Gillian Perry
SOMATICS

It had been a month since my miscarriage, two weeks since I decided to take my maternity leave anyway. I justify it like this—I’m not leaving the office for maternity, maternity had left me instead.

Davis leaves for work in the morning, tie tied, hair slicked back, a pitiful look at me as I lay in bed with my eyes open.

“Feel better, hon.”

Davis does yoga and reads books about “Somatics”—a mind-body connective healing theory or practice. His books are full of primary colors and energy, loopy illustrations and listening. They make me want to judge him. At night he does yoga and practices meditation, which I used to think was good for him and good for us. One of us should be balanced. But now it feels aggressive and in my face. Davis is centered, I’m not. Davis is healthy, I’m not. Davis can be happy without our daughter. I can’t.

I listen to his footsteps travel from room to room, the click-clack of his shoelaces hitting the wood floors. He is opening the doors to all the rooms in our home as he does every morning, for feng shui, for airiness, for the idea that my surroundings and I are in harmony. Slamming them closed after I hear his car peel out of our driveway is a nice little release—maybe he intends it that way.

Today, his tires spit gravel. Sweat drips in a single bead into the small of my back, and I try to go back to comfortable darkness.

Feet in socks, I take silent steps to every door. Slam to the shower curtain and the toilet and my bottles of creams and toners that lined the counter like potions. Slam to the empty mason jars on the kitchen table, catching moonbeams for Davis. Slam to the rows of twisted faces and inhuman coloring of the little Sunbonnet Sue figurines Mom had given us, to start a cabinet, a collection. I put my hand on the doorknob to the nursery, cold with her absence, and try to close this door too. But today, clouds and gray sky from the window draw me into the belly of this lost room, a swirl of color like a threat.

The view from the window is nice. It frames a park we had hoped she could play in. I saw her in the swings with Davis and I, in the fields and hills, exploring. Davis and I had bought her a little denim bucket hat that tied on the bottom, the strings new and uncreased. It is tossed on the crib, hanging on a bed knob.

The denim feels soft in my fingers; it still has the new smell of plastic and chain stores. I hold it to my cheek and look out, feeling the stillness of a morning turning afternoon. The world is growing into something I can recognize. I spin the little hat on one finger.

As the hat loops, orbiting my unclean aura (Davis would say my gravitational pull was affecting it or something), I hear her. It must be her. I spin the hat faster and close my eyes, thinking I am somehow summoning the spirit of my lost daughter. Irrational thoughts haven’t been scaring me, lately. When I open them, crust dotting the corners of my eyes, I see I have not summoned her. I have summoned them instead.

They are a little troupe of girls who look to be on the edge of preteen gawkiness. They burst like light—darting from one parking space to the other like electrons outside a nucleus. Their messes of hair propel them forward and around, over and under, living, breathing, alive.

I ball up the hat in a fist and feel pressed out to observe. Fresh air could blot clear what I am seeing. As I step out onto the porch, the sun streaks through the threatening sky, dappling the parking lot in spots of sun and heat. I settle into the plastic Adirondack chair, zoom in on these creatures the nursery window had brought me. They seem unbothered that my porch is close enough for me to hear their conversations. The group is also uninterested in what I am interested in, which is one of them, flat on her stomach, in a parking space.

As the girls chase each other and pay the facedown one no mind, the sun reveals itself in little patches of light. Soon, the empty parking spaces radiate heat in little waves, like music. I understand the one that was already there, in a space. She has to listen. She felt the heat through her sneakers, pulling her down, to a sun bed, a sun blanket, a sun pillow.

“What are you doing?” This speaker has a frizzy halo of red curls and stands tall above the rest, which made her Best, to me. She draws the attention of the others.

The parking space sun-soaker looks up, her lips dotted with gravel bits. She grins, then returns to the asphalt. Sun seeps into her forehead. She turns her arms so her elbows face up, so her palms can fill up with heat like sponges. Heat washes her clean.

One says something like, “Is she ok?” and is quick to the parking space’s side. Fast.

Fast lays in the adjoining parking space, and the sun-drenched one turns her cheek to face her. She smiles. Because she has a secret, I think.

“Ohhh, it’s warm,” Fast purrs.

“It’s more than that.” She answers like it is gospel, like they are in the hush-hush of church where people are talking to higher powers in their head.

“It’s sun power!” She lifts her face to the sky, a girl seal in a parking spot ocean rock.

The heat and light ignite her skin, and I know she will burn anyone she touches. Suddenly, she is fire and she has no choice but to run the flames off of her back. She springs up, a phoenix, a dragon, and runs. I catch her flaming eyes. She is Wild.

