family curses

after clytemnestra’s husband returns from the ten-year war, she hacks him to death with an axe. she says a curse made her do it. her son kills her in revenge. all the while — birdsong. 

 

i. the first year // petrification

 

we were happy until the summer i turned ten. i hadn’t learned to read the birds yet — didn’t know, at ten, that a bird could be more than a bird — so i didn’t realise we were doomed until the unhappiness like a fury was beating its wings in our living room. but by then it was too late for anything but the happening. one day i came home from school and found my mother on the balcony with the door locked, her face a smooth nothingness, like the goose eggs i had for breakfast. then she went into her bedroom and locked that door too.

 

i would’ve prayed if i’d known how, but i was ten, and we didn’t believe in much. i settled for the next best thing, which was to wish very hard on everything i came across: an egg, a moon, the girl with a smile like the persian cat my mother loved, once, but never talked about. i couldn’t pocket the moon or the girl, so i slept with a goose egg for a week. i’d wake up with yolk in my hair but still no mother, so i stopped with the eggs and started locking my doors too.

sequestered away in the house, i thought i’d feel a little closer to her, but all that did was invite the same smooth nothingness that lived inside of her into me. when the summer ended we emerged, eggshell-white, enamelled like the bright axe of a mirror.

 

ii. a chronology of anagnorises

 

at ten, i thought the sickness was the end. at thirteen, i understood that the sickness was the beginning. at fifteen, glutting myself on a copy of the agamemnon that had washed up in some cornershop, i discovered a new word for the thing that raged through my mother and cleaved at my father: a curse. for once the birds, a chorus in my ear, had something positive to say. the thing was not my mother but a daimon. like a malignant tumor, it was safe to grieve and hate and exile.

at sixteen, i found the oedipus, this time not by luck but by choice. likewise, it was all choice and no luck when my mother disappeared for two days. the only notice of her departure was an edict on the table, decreeing my father’s will a curse unto her.

 

i’d read the birds entirely wrong. she liked to tell me i was lucky because i was my father’s daughter; she said it like it was something to be proud of. now it was a reminder that i’d come into the world all wrong, a cuckoo in her womb. the silence was full of teeth. i crept into her crypt and slept in the mouth of the whale. when she returned, i watched as she cried and picked out shards of moon, and wondered when it would be my turn.

 

iii. epiphanies, part one

 

my mother likes to recount the truths of her world like a sibyl: that i took her life, and never to have children because children herald plagues. the dinner table forms a wood of styx between us. the price of prophecy is prayer, so i give her words back to her. she accepts and shuts the door.

 

that is a good day. on bad days i hear her screaming at my father on the balcony. on very bad days she doesn’t come out at all.

 

iv. who’s afraid of clytemnestra?

 

i used to think of my mother as a clytemnestra. the resentment was yet another thing i’d taken from her. but even then i knew that wasn’t true. the hatred was learned, not earned. she was the one who put my uncalloused hands — hands she was always so jealous of, clean hands, unscorched by love or labour — on the axe.

 

i never saw the fatal blow, only felt it later, behind the safety of my own door. unlike clytemnestra, the only person she ever wanted to kill was herself. it wasn’t her fault that i got the ends mixed up, and drew my blood instead of hers.

v. scour(g)ing

 

my father once told me my mother doesn’t know how to love or be loved. he said it the way she imparted prophecies: saffron-robed, like dawn or a lion’s mane. but i didn’t think that was true, either. it took the span of an ocean to relearn her prophecies as acts of kindness. it was her mother who first taught her the best way to scour something was to scourge it. my mother has the scars on her elbows to prove it, from when she was purified in boiling water.

 

she was no clytemnestra, then, but a thetis; they both wanted to purify their children in bright blessings. or maybe she just wanted to do one better than her mother. she set out to find the styx, but the edge of the world was one body of water. when she stooped to dip me into the river, she fell in as well.

 

she has never quite made it back to shore. a sacrifice for a boon: my elbows are perfect, bright as bone or blessings. sometimes i catch her inspecting my hands and wishing they were hers.

 

vi. it’s nice to have a friend, part one // yes, they are alive and can have those colors

 

i carried the curse with me like a snail with a boulder. even an ocean away, in the face of a girl i’d grow to love, i was always watching the dark sweep of her eyelashes for the telltale butterfly storm of my mother’s anger. when the big winged fury alighted on me, she sat next to me as i cried and cried, until all the unhappiness trickled out of me, and there was nothing left on the grass save for her hand on my elbow like a tiny sun.

 

by dusk, the purpling bruises on our elbows had transfigured into the slow croon of her favourite film. later, on the way home, i floated by the moon in a puddle and wished my mother could learn the scouring needn’t hurt. it was a blessing i wanted to give her.

 

vii. picket fences

 

the girl with the persian cat smile liked to pick at her nails until her cuticles bled; my heart was soft as thread and good for unpicking. i learned how to unpick all sorts of things: the birds in the sky, my goose-egged hurt, the imperious marble line of my mother’s mouth before she said something cruel.

 

in my mother’s house, a bird was never just a bird. at times it was an omen. other times it was an avenger. sometimes it was a scavenger, descending on the carnage of riddled bone to unpick the red yarn of her liver, or mine.

 

viii. it’s nice to have a friend, part two // and then i start getting this feeling of exaltation 

 

he likes walks, and i like him, so when it started to get sunny out we tripped to the meadow to see the cows. under the aegis of his sky, i asked him for a prophecy.

 

he squinted at me, warm and bright. that was new: during our readings, my mother never looked at me, only the peeling eggshell wall behind me. she was always searching for her own yolk through the cracks. then he picked my oracle bones up. that too was new. my mother, heavy with plague or yarn, never touched me.

 

in a voice wholly his own he divined my acquittal. the bird that wasn’t a bird thrashed its way out of my liver and fell into his palm.

 

ix. epiphanies, part two

these days my mother’s door is open more often than not. instead of prophecies she says things like when you were small you used to follow me around the house a buoyant lightness your words a brook (here her mouth flattens) when you grew up the words dried up.

 

like every new thing i am learning about her, it comes as a revelation. she, too, has been birdwatching, reading bright terrible portents in my silence. the eggs must’ve worked; i just didn’t realise the price for closeness was oneness.

 

tonight, she is peeling oranges, like she does most evenings now. the split orange — just orange, not saffron-robed or eggyolk-yellow — is bright against her worn knuckles. i watch her from across the table, heavy and light with my marmalade love for her.

 

x.ten years

it’s summer, and we’ve settled on a shady bench. a family of birds land on the branch above us. magpie? i ask, squinting at the cloud. no, hei zoek. she peers at me under the brim of her sun hat, waiting for me to understand. lucky bird. a bird is just a bird, but her pictures turn out blurry, as if she’s worried she’s dreamed them up.

 

she’s trying to hide her smile, but i know that she’s happy. time has softened the austerity of her beautiful carved face. another revelation: she was the first person in the world to want me, before i was ever even me.

 

we cross the river. her hand is warm in mine when i lead her back into the house.