The first patch appeared when Cara was 10.
Ma rubbed at it with a washcloth, stiff and abrasive. It had been strung up with a wooden peg. The material carried the scar, an inflexible notch in the roughened fabric. Ma puffed. A strand of grey hair lifted from her damp forehead. She frowned.
“How do you manage it? Honestly. I don’t know what to do with you. It looks like earth but it won’t come off.”
Cara shrugged. Stared out the window. Ignored the threads scoring the skin on her knee. Ma threw the cloth in the sink. Glared. Shook her head.
“It’ll have to do. I don’t have time for this,” she said.
For you, Cara heard. Since Da left them, Cara knew she was a heavy weight for Ma to carry. Alone. She told her often enough. Da up-and-died. That’s what Ma said. It was Cara’s fault. That’s what Ma didn’t say.
She hopped from the kitchen counter, pulling her skirt down to try and cover the brown stain on her leg. Ma thought she’d been hanging around with the others. Loafing. Rolling down the grass slopes around the cricket pitch and stomping through the mud at the edge of the field out back. Ma thought she was covered in earth. Cara knew better. Cara knew the earth had just grown.
“You’re your Da’s daughter alright,” Ma said. Cara wanted to tell her then. Wanted to explain that it couldn’t be so. She couldn’t find the words to describe how long she had spent that morning, staring into the chipped old mirror in the hall, her face peeking out between the flecks of silver where the glass once was. Trying to find him. His face. She couldn’t tell her that this morning when she woke, she had known that it was lost. Her memory of Da. Ma had photographs, unmoving and flat. Cara knew that Da hadn’t been flat. Da had had a smell. Da had had sounds about him. She had woken that morning and they weren’t there anymore, in her head. Da was gone.
The first patch appeared that day.
Cara knew that the earth was stuck.
“Away with you then and play,” Ma said. Cara didn’t need telling twice. She took the stairs two at a time and slammed the bedroom door in her hurry.
“Quiet up there,” Ma called. “You’ll be bringing down the ceiling before you’re done.”
Cara lay face-down on the quilt. Breathing. Looking for a lost scent. All that came back to her was the musty smell of feathers. She inhaled deeply. It was there. The slight odour of wet leaves and damp ground.
She knew it had begun.
*
Cara loved jeans. Ma missed the time when she had worn skirts and shorts. It had been years now since Da died. Cara always thought of skirts as part of the before-Cara. Jeans were the after-Cara.
Jeans were secret-keepers.
The day Cara realised she couldn’t remember her first friend’s name at Primary school, she stopped wearing skirts. That day, the earth that had been creeping down her thigh with every small loss, reached past her hem. She couldn’t hide it anymore. She ran her fingers over her bare leg, the smoothness of the skin below her knee changed abruptly to a damp, gritty mat of earth. Her fingers smelt of outside when she lifted them up to her nose. Of the gradual decay of living things. Of forgetting. She was used to it now. The earth was packed tight but if she dragged her finger across it, pieces of her chimbled away leaving a fine dust under her nail. She felt the tiny grains rolling between the pads of her fingers, each one a memory.
Or so she believed.
Cara pulled a pair of jeans over the earth. She took care not to dislodge too much of herself. Ma was waiting for her. There would be breakfast and two places set either side of the small kitchen table. The routine was comforting. Cara liked routine. There was less to remember. Less to forget.
“Morning,” Ma said. Cara smiled a reply and slid her legs gently under the table, careful not to knock them. The earth didn’t hurt. It didn’t feel. Cara was sure it remembered though. She couldn’t imagine it not being there now.
“I made pancakes,” Ma said. “With maple syrup. You used to love these when you were smaller. Remember?” Cara looked at the thin cream mats on the plate in front of her, syrup slowly flooding them. It reminded her of a lava flow on one of the natural history documentaries she and Ma used to watch together every Sunday night before school and work crept back to steal their time.
She didn’t remember liking pancakes.
Her shoulder started to itch. It was a familiar feeling. Like little pricks of electricity, each needle chipping away a small part of her. She knew what she would see when she took her shirt off that evening.
“You look different today,” Ma said. “More grown.” Cara shrank away from the attention worried Ma might notice something had changed. Ma pushed her hair back from her face and tucked it behind her ear. Cara thought Ma looked old. It stole her breath. She couldn’t look away, from the wrinkles and the white hair, from the person Ma had become while she wasn’t looking. In that moment, she forgot. Not everything. Just enough. Ma had become the wrinkles and the white hair and Cara’s picture of her before got just a little duller and more out of focus.
Her shoulder itched and pricked.
She cut her pancake into small squares, dunked it in the syrup and relished the burnt sweetness as it spread over her tongue, glad that she was wearing a shirt. Glad that Ma couldn’t see the earth spreading.
“Just like you used to like them,” Ma said.
“Always,” Cara replied.
*
When she was 20, Cara became a medical curiosity. Until then, the earth had remained at bay, easily hidden behind layers of clothing. Cara had remained hidden beneath the veneer of a normal teenager, slouching around the house in clothing Ma didn’t understand. Ma didn’t expect to understand. No parent expects that of teenagers.
Then Ma died.
