shell was foreign to her mother because, physically, she looked like a boy. But whose fault is that? It wasn’t always just the clothes Shell was guarded from. Shell was also guarded from feeling at home in her own body.
Fungus grows anywhere it can, anywhere it wants. Is that true? Shell examined her nails, her eyelids, her lips, her armpits, her bikini line religiously. Things grow everywhere. Hair, wrinkles, pustules, a rotting husk of body murdered in the bathroom mirror. The smell of dust and rot in her mother’s house was immense.
How could she get rid of it all?
“If I could be completely free of hair, completely bald from my eyelashes down to my toes, I would,” Shell repeated every night, like a wish. It was a pipe dream, a pipe bomb. She would explode herself into a million pieces if she could. The mushrooms that grew in her lips were too tiny to make a difference. She wished the mushrooms in her chest would swell until breasts grew. Then she would feel proportional. Then she’d feel something like acceptance. Right?
A whisper sometimes came from the closet, “Who are you? What are you performing for?”
When she heard this, Shell would suck her stomach in, make it rock hard, make it flat like a table. When she heard this, she’d skitter from the room, hiding along the shadows, bending down away from the windows, avoiding any mirrored surface.
One night she had a dream that she was a very juicy peach. And this juicy peach broke into her mother’s closet and grabbed the forbidden cotton dress, ripped it off its hanger, and pulled it over her head. She was trapped for what felt like hours, searching for the hole for her trunk, the head hole, and then the armholes. Her breathing changed and panicked. Once she found the holes where her arms and head went, she thought, at last. But it did not fit, it did not look right. In her panic, she popped a button or two or five, and heard a great, jagged rip. She’d destroyed her mother’s dress; it had ripped down the side from her frenzied fear. The dress her mother was saving. The dress her mother warned her not to touch. And the juicy peach, too, was destroyed, pulped, tooth-bitten, ripped little girl crying.
Have you ever ripped a dress of your mother’s? Shattered the heirloom vase that your great-great-great grandmother had passed down? Left the tradition you were born into?
The impulse is to throw herself out the window. If only the grass were further away. If only that would be enough.
There was a story Shell had once read about an alien trying on a dress and finding it didn’t fit the way it’d imagined. Once her cousin read a pop-up Alice in Wonderland book to her. Every page held a leaping surprise. There had been a calendar in the family home that was permanently stuck on the wrong month. Merricat sugared her family to death. The blue of a bird wheeled in and out of the spring sunshine.
Had Shell received magic powers in her youth? She thought maybe she did. She thought it was maybe when she ate huckleberries from the sidewalk, or when she hid under the lilac bush for hours. Her grandfather hit her with a broom, calling her by a name she’d long locked away. She’d forget the combination to her high school locker all the time. She never remembered exactly how to spin the mechanism. She had never wanted the responsibility of being alive like this. She didn’t want to cry in the dark of night.
Who is going to guide her body into the form of a woman? Who is going to come fix up this blue house?
Jordan Hagedon had the opportunity to swim with sharks and did not take it. You can find her most recent work in Soft Star Magazine and in Porter House Review, where she won the Editor’s Prize for Fiction. Find more of her work at jordanhagedon.com. Follow her on dying Twitter @jeimask.