Ptolomaea
AnnaSophia Nicely

       For my tenth birthday, Uncle Nathan took me to the orchard to shoot the family dog. A hissing, crackling wind snuck through the orchard like a long blowout of a pipe. Smoke from a distant chimney mingled with the sulfurous smell of the gunpowder, adding an astringency to the bloody salt of the fall air. The heavy cream of winter was near, the rot settling as a distant memory.
Nemo, Nathan claimed, was what his father and his before him would have called ripe. To Uncle Nathan, Nemo was a Granny Smith suspended between branch and ground, tipping from climax to sudden death. Nemo was my first harvest, as it was.
       To Uncle Nathan, Nemo was dead long before she hit the ground. On the walk back to our farmhouse, Nemo already halfway down the river, Uncle Nathan explained our act to me with a solid hand spanned across the small of my back.
       “Cleanup is vital to apple farmers,” he said.
       “Otherwise, you risk the ground becoming drunk off of the rot’s cider.”
       I’d never so much as sipped a lazy drop of wine from Mother’s table at that point, but I knew what he meant. Uncle Nathan had a way of talking that made you want to understand him.
       If Mother noticed the strange silence of my birthday supper and the stark lack of Nemo’s graying tail beating pleas into the planks, she said nothing of it. Such silence was her custom and her birthright.
       Mother was an ex-Catholic. She lived surrounded by relics: rosaries strung and tangled together like butterflied rope, porcelain virgins that watched her sleep from her lonely bedside table. All from her late mother’s hoarded collection.
       ​I knew for a fact that sometimes she relapsed. I’d grown up peeking through her door as she skittishly prayed and then went to bed heavy with shame, the guilt a stone in her stomach, tied-up witch wrestled into a frozen river. To Mother, faith was potent heroin and she needed a good fix. She worshiped like the act itself was a dirty secret, an affair with a man she no longer loved but still desired desperately, still masturbated to the thought of.
       I’d only been caught once, years before. Uncle Nathan was out by the river and I was back early from school, school bus yellow sweater marking my adolescence’s first few winters. A cold wind shoulder its way past me as I entered the house.
       I found her in her room, stark naked on all fours, her skin pulled tight against her frame like a canvas stretched too far. The fat and muscle striation that had come from a lifetime of farmwork seemed to have melted off, leaving her all bone and skin. She grew downwards, her fingers splayed as if shooting roots into the frozen ground under the archaic wood. Where age sags the human casing, death pulls us taught. Mother’s lips peeled against her gums in a corpse’s sneer, her eyelids strained about bulbs popped and watered in crazed fear. She became petrified, brittle bone partialized like a baby’s skull. Liquid pooled in her pores, squeezing out and pilling on paper-mâché skin.
       She looked at me, then. She pleaded, for some sort of mercy. I’d been afraid of my mother before, revered her even, in my own quiet, prayerful way. And then there she was, a monster before my glazed eyes. No, not a monster, but a woman.
       I shut the door in her face.
       I lost sleep that night, but not because I couldn’t get the picture of that calcified form out of my mind. I lay awake in anger that I had come from her, that she was my mother. I will admit, the witching hours of my non-sleep allowed for half-dreams, half-fantasies of Uncle Nathan. I imagined him on the birthing bed, pushing, sweat running from his formidable brow. He needed no midwife. He pushed me clean and dry from his innards without a sound. And the Mother-Father-Uncle looked the child in his eyes with not the faintest smile, and through this stoicism peered a truer love than any known before.
       The next day, Mother made eggs, checked the temperature of the water pipes, cleared the underbrush from the northern orchard (a storm the previous night had knocked branches into the half-thawed muck), and retired to her room in the evening. She was no monster, only a woman. My disappointment was insurmountable.

                                                                                                            ***

       ​We had killed The Dog and we were smug for it. Mother was unchanged, or so it seemed. She looked at her younger brother and her ten-year-old son and life went on. She was a silent woman in the face of men. She still followed her old master’s rules, obedience crackling through her like the sharp thwack of a whip. A part of me wondered gently if the barrier that kept Mother confined to her weeping room was more than just the trinkets she kept ‘round herself like a pentagram of guilty voodoo dolls, pinned and pricked and all pointed back towards her. I wondered what would happen if I turned the knob; if it would budge. I wondered if it would budge for her, if the banging in the night was the Eastern winds on the ancient shutters or my mother’s frail body bashing against her bedroom door. But I stopped wondering about this nonsense long ago. I’ve left the wailing to the wind.

