31

31

T hings look much worse in the light.

Jodi's feet are gravely misshapen. On the left, her three middle toes are melted together with a large patch of scaly redness on top, the skin peeling back to expose rawness. It's all reds and purples and yellows, the tips of the toes starting to blister and bloat. On the right, her heel is peeling, as though the foot is loosely wrapped in its own skin, like cling wrap on half a sandwich.

"What happened, Mom?" Flora asks.

They are at the kitchen table, Jodi's feet propped on a chair nearby. With Iris safe in her crib upstairs, Flora tends to her mother's wounds.

Jodi is more alert now. "It was an accident."

Flora frowns. "I saw the birth tusk. Were you trying to burn it?"

"It's cursed."

"You mentioned that," Flora says.

As they talk, the tusk warms in her pocket, the heat traveling through her thick pants to the top of her thigh.

"You left it there, right? You left it in the fire?" Jodi's eyes are wide and wild.

"Yes," Flora lies. "Mom, you have to tell me what's going on."

Jodi bites her lip and shakes her head. Flora sighs and bends over Jodi's feet again, using tweezers to peel away at the swollen heel. As she sets the remnants on a paper towel, she marvels at the growing pile of human skin on her kitchen table.

"When I threw it into the fire," Jodi starts, eyes trained on her injuries, "it—nothing happened at first. But then… my feet burned."

"Like the flames jumped? You were standing too close?"

"No, no, not like that. My feet just felt really hot and when I looked down there was nothing one minute and then the next—they were covered in flames."

Flora scrunches her eyebrows together. "I don't see how that's possible. Like spontaneous combustion?"

"I don't know, Flora," Jodi says tiredly. "I'm just telling you what happened. That thing "—she spits the word from her mouth—"is out to get me."

Flora finishes wrapping her mother's feet with gauze. "The tusk? What do you mean ‘out to get' you?"

"It's as if we're connected somehow." Jodi takes a deep breath, lifting her chest, and lets the air out slowly. "But it's gone. Out there in the woods. So I'm safe now." She grabs Flora's hands with her own. " We are safe now."

Flora's brain is chunky soup. Her mother's story makes no sense. And Flora's thigh is getting hotter with every passing minute. She expects to find a shiny burn mark there. But still, she dares not move the tusk now, dares not tell her mother that it is not actually out there in the woods but, in fact, right here in her pocket.

Upstairs, Iris cries, and, as her voice reaches them at the table, Jodi gasps. Flora looks over to find that her mother's breasts are leaking. A wetness spreads across Jodi's shirt. Flora's own chest, however, is dry. Panic and anger and revulsion steam up in her like a kettle about to sing. This isn't right. It isn't right.

"You stole my milk," she says, harsh and accusing.

"What?" Jodi asks.

"You stole it from me!"

Jodi cocks her head to the side. "Now, Flora, that's not how it works, you know that."

"Oh, is it not? Is that ‘not how it works'? Kinda like how feet don't just spontaneously combust and people aren't connected to inanimate objects?"

Jodi opens her mouth and closes it again. "You don't understand."

"Connor will be home tomorrow," Flora says, and she can taste the relief of her words as she speaks them.

"What do you think women did in ancient times?" her mom asks, ignoring her. "It was normal, if a woman couldn't breastfeed—"

"I was breastfeeding!"

"—then another nursing mother in the community would help out. It's absolutely natural."

Flora's hands fly into the air. "You are not another nursing mother! You are my mother!"

She watches as the wet spots on Jodi's shirt expand, and she can't take it anymore. She needs to go upstairs. Needs to be with her daughter. Needs to clean her filthy body and rest her bones, which feel like they are breaking at this very moment, cracking from exhaustion and overexertion.

Silence screams between them, dense and alive like an angry scribble.

Finally, her mother asks in a small voice, "Carry me to bed?"

And, of course, Flora agrees, because for every cell within her that resists, there exists a cell drawn to her mother like a compass to true north.

With her mom in her arms, a role reversal of all the nights her mother carried her to bed as a child, Flora climbs the steps. They do not speak, but their bodies communicate; Jodi's heartbeat thumping against Flora's arm, tears falling down Flora's cheeks. Her mother rests her head on her daughter's shoulder. And as Flora lays her mom in bed, she realizes that the same complex, paradoxical feelings she has for Iris apply to her mother as well. A deep, primal, evolutionarily wired love that coexists with resentment and a desperate need to separate, to individuate.

Perhaps there is no way to break this cycle, after all. Perhaps this is how it was always meant to be.