The mud is everywhere. First it is in between our toes. Our bare feet churning packed dirt into an earthen stew. Then it is on our calves, inching up our thighs like ants. Soon it coats our bottoms, our backs, our necks, our arms. We are swimming in mud, snow angel-ing in mud. We scoop globs of it, unexpectedly cool from well water, and smear it into the cracks, onto the ridges of our bodies. We mask our faces in mud, like we are ladies at a spa. But we are just girls. Girls in our underwear, in a backyard, on a summer day.
Iris, my cousin, with her porcelain skin and raven hair, is lost to the mud—light and dark readily camouflaged. My ruddy complexion, my hair like wildfire, my brightness, these are less easily tamed. I burrow like a turtle, estivating myself. I become lips and eyelids and nose holes. I erase myself, like a sloppily drawn sketch. I am a blank page.
We are no longer hot and sticky with the anger of the day. The too-close living room and the kitchen, my aunt’s domain, recede into the mud. We are cleansed of the stigma of cigarette smoke, the morning’s bacon fat growing rank in a pan. We are absolved of the minor irritations of our chorus of need. Juice, please. Or, I’m hungry—we had thrown the words into the whir of the fan and wiggled with the resounding reverberations. But the things we needed—to be fed, to be watered, to be tended—annoyed our mothers.
Take us to the pool, we had bellowed. Beach, beach, beach. We hurled our words like divers muscling their bodies. Lake, lake, laaaake. Our lips flapped in the mechanical gusts of the fan.
Our mother’s brows wrinkled and their painted lips tightened. We watched as the easy laughs reserved for each other caught behind clenched teeth. Seated across the checkered tablecloth from one another, our mothers morphed into sentries, gatekeepers of fun, of adventure, of their own patience and attention. Their orders were gruff and strong and enforceable: Go, they said. Now, they said.
We scrambled like kicked kittens. We raced away from the kitchen, veered from the direction of Iris’s bedroom (a trap, we knew from experience), and pedaled out the backdoor, tearing into the sunshine with the desperation of cave-kept prisoners. Our bare feet sounded our retreat, the metal of the fire escape jingling with our narrowly found freedom. At the bottom, Iris clutched the garden hose, fat and green as a snake, and told me to pull until the end.
We splashed in the mist, pretending to be dolphins, believing we were ducks—no, for once: swans. We adjusted the spray to a shower and then a torrent, which made a puddle, and then a murky pool. We shed our saturated tees and shorts like reptile skin.
Like plants, we root into the soil, ready to unfurl leaf by leaf, to grow.
Iris is the first to notice the bugs. A beetle, she screams. A beetle? I laugh. I ignore her and burrow deeper. I make a nest, a bed, a coffin of mud. The mud seeps into my pores. With it, comes stillness and an unknown quiet. I no longer hear the ghost whispers of the TV or our mothers’ gossip, foreign and fierce, through the screen door.
This is the peace of death, I tell myself.
And then, there is the crawling. A parade of tiny pinpricks across my belly. My cheek. It is as if the fingernails of the living are reaching out to me, clutching me, pulling me back to them.
Beetles! I echo. Flinging my body from the mudpack, I writhe and smack and rip. I am on fire. Iris howls. A low creaturely sound tears out of the depths of her. It is an ancient noise, suited to her mud-encrusted locks. Her dark-streaked face illuminates the moons of her eyes. I half-think she will grow an inky seal’s pelt or sprout feathers, bloom wings. I half-expect our mothers will be called to her siren sound. I smile as I peel the last beetle from the back of my neck, stopping its tracks to my ear.
We are not really afraid. Not of beetles, anyway. We are afraid, of course, of other things: no dinner and no bedtime stories, no goodnight kisses. No breakfast, no packed lunches, no help with our homework. We are afraid our mothers will forget, will be too busy, will choose themselves over us. We are afraid, perhaps most of all, of our own transformation.
We can look up the beetles in our bug book, examine them under the accompanying magnifying glass. We can pin them on construction paper with little more than our will. We can spread a rainbow of colored pencils across the wide floorboards of Iris’s bedroom and discuss which colors will best capture the insects’ iridescent wings and dark exoskeletons. The beetles are hard and round and known. They have edges and patterns.
But then again, don’t our mothers?
We grasp at them, to study, we say, to learn, we say. We are desperate to observe, to make sense of the world. We muster our focus, hold hope like breath, preparing to watch, forever, however long it takes.
Holli Cederholm is a writer, editor, and farmer who lives in Maine. She holds a bachelor’s degree in environmental writing from Unity College.
Header photo by EfteskiStudio, courtesy Shutterstock.