They deserve the sun, these girls. The porch is shaded, and I have no shoes on. Chill creeps into my skin and nudges me. If I lean over the porch rail, the sun could kiss me too. But I don’t want them to notice me, to take away any of the sun power.

That evening they leave with arms slung around each other, faces flecked with dirt and blooming red with sunburn. I watch them speed away on their bikes, chasing the sun, chasing each other. My heart breaks a little, and I chide myself for my fresh attachment to them. I stand and stretch and feel the hat drop off of my lap. It lays flat on the porch planks. A day in my hands has weathered it. It looks rougher than before, worn. I shake it out, the crinkles and creases in the strings making my heart seize.

By these crinkled strings, I carry it to Wild’s parking space. My legs pump, arms swing, stomach aches—I am being moved to deposit this for them. It feels like I don’t really have a say. I understand that they should have this piece of me. Of her.

◊

On the third day my daughter’s hat is ignored, I decide to start evening meditation, to think of nothing. For me, it is straight to the nursery to sit and hum and become blank—Davis says that’s a “site of trauma,” the nursery. When I am nothing I think of the Parking Lot girls. I feel a pulse in my fingertips. When I think of them, I can think of her. I think of what they will do with my baby’s little hat. I think whatever they do will teach me about her.

Davis calls the meditation practice “sequencing.” We are supposed to notice the order in which tension leaves our bodies. I notice pain in my squint because I can’t quite close my eyes. The park is best when the darkness creeps into the edges of the sky, when the clouds show the last of their color. Orange. Pink. Purple. I notice my ears ringing as the bugs drone, and the girls grow louder, more boisterous. Bubbles on a roiling boil.

They have been visiting me every evening–wild girls with wild eyes and wild hair and wild hearts. ​​They run until their legs run out of blood to pump them. They slam their sneakers into the pavement, atom zips. Their knees are skinned. Their lips are blue. Their ears are tinted with sunburn or goosebumps. Knees, lips, ears.

I unwind my legs and leave the meditation me—my pouty lips and furrowed brow and empty, empty silence. I hear their laughter.

Tonight, a New little creature with braids and red cheeks is their shadow. I watch her—she holds herself a little too straight. She purses her lips. She blinks back watery eyes or tears.

The meditation pulse is back in my fingertips, and I wonder if they feel it too. The connection, our connection, a bumblebee buzz on the surface of our skin. They are chasing Fast, and it seems like nothing will pull them away from the game. I walk my fingers over my bare arm, trying to mirror their steps.

The hat sits in the parking space that held so much power just a mere week ago, blackened with tire tracks. They have no use for it.

I watch the New one, different from the others, more polished. She trails Best, arms crossed to keep herself warm. It is getting chilly, but they never wear jackets. Best seems oblivious to New, as she hollers at the others to give Fast no way out of their game. New is moving her lips, but no sound seems to emanate from them. Fast laughs with her head tilted back, her mouth open wide as if she is collecting raindrops. Suddenly, Best corners Fast and she takes off into the parking lot, leading the girls in a squealing frenzy. New trails them, trying her best to giggle along with them.

I consider going inside.

I tell myself they are annoying and too loud and I have better things to do. The truth is that I can’t bear another night of them ignoring the hat, the piece of her I had offered. I try to listen to my goose-pimpled legs humming with pins and needles, telling me that I really don’t feel like standing up. That is a part of meditation and body awareness—noticing what your body was trying to tell you.

The chase continues. Through the bike rack. Through the parking lot. Onto each dusted, fading paint line that bordered each space. I sit forward and push my palms together, thinking that Davis would find me insane. A reason he had married me, he said one night over frozen pizza. With a tap on my nose, “You’re just a little insane, you.”

Best leads them into a cluster around the parking space, Wild’s parking space, to make a plan of attack. They don’t treat it differently from any other space in the lot. It is as if they forgot the power of the sun, the thing that had brought Wild into their sisterhood. I am not hurt, no I’m not. That would be insane.

They huddle, hands on shoulders and loud whispers. The hat is just a piece of scenery, absolutely nothing special. My eyes are wet. My chest deflates. Until, until, the New one. Special. Perfect. She leaves the huddle and reaches down to it, squatting to investigate, letting the chase continue and leave her behind.

Her braids fall forward like two arrows to my hat. The hat is upside down, waiting for her head to snuggle into it. She squats as if she were looking at her reflection in a puddle, as if my hat could show her who she could be. She isn’t Wild or Best, but she is there, looking at what I left.

