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  • The Only Daughter on the Coast of Mothers
  • Gail Aronson (bio)

On the coast of a sea, rusted red with waste from a human world gone missing, live many mothers. I am not a mother but a young woman, not quite a girl anymore. How I arrived on the coast of mothers I will never know. I woke up on the beach shores. Not much else appears to live here; the salt flats reach far and the salt and the dead matter itself washes up on the sand each night. I never see a fin on the beach. Just mothers, living plants on dry land, and more mothers.

The mothers attend town hall meetings to address the issue of garbage washing up on the beach and how it turns the sand the color that blood turns when it hits air. They remark on their findings:

Feathers. Bones. Plastic bottles. Spatulas. The wooden legs of once-tables. Tombstones. Mugs un-chipped and spattered with fake hearts. Pictures, plastics, glass, wood, and stone. The lists never end.

The mothers burn what they can, and use what they can't burn, and bury what they can't burn or use. I woke up dripping in algae, my arms slimed with watered-down waste. The mothers decided that I wasn't waste, or of any use, either. So they did what mothers do. They mothered me.

One mother walked from sand to bring me home, a different mother fed and bathed me, a different one still, taught me to count up to one hundred. The boardwalk carnival games sit empty. The motel signs don't light up anymore. Mothers live in every room.

________

A coastal highway holds the boardwalk town on one edge; the ocean holds the other. The kind of highway without guardrails, that you can drive right off and over the grayed flesh-toned rocks—their violets and browns and salmons fuzzed and shimmering algae-slicked, their rock furls pursed lips and aged necks jutting out to the black throat of oceanic depths below; a long way down. Mothers are said to have come up from the darkness. With no children to care for, they populate the island with knitting circles and bakeries, antique shops with the most prized washed-up possessions: crystal candlestick holders and full volumes of encyclopedias pieced together. The mothers reproduce by mothering. Each mother is said to produce a few identical mothers in her lifetime. When mothers decide to [End Page 92] cohabitate, the additional mothers each mother produces can up to triple. Since I am not a mother, nobody is quite sure how I am and why I am to live in this world, except to daughter and daughter.

When not collecting tarot cards and broken teacups from the shore, I try my best to grow things. I sleep in a hammock in the old aquarium, walls which crumble to the touch. Inside, an escalator still stands. Tanks of water sit empty and grasses that look like scales glow when the sun enters the wall cracks. Sometimes I swim naked in the enormous tanks pretending to be a whale-thing, any creature who wouldn't eventually sink.

When I close my eyes and float on my back, sometimes I have terrible flashes of memory, where I find myself in a distant city, and a man spits inside of me.

In the city. The city without water and coast feels borderless. A man in me in the city. My body, something to be made. Borderless. I've always known there was more in me that could not yet be found, that he would not find.

What he spits isn't ink or semen. He spits saliva between my legs as if we were in a porno. I'm just trying to get you wet. His saliva, cold. His saliva in my mouth, too, foamed like a dead thing on the surface of a lake—a buildup of plant matter and waste.

If this feeling is making love, then I must have ignored the feeling of water all around me. Like I'd just swallowed a sleeping pill.

When I lay and dream of borders and slimes...

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