Cara thought she was acquainted with death. She was wrong. Da had up-and-died suddenly. Ma took her time about it. Her skin turned into creased parchment, dry and yellow-tinged. Her eyes clouded. Cara realised she could see Ma’s scalp beneath her thinning hair. Ma shrunk in on herself, became smaller and brittle.
Then one day she was gone.
Cara returned to an empty house that no longer seemed like a home. Hospital scent clung to her like a mask. She couldn’t wash it away. It stuck to the earth. She closed herself in her room, drawing the quilt up above her head, wrapping herself in the scent of damp ground, and Cara slept.
When she woke, Cara knew things were different. Already, she realised she could no longer recall her mother’s voice. In her head, when she played back their last conversations, it was her own voice she heard. She moved through the house as though she was a stranger. The familiar was no longer so. She shed a fine dust as she moved. It formed a patina on the wooden floor. With each step, a memory flaked away. There were echoes of Ma scattered around the house she now owned. A pair of glasses left open on top of an unfinished crossword, weeks old. A forgotten coffee cup, Ma’s lipstick ghosting the rim. Each was a reminder of all Cara had forgotten. As fast as she grasped for the thoughts, so they flew from her. She tried to remember the last conversation she’d had with Ma in the house. It was gone. The scent of earth rose up and enveloped her. She could feel the change. As quickly as the memories left her, the earth encroached. It reached around her neck, noose-like. Her right arm solidified and stiffened by her side.
The earth couldn’t be hidden.
She visited a doctor. The woman didn’t bother to disguise her horror as she stared at the Cara’s earthen neck. She pulled gloves on and dragged a surgical mask over her mouth and nose. Even so, as she scraped at Cara with a sterile metal device, chipping away at the earth and closing it in a plastic pot, she looked afraid. Cara was an infection. A pathogenic patient. To be treated with caution and handled with care.
“I need to consult with someone about this,” the doctor said. “I don’t know why this is happening.”
Cara wondered whether she would consult with a surgeon or a horticulturist.
“I understand,” Cara said. She did understand. She knew the doctor never would. Cara didn’t need to be told why this was happening. She wasn’t looking for an answer. She wasn’t looking for a cure. Memories. She was looking for memories.
“I’ll send the sample for testing,” the doctor said. “They’ll do all they can.”
“Will I get the report?” Cara asked. “The images of what they see?”
“We’ll discuss that later,” the doctor replied. “You should go home. Stay indoors. Keep away from people until we know what this is.”
Cara went home and Cara waited. In the quiet. Cara tried not to think. The less she thought, the less she forgot.
The earth stood still.
Cara hoped.
Then the doctors came. One-by-one at first. Cara asked them what they saw when they examined the samples. A legion of microscopes turned inwards on the grains. She wasn’t sure what she expected them to say. What a memory would look like. The doctors looked uncomfortable, turning their eyes away from her as they spoke.
“Earth,” they said. “It was just earth.”
Soon, the doctors overflowed like waters breaking a levée.
Cara was disappointed. Their questions were all the same yet none of them could give her any more of an answer than ‘earth’.
Gradually, they stopped visiting her.
*
Cara gave up on the outside world. She began to weather into the landscape of her house. The small amount of food she now ate was delivered each week by a different driver, left by the door on her request. She rarely felt hungry. Not long after the doctors dried up, she realised that the earth had turned inwards. She could feel it clogging her veins.
Cara didn’t believe she was lonely. Still, she marked the day that she felt the earth take her heart. That morning, she woke and could no longer hear it beating. She didn’t bother looking for a pulse. She knew that it had become earthen. They said lonely hearts are hollow, but Cara knew better. Her heart was full of memories.
The earth stayed still for a time. There were fewer memories to hold and fewer to lose. Cara spent her days shut away in a box of her own crafting, living alongside her past. For a while, she tried to hold onto it by writing notes to herself, small squares of coloured paper that spread through her house like a rash.
You like honey.
Ma’s name was Anna.
You don’t like coffee.
Ma used to sing Motown songs in the kitchen.
You owned a cat called Maxie.
You were happy.
Maxie’s gone now.
Ma died.
The earth filled her eyes and she could no longer cry. It was then that she realised, it was easier to forget.
Cara was more earth than flesh by then.
*
Spring came. The scent of the outside filtered under the doors and roused Cara from sleep. She had long since stopped dreaming.
She remembered. Something. A girl who once ran free, her hair whipped by a green-scented breeze.
Cara knew it was time.
She left the house by the back door and followed the path to the orchard. Her feet dragged. She could no longer run. The dampness seeped into her between the fine grains of dust, rain dripping from her hair and cascading downwards. She felt her fingers rubbing against them through her clenched fists. Cara was weary. The weight of the memories she no longer held pressed into her. The old apple tree still stood where it always had. A survivor of the storms, gnarled and moss-covered. Cara remembered the tree. She had long since forgotten climbing it as a child. She didn’t know that Maxie lay below it. Ma no longer lived in her head.
Cara was alone.
She remembered the tree, though.
Tired, she sank down at its base, her legs blending in with the earth below it. Cara felt the earth filling her head. She could no longer remember her name. It didn’t hurt. Forgetting never did. She smiled as she lay her head on the ground.
The memories she was formed of crumbled away and all that remained was earth, washed away by the falling rain.
© Claire Kotecki (2019)
First published Popshot Quarterly, Issue 28 The Earth Issue, May 2020