Instead of placing it on her head, she picks it up by the rim. I don’t know what made me think she would put it on. The hat would fit a cat or a teddy bear. The hat, my daughter’s hat, is being walked to them like a birthday present, like an open treasure chest. She is a little beggar girl asking for crumbs, from those she wanted to be sister to. My baby’s hat, her prize.

Best sees that she has something and stops her. I sit on the edge of my plastic chair, chill dotting my arms. The girls grow quiet, the game forgotten. They say something to one another that I can’t hear. Heads bowed and hands clasped and one clump of sisters talking about me. Or my daughter. Dusk softens the sky to a dark denim blue. On soft feet, I patter to the screen door, reach an arm inside to turn on my porch light.

I blink hard, seeing shadow spots from my new light. Blink. They’re giggling and chattering. Blink. The hat is gone, at the core of their huddle, I hope. Blink. The girls scatter, digging in the grass like dogs.

They claw at the dirt with stubby nails, pulling up clumps of grass and soil. The sky is growing darker. Their arms and hands and nails are full of earth. The hat sits upside down under a streetlight. They are filling it with their dirt. My body hums with a warning buzz, like a wrong note. Like a crescendo.

New beams, the guardian of the dirt hat. She stands over it and directs the girls to different corners of the park. Under the streetlamp, the shadows give her length and stretch, as if she is suddenly all of them.

I listen to this ringing in my ears, thinking they are trying to tell me something about my baby. To teach me, like I wanted.  It is like they had some secret knowledge of where she really is, buried somewhere. They are reuniting her with her things. I didn’t need them to remind me of that, I needed them. To be with me. To let me in. I sigh, loudly, pitifully. Not one ponytail or pigtail flips in my direction.

Then, again they are gone—through the bushes and up the hill, never even a look in my direction. What is it about me? What kept the distance between us, really?

I lean against the porch rail, pressure on my abdomen, wetness on my abdomen. Dew and heft pushing me to do something. Maybe her hat isn’t really enough for them, for me. Maybe the hat isn’t special.

I see two headlights reaching for me from the driveway. When they light my face, Davis honks as if he’s home from war and not his office job. He hops out of the driver’s seat, checks the edges of his reflection in the side mirrors, and jogs to me with open arms. He slows his happy steps and puts two flat hands out toward me.

“Oh, are you grounding right now, babe?”

Grounding is the somatic way to stand still. I think how I must look, empty glazed eyes rooted on this porch, astounded by the Parking Lot Girls and their digging.

“I…” I’m not sure how to answer him, my mind is playing me scenes of the Parking Lot girls piling dirt and rocks and maybe wriggling worms into what was supposed to cradle my daughter’s skull.

“Oh I’m so sorry, you’re still in it.” He puts his hands on my shoulders gingerly as if his touch could bring me to my knees. He kisses my cheek and I notice his lips are chapped. For someone so conscious of his body’s needs, I’m surprised he isn’t drinking enough water.

He turns on the light in her nursery and my eyes follow his shape as he pulls boxes off of the shelves in her closet. He’s humming. My head is throbbing.

◊

That night, sleepless and furious that Davis lay still and quiet like a corpse, I go to the park. I sit on my knees, face the memorial we had made for my daughter—me and them. Looking at my half-baked girl in a mound of soil, I am glad she wasn’t born. I don’t understand girls like I thought I did. I don’t understand myself like I thought I did either. My head pounds, and I think that maybe this is a good revelation.

I lay back in the grass, like I had seen them do when they ran out of things to talk about. Tracing my finger in the dirt, dew seeping into the curves of my shoulders, I feel a heat, like anger. I imagine them around me, digging into me like they had this grass.

Watching New cradle my daughter’s hat felt like releasing tension from my jaw. Maybe it should. A somatic sensation—my mind instructing my body to feel better. Yes, each piece of her was a piece of me that could be given to them. Maybe I should be Teacher. I could show them how it hurts.

Davis doesn’t know I did this: offered a token of our baby to this little pack of creatures, thinking of it like therapy. He would tell me that children, not young women just children, behaved irrationally all the time. They didn’t mean to hurt me. They were just playing. They were being them.

I sit up, dust grass and wet dirt off my shoulders. My fingers dark with soil, I put them to my nose, trying to understand.

New still dressed cleanly. I close my eyes, seeing her rosy cheeks and braids. She doesn’t seem to be like them, not really. She is more of the mermaid princess fairy sprite that I expect from little girls.

I pull my father’s Swiss army knife from my pocket. I remember thinking it was an odd gift, especially for my sixteenth birthday. He hadn’t even bothered to wrap it, just yanked it from his back pocket, pressed it into my palm.

