Handpicked

This memory I’m sieving through is polluted with hard clumps of soil. I run a knuckle along the strainer of my memory. I’m combing through the inconsistencies, but they’re heavy, tough.

The vegetable patch of my childhood backyard was small, rectangular, and bordered by planks of bleached, bone wood. Splinters bloomed wherever you touched them. This patch boasted an array of herbs and some scarce carrot deliveries that were almost as bony and leggy as my ten-year-old body.

The patch was also home to beetroots. One evening, my mother found a recipe for a beetroot dip in the Better Homes and Gardens to accompany some macadamia-cashew-cheese-butter for the bread with our pumpkin soup. She had amiably tasked me with retrieving the beetroots. She loved setting me little jobs, and I loved meeting her standards.

I suppose this task had an ulterior motive, in that odd way motherhood tends to delicately mould its subjects into something shiny and resilient and presentable. I was horrified by the dark. I couldn’t sleep with my back turned to the window, where the darkness let itself in and overstayed its welcome between those blinds. I couldn’t venture out into the hallway for fear of strange things lurking where I couldn’t locate them in the dim.

It was winter. I remember the frost blanket on the first layer of the earth, chilling as I dug fingertips into the powdery soil. The night was thick with a membrane-like quality that cocooned me inside the bitter Australian cold. A moon hung languid in the trees, inert in the quiet abyss. I stood there, bare toes blanketed by the icy dew, and felt, oddly, separated from the rest of the world. Indeed, I was severed from everything outside myself and the veggie patch.

A kookaburra cackled in the distance. The sound was muffled by the otherworldly tissue that enclosed the night and I. Blinded by the density of the dark, I felt my way into the dirt, fumbling amongst clutches of leafy greens and carrot tops.

Candles wept wax a few more times. I’m older now.

Last night I occupied the bathroom and its blue fluorescence, soaking it up like a greedy phantom. My reflection taunted me in this harsh light. Impurities glistened, eager landmines. My nettling fingernails made quick work of them before I realised the pain: not in my face, but in my back. I stretched as I leant over the sink, transfixed by a constellation of clogged pores. Twin faces pressed close. One satisfied, empty of the clawing dread. One a copy, clawing at herself. The mirror held its membrane taut, keeping the twins from meeting.

I plunged my fingers knuckle-deep into the spongy earth. Beneath the surface, the soil was hot, insulated. One palm gripped the stalk while I unearthed the lumpy sphere. The beetroot sprung free of its moist nest and landed, steaming, in my lap, as I knelt in the wet grass. My spine curled over the vegetable patch as crudely as the arch of my budding cupid’s bow. My flannelette pyjamas were cold and the little pink bunnies that adorned them warped as they clung to my legs.

I saw the cracks begin to splinter, scars peeling like bark from a paperbark. I see it when my makeup starts to pill and melt. Tears leaked from my mascara-rimmed eyes and met the congealed blood that stained my skin, staining my cheeks a sickly rose. Gooseflesh pebbled over my porcelain arms like honeycomb.

I wandered back inside without patching over the hole I’d made in the veggie patch, wondering what I’d done. It felt wrong, popping a bone out of the socket and leaving it unsettled.

This morning I woke to burgeoning scars dotting my nose and cheeks. Memories of childhood scattering themselves indiscriminately across my consciousness, shoes tracking dirt over a carpet. I’d tried to dig up each vegetable cradled in my pores.

From there, my memory wanes, that odd liminal moment giving way to mundane scenes of domesticity. I scrubbed the vegetable and peeled it painstakingly into the sink. I shaved every stray hair and exfoliated it until the pollutants were stripped and fingers dove into the spherical gash encrusted with dried earth and blood flowed. Pure, raw crimson.

I bought a new lip stain yesterday. I exfoliated my lips with a coarse, cruelly pink bubblegum sugar scrub. Then, I peeled off the dead skin that remained with a small cotton cloth. I diced the beetroot roughly into large chunks and fired up the food processor. I seasoned and ladled the dip into a little white bowl, smoothing the surface with the underside of the spoon. I licked my lips clean and dried them roughly with a bath towel. Carefully, I let a few drops of the stain wriggle into the little lines that web across my lips, spreading and clawing its way across my mouth.

I stained my palms.

I smoothed the tint with a cotton bud, attempting to colour inside the lines.

Mouth split wide. Smile missing.

We sat around the dinner table, the shrill laughter of my sisters tinkling like lightly shattering glass. The beetroot dip was delicious. It carried a strong, sweet, earthy bitterness. The slathered bread met my tongue. Bile rose in my throat.

My lips tingled for hours afterwards from the exfoliation. When I stepped back from the close interrogation of the mirror, my cupid’s bow shone a glistening beetroot.