                                                                                                            ​***

       Nathan, the pipes.
       Hushed. Nearly a whisper. That was all she dared when addressing him. They were night-time conversers, speaking only with the least amount of words possible for coherence. The night was either too fragile, too gentle, or too wicked to be disturbed. Night on the farm was not awake in the darkness. It did not find repose during the day. It too slumbered among the stars, in the cradle of the high moon.
       ​They’ll burst by the first frost.
       “Hmm," Uncle Nathan grumbled out. He stewed over a midnight beer. I sat on the floor wrapped in a woolen blanket, pretending to listen to the crackling on the radio. Someone sang gently from some faraway place.
       ​It’s getting colder every year. We need to replace before it’s too late.
       “Shhhhhhhhh," he slumped over the oak, waving her off.
       She shut up. I watched her out of the corner of my eye as the song crooned to an end. She picked at the edges of her fingernails, her little finger quivering ever so slightly. I could smell how bad she wanted it, how close she was to a relapse. The withdrawals were always at their worst this time of year.
       “Do me and the boy a favor, Lil. Go to your room. Leave this mess alone."
       She walked over to her door without hesitation. I settled back into half-sleep, the molasses voice of the radio host melting my bones.
       But then Mother surprised me. She stopped in her tracks, just outside her room. Paused, then spoke.
       ​Winter is coming.
       She shut the door. I heard the click of the lock fitting into place, a sound that had been in my brain before my cranium had finished fusing.
       ​Nathan laughed, and I smiled because it was the right thing to do.
       “Yeah, bitch. Winter is coming real soon. Right son?”
       I responded only because that was the first time he had ever called me that, and it was all I had ever wanted. We looked nothing alike, not really. His eyes were blue and mine were brown. His brow was sunken and mine stood out with youth. But I came from him, in a way.
       “Yeah." It was all I could manage. There were no words for the feelings of a young boy towards the man that made him.
Uncle Nathan laughed again, and, hoisting himself up, stumbled with his warm beer over to his door.
       Winter is coming, bitch.
       That it was.

                                                                                                            ***
 
       ​For my fifteenth birthday, Nathan dragged Mother out of the house and drowned her in the vats. The batch that season was acidic, which most customers hated. A vocal few found it exquisite. I can only imagine she packed some sort of punch; she hadn’t gone easily into the good night. Nathan had the mark to show it: A raw, red bitemark stained the juncture between his left thumb and pointer.
       “The land was her whole life," Nathan would tell me later, washing the wound under a steady stream of vinegar. He didn’t wince, and he didn’t wrap it afterward. It was a branding he’d earned and wore with pride, like the seared hind flesh of a prized stallion.
       “She should have been glad to return to it."
       I listened because he had the sort of way of speaking that one listens to.    
       Nathan had me clean up the mess.
       Her room was destroyed, relics and dollar-store kittens with bright teary ears and languid smiles obliterated. An act of terrorism had been committed in the country that was my Mother. A little porcelain Mother Mary lay on her side on the bedside table, her life’s requiem the soft hum of Nathan from the kitchen. Above the door frame, the little porcelain Jesus turned his cheek and grinned. I knocked Mary off the desk and into the dustpan, her shards mingling with the rest, the mass grave of my Mother’s life.
       The lock no longer clicked. The door never sat right on its hinges again.
       Nathan had been quick to convince me of the necessity of the work we committed. We had cleansed the land of something dangerous, something wrong. There was something inside her that was different from us, in opposition to us. Her nose wasn’t hard enough, her hair not course. Her body was round where ours were flat. It was for the ways she contrasted us that we knew she did not belong in our house, on our orchard. The one that had belonged to her father, and his father before that. That had never belonged to her. Apples for ladies to bake pies with, cider to consecrate her sins. We baptized her. We cleansed ourselves.