“It’s tradition,” he had said, like it was an embarrassing thing to say. “You’re the firstborn, you get the knife.” Like most tradition, I got to accept it without question.

My firstborn was never going to take a breath. The obligation of it had been released from me now. The knife is red and reflecting my thumbprints and screaming at me that now I am being irrational.

I want to understand them, to be right about this. I want New to see who they really are, turn her cheek to my porch and run into my arms. My mind, her body—connection.

◊

Davis leaves for work this morning and says, “You’re looking better these days.” I smile and have a cup of coffee and think all day about what they will do.

They come later than usual, the new one radiating joy. A decision has been made, something has been said. They are an ink blot spreading, opening, widening to let her in. Thank God, I think. Thank God she’ll be able to see them truly, tonight. Thank God I will too.

They sit in a circle on the grass, their hearts beating the same beat. I feel it too, a thumping in my neck. Darkness settles over them in a purple-blue haze, and the first stars pierce the air with chill. They fall into a hush.

Best walks over to the hat, still full of dirt. She sees my knife, like a little red tombstone, and gingerly picks it up, turning it around in her fingers. I wonder if she knows what she is holding, if she is mapping together this knife and the bucket hat, conjuring my daughter.

My heart beats. I listen to it and think of Davis. He’d say, “Isn’t it exhilarating that your heart can beat like that? What is your body trying to tell you?”

She brings the knife back to the circle and talk swells. They open all the little compartments, trying the corkscrew in the dirt, the nail file pressed on Wild’s tongue. The moon lights them up as if they are sacrificing someone, something. Best had brought each of them a flashlight. They click the lights on and hold them under their chins, their faces contorting in shadow.

Best opens the compartment with the longest, thickest, most intimidating knife. The girls whisper and giggle.

Best sticks out her fat thumb and stares at them through the veil of dark. They see the flash of metal, but Best makes no sound as it cuts her skin. I inhale, night air filling me, gleeful to have anticipated something. I hope she doesn’t cut too deep.

But then, she touches her thumb to her forehead. Then, to each of the girls’. I thought they would hurt each other. I thought they would hurt themselves. When Best touches her sticky thumb to New’s forehead, I see her cheeks lift.

“Me next! Me next!” Fast kneels next to Best and eagerly offers her thumb. The blood thumb ritual repeats and for once, the girls seem to have nothing to say. Nothing at all. This is New’s chance to run. But she is cross-legged and wide-eyed. Anchored.

Wild, with her loud cry, makes a racket at her turn. Breaking the silence. While she is hooting and using the one curse word they know, New’s smile grows and grows. She must love to be a part of something, even if this something is chaos and wildness. Would my daughter have been a part of something? Was she a part of this? Was I? It was my knife. It was her knife.

Wild touches her thumb to each sister with such clarity and such force that I feel she must have done it before. I wonder what it feels like to have a sister’s heartbeat sink into your temples.

Wild takes the little knife from Best and approaches the new one, breaking their circle to kneel in front of her. I close my eyes, darkness and nothingness giving me the clarity to hear their small voices.

“Ready?” she asks her as if New would ever dare to say no.

Her little face must have ogled Wild’s blood-smeared forehead. She takes quick, loud breaths.

“Does it hurt?” she asks.

Wild’s cackle makes me open my eyes.

New sticks her thumb out to Wild, her soft, lily-white thumb like a tiny moon in the dark. Wild tips the blade into her skin and it splits open in a thin curtain. As the blood forms little droplets, she smiles and touches the line to Wild’s brow. Her touch is delicate.

I watch as she presses the skin of her thumb to each of her sisters with a tenderness they can’t replicate. It quiets their pulses. It makes them giggle, like they are much younger than they look. Best rocks in place, in a knowing way. Their ritual doesn’t have to be so carnal, so serious. This new one has become Mother, the last to share her blood, the last step to connect all their dots. My stomach aches. She has made them beautiful.

When New finishes pressing her skin to each of them, she looks across their circle. She looks at me.

“Now what?”

“We howl!” Best instructs.

And each of them howls to the empty darkness, their voices a blend of all that they are. New, now Tender, her voice sweet. She needs them and they need her, but God, I need Tender too. I tip my head back, my neck creaking and craning.

I howl for my Olivia. I howl for who I am without her.

Gillian Perry is a writer originally from California, currently in Greensboro, North Carolina. She is a fiction MFA graduate of UNC Greensboro. You can find other work of hers in the Carolina Quarterly and Heavy Feather Review.

Cover Design by Karen Rile