Every day, when her mother picks her up from preschool, Beatrice licks her mother’s cheek because its salty taste reminds her of the sea. Beatrice believes the sea and her mother to be the same thing—a belly into which one perpetually falls. Beatrice knows she will never learn to swim, so she often dreams of running free in the open field without the threat of drowning.
When Beatrice runs, she is a golden mare.
Beatrice’s mother cannot stand the damp feeling on her cheek, so she hurries Beatrice down the road. It is spring, the season Beatrice's mother despises most because Beatrice smells of wildflowers, runs on all fours, raising a cloud of dust that makes the sun look like the moon. And all Beatrice’s mother can hear is the barking of dogs, doors slamming in the wind, and the whispers of other mothers covering their children's eyes to make sure they don’t see the erratic dance that is Beatrice.
So today, Beatrice's mother plays a game to bring Beatrice back to a place where she can say that
Beatrice smells of roses. The game is old, has no name, and asks unbreathable questions. “Why do you obscure the sun?” “Why does your voice resemble the barking of a stray dog?”
The game doesn’t accept answers, only stillness.
When the game ends, what we see is Beatrice’s mother holding the reins of a gray, weathered horse under a cloud-filled sky. What we know is that by the time Beatrice is home, she is a thousand years old, has no teeth, but can bite off the earth’s crust and mould it into a clay body that lies motionless on the hard kitchen floor. The body resembles something that neither Beatrice nor her mother will ever remember.
Gessica Sakamoto Martini’s work has been nominated for Best of the Net and appears in DMQ Review, HAD, South Florida Poetry Journal (SoFloPoJo), HEX, Ballast Journal, Red Ogre Review, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from Durham University (UK) and is a Fiction Editor at Orion’s Belt magazine.
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