                                                                                                            ***

       Her batch rotted six weeks into its shelf life. The markets were shocked: they’d never known alcohol to go sour so quickly. But that was Mother, sour, bitter, astringent Mother. Winter had come early that year, heavy-cream air filled our lungs as we put the trees to rest for the season.

                                                                                                            ***

       ​Wake up.
       The dream: Nathan is My Mother and I am his. We take turns swallowing each other and pushing. We push and we laugh together and we share a beer. We’re covered in something that smells like cider gone bad, it leaves a sticky sheen on our skin. It’s our wedding day. We drink the warm beer. It’s a perfect Summer evening.
       “Wake up!”
       Nathan’s screaming, cold, fat drops of sweat pool on his chin and drop onto my brow. The wind wails, and for the first time all winter its icy knife saws through to my bones.
       “Wha-what’s going on?”
       He’s pulling me up off my bed and throwing me a woolen sweater without a moment’s thought. It’s one I used to wear as a child, school bus yellow and stained with years of cold sweats. There’s no way it will fit me now. I hold in it my outstretched palms like an offering, a question. Nathan doesn’t even take a moment to look back at me before he’s ushering me through the room, his frenzy reaching a hysteria. Suddenly all I can see when I look at him as we hurry through the front door is the clawing urgency of my Mother the day we put her to rest. For a moment, the serrated scar that was my Mother’s last mark seems to glow under the midnight moon.
       We’re making good time over the northern orchard, running from something. But what?
       And so I ask, my vocal cords finally thawing out enough to rush out a syllable, a question mark verbalized and hanging in the air behind us as we move.
       Two words, he gets out.
       ​“The Pipes."
       Suddenly, Nathan drops like a clay pigeon, emitting a scream so loud it must wake the night itself. I watch, wide-eyed, as he writhes on the grass, as he births his pain into the living sky. He grips the hand with the scar, his cries breaking against his throat.
       ​Nathan? A meek whisper, solving nothing. I sound like my Mother.
       ​What about the pipes?
       He’s scrambling on all fours before he can even register that I’ve spoken. I’m not even sure if he knows I’m still there; if he knows who I am at all, who he is. Bile dribbles down his chin. I chase him back down the hill, towards the half-frozen river. He bounds and jerks like a wounded deer across a freeway.
       He’s running towards the river. I try to shout before he leaps, but nothing comes out, the words turning to smoke as they leave my lips. For a second, he soars, then falls. The ice cracks under him instantly.
       Peace reenters the orchard momentarily. The night goes back to sleep. I take a breath, and it’s the easiest breathing has come to me my whole life. I let the winter penetrate me. I feel whole.
       Tears come next, and with them the pain. Drops freeze instantly in my sockets, blinding me. I open my maw and hear a scream call into the wind. It’s Nathan’s scream, birthed from my lips. The euphoria of this consummation lasts for all of a moment, and then it’s gone forever.
Something sharp digs its way into my thigh. Sightless and screaming, I claw for it, this pain so comforting in the face of the horror. It’s porcelain, and I realize it’s a piece of Mary I tucked away in a moment of weakness. I bring it to my face and excise. The blood freezes before I can wipe it off my hands. My body is a frozen inferno, a cold, cold hell.
       Just then, the pipes burst, and everything is ice. I feel myself shatter.

                                                                                                            ***

       ​Uneasiness dawns with the horror of daybreak. Larks screaming as their flesh melts from hollow bones, arthritic trees convulsing and snapping under the pressure of rolling seasons. Earthworms pried from soft ground and fed to bloody maws, men awakening as monsters, teenage boys opening doors that should remain locked.
       And all of it gone. Coated in icy ash, petrified in Pompeian terror.
       The orchard is frozen solid. The sun has begun to rise, a bloody red yolk in the distance. Spring has won her battle, but it has not been a cold war. Winter has died for her sins.
       On the horizon, A Dog sits, awaiting the thaw. Her tail thumps a steady heartbeat into the frozen Earth.
       ​Bones chilled to ash and atoms scattered to be sown into stars. March seems to dawn, and it pushes snow back into the earth.
       The ice breaks.
​

AnnaSophia Nicely