Tuesday is the new Thursday is the new Friday, so were starting a new Write Big Tuesday series of writing that has been rejected, declined, or ghosted by established mainstream magazines. Cuz, what the hell.
Do YOU have any rejected works you would like to share? Let me know!
Write Big is where bad stuff can be good and good stuff can be bad. Cuz, that’s the way life actually goes. Here’s the first in the series; written by moi and proudly rejected by Cream City Review.
head egg
I hit the corner of my eye with a loud thwack on the bright brass window knob. I oommphed gutturally and collapsed face down on my daughter’s pink nubby bedspread, my brown and white-spotted sun-damaged hand cupped my pulsing eye. I could smell my daughter’s yeast and Fruit Loops scent with no consolation while I inhaled her bed’s layers of adolescence .
I had been making my daughter’s bed because she had texted me from school asking me to. This was a first. My daughter never made her bed. But on this Thursday, she was having a “very smart girl” come over after school to work on their goldfish bowl ecosystem science project which was due on Friday. It was a rush, and a “big deal.” I was skeptical of their fishbowl ecosystem hypotheses but still wanted them to succeed. And so, I had tried to make the bed. But now, I just lay there, face in the covers, for a long time. I couldn’t move, allowing the corner of my eye to swell, pulse, heat. I could feel the egg grow out of the side of my head.
Lying there face down, I remembered my mother’s egg from a few years ago. She had fallen out of bed, hit her forehead on the side table, and broken her arm, keeping her from visiting at Christmas. After Christmas, I had visited and seen her egg. It was still huge, like a golf ball under her skin, protruding into space, where nothing was supposed to be protruding. Deeply alarmed, I had made my mother buy one of those fall-down-alert necklaces and wear it at all times. Even to the doctor’s office. In the cold sterile hospital room, while waiting for the doctor to arrive, I looked at my mother sitting across from me on the patient bed with its scrunched-up paper cover and her long skinny legs dangling. Her egg jutted out into the stratosphere and the alert necklace, with its big red SOS button like a tacky statement necklace, hung petulantly around her neck. I started to laugh so hard I peed my pants. My mother, so sweet and doe eyed, got the sad joke and we both started laughing uncontrollably, tears rolling, until the doctor came in. Now, I had my own egg on my own head. I somehow managed to stumble into the kitchen and put ice on it. It stung.
There is this thing that happens to me when I hurt. It’s like I cannot get enough. I cannot get enough sympathy, empathy, or whatever the word is. I just cannot get any kind of enough. And so, when I told my husband about the brass window knob, and showed him my egg, his reply was nowhere near enough.
Later that Thursday, I pointed the egg out to my daughter when she came home from school and told her what happened. She looked at me with wide eyes, touching her fingertips to the side of her own face ooooohhhing, Oh my god! Are you OK? And, for this split second, my daughter was my mother saying those words – my dead mother. And in that instant, I got a quick marvelous hit of enough. But then, just as quickly, I shook myself out of it and thought, Your daughter is not your mother. Your daughter should not have to take care of you. So, I said blithely, Yeah, but I’m fine, it looks worse that it feels. The science project date continued as planned, bed made. The smart girl did not notice the impression of my body’s form on my daughter’s bedspread.
This was not the first time my daughter was my mother, or was like my mother, I should say. They were, after all, the same astrological sign – Cancer. (I don’t know what that actually means, although I know it must mean something.) My daughter had recently started to say certain things, certain phrases, or speak in a certain cadence, and it was as if my mother was coming out of her mouth. And how enchanting it was! I laughed so hard, guffawed, peed my pants, and I thought to myself, Oh hello enough! Hellooo! But then. The pure delight also terrified me. I chastised myself. It’s wrong, I thought. Let her be herself! She is not your mother. Don’t use her this way! She’s just a girl, saying something that reminds you of your dead mother.
When she was little and her head hurt, my daughter said she had a head egg. She meant headache, but we let her say head egg because it was so cute. Still, sometimes, she says it just to be funny. Sometimes, I say it to be funny. Is this what mothers and daughters do? Copy and become each other? Then, I chastise myself again. No! Be you! Not her. This endless cycle mother becoming daughter, daughter becoming mother. A torment. A divine dance.
The day after my violent encounter with the window knob, I swabbed layers of creamy make up over my bruised head egg so that my clients would not think I was a victim of domestic violence. But the truth is that some kind of domestic violence had occurred. I had backed my eye into the brassy window knob, and it had taken my breath away, and I had laid face down on my daughter’s bed for hours. I had not gotten enough, and then I had gotten enough for a brief moment but had become desperate about it. So, there I was in session with my clients, listening to their versions of domestic violence. I noticed that sitting with them, listening, and oohhhing at their head eggs, there was a kind of enough in the room. But it was enough for them, not for me. I would never have my mothers enough. That was over. I had to be my own enough, and it hurt like hell.
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