Metamorphora
by Viola Wang
Someone keeps replacing my daughter.
At the beginning, I chalk the moodiness and the soft, lusher tint of her skin to That Age. When her laugh grows richer, I think of the ripening of vocal cords. Her jaw, her smirk, the wintry smell of her anger—I think none of it.
The lack of recognition strikes me all at once. She, who is mine, comes thundering down the stairs; my hands have fresh burns from the skillet and she tosses a look at me on her way out the door.
My breath quickens. It is not the child I have birthed and raised. I feel irrationality and blood-deep certainty war for attention.
The plate trembles in my hand. I should put her down with it, and demand she come back. A perfect stranger walks out of my house. She wakes up in my daughter's bed.
~ ~ ~
At work, Joanne brushes me a look. She cannot know that my mind is screaming about the changeling children I do not believe in, and about little wax figures enchanted to replace our loved ones.
Joanne sets the next manuscript on my desk with more reverence than it deserves. I reach for my pen. Begin painting before her hand withdraws.
“You have to read it first,” she blinks at me, grey filth matting her hair. The red smear of her lips is as sharp as ever. My pen bleeds redder.
“It’s not a good story,” I say, three pages in. She stands, waiting the whole time—a thin, old spectre. “When am I meeting her?”
She paused. Wind ran its fingers through her hair, across her temple. Tufts of flesh clung to the shivering blades of grass; a hawk, shaking the life out of another bird that
My voice is curt. Li and Diya, my other coworkers, don’t know that I know that they hate me in secret.
“The fourth. At the café,” she trails off. Her eyes skirt to the edge of the page. “How can you tell?”
There are no names on the manuscripts. As if it isn't obvious from the tone who writes them.
”Women write different stories.” Better, I want to say. She will take it the wrong way.
I’m twelve pages in. The author has potential. They’re all talented, of course. Everyone they bring to my table is talented. Some are too predictable, too purple. Most of them are not enough.
and contemplates the shape of the scars. She touches the tip of her nail to a groove—the faint odor of musk entwines with that of the sap. Cut into the trees, they screamed
“You’re off. You’ve missed an adverb,” she says, and I do not care enough to make out her eyes. “Trouble at home?”
I should hate her for insinuating. I’ve got fairies on my mind.
“She’s at that age,” I say. “My daughter.”
I chuckle to complete the performance, that rite of parental passage. It screams of our collective experience.
There is someone else in her clothes, I want to say. There is something in my house. But they already look at me oddly, for when I set a manuscript on fire and sent it fluttering down the stairwell.
Joanne sees through me in an instant. I do not know what she sees.
”She’s still your daughter,” she says. “Now, she’s just a…girl with a personality, too. Still your girl.”
Joanne has three sons. I had told my husband that I did not want a son. I wanted a child, a daughter. I would have just one. And she would be like me.
He had laughed. Said he would try, but he couldn’t guarantee it; my husband, the court jester and God-King. He did not die, as men like him do. The divorce had been good to him.
“Yes,” I say, my pen skidding on the page, a little red scratch where it's not supposed to go.
speak to the girls at the church. They
~ ~ ~
Tonight, I eat dinner with her. This one could almost pass for my girl. Her mouth opens and she eats. She’s quiet, but then again, so was I. Her shoulders are hunched over and she stares into nothing.
“Everything alright at school?” I ask. She doesn’t look me in the eyes, but she smiles. It's aimed somewhere near the bowl.
“Yes,” she says. “Everything’s fine.”
“I’ve cooked dinner for you,” I say. “And you can’t even look at me? Poor girl.”
Her head shoots up, baby fat clinging to her cheeks. She’s stunned.
“No, I’m—I’m glad to be here. Really!”
I continue. I can’t help it, oh I can’t help the way I press the iron closer before I pull away. “It's my age. One day, you won’t be needing me the same way you do, and that’s alright. You’re growing up.”
dear girl, beware. They come to your door with their lips quivering and voices familiar. Beware.” The old woman’s eyes swallowed her whole. She was forever made young by them and
She goes on babbling, because she loves me, wants to do right by me. She wants to keep me, wants to keep my love. I am not a bad mother, I remind myself. I love her unconditionally, as long as she’s my daughter. She tries to remind me of this through the softening of her voice, the pleading jut of her lip. I remind her to do her homework.
As I wash my face that night, I take a moment to stare. Lines cross the corners of my eyes. My hair is thinning. I know that if I look down, my midsection is loose in a way it wasn’t before her.
I’m going to forgive her, I decide. Maybe, that is my daughter. Because sometimes, I will admit, it's me.
But then I go to say goodnight to her. As she opens the door to her room, she returns my gaze with a pale flash of animal sclera.
beware the creature that does not
~ ~ ~
The dream is one that twists into my mouth and lifts my tongue away.
A golden cocoon, strands of silk floating towards a burning-yellow ceiling. It tangles in my hair, between my fingers, around my throat. A thin, black needle of an insect leg appears in a slit. It peeks out shyly. It clicks. It clicks into the back of my head, fast and soft, over and over.
I raise an arm, silk streaming from my skin. The burn of gold and oil casts a liquid shadow on the matte of the walls. The leg vanishes. The cocoon shudders, little pores appearing in it before vanishing.
I put the tip of my finger on the cocoon. I can feel little wings beating under it. I can feel liquid—primordial ooze—shifting within it. I stroke it, dry and soft under my finger.
Tugging. I try to withdraw my hand. I look up. From that point of contact, the strands wrap around me. The heat becomes the stifling breath of a greenhouse. The silk ties its way up my arm, circles start circling my waist, my ankles, my neck. Millions of little strands, thinner than my hair, shift across my body.
I press down on it with my finger. I press it into the wall.
I wake up to nothing and breathe out into the cold, quiet dark of my room.
~ ~ ~
The author is a thin, Chinese woman who has been picking at the perfect pleat in her skirt since the moment I sat down. We had exchanged pleasantries, I had bought a muffin to pick off the berries, and she had lapsed into silence.
I stare now at her neck. It is the sinewy length of a swimmer's forearm. I can’t quite make out her face.
The author looks into my eyes, flinches a little, and chuckles.
“So, my story?”
“Yes,” I say. “As I mentioned, I am the editor currently assigned to your manuscript. The standards of the publishing industry and the ideals of authors are often…at odds.”
She smiles again, and the nervous air vanishes. Her hands still.
“I just wanted to make sure that whatever changes I make are aligned with your vision for your story. It is my fondest wish that I don’t deviate from the source material.”
I think of the manuscript sitting under the coffee table, dripping in red.
She says, “You’re very professional.”
“Yes.” I want to slap her. “I know it's easier to feel like you have a friend in this whole process, as—” I root around for the words.“—just writing a book is a marvel. But as I remember, you asked for someone with a certain degree of objectivity.”
The author smiles a very different smile.
“Detachment,” she says. “That’s what I wanted.”
That morning, the thing that replaced my daughter came down the stairs. This one is not the one I ate dinner with. This one has a slight raised mottling on her cheekbone, a bow-legged gait. She looks hurt by the cold smile I give.
Still, I cook her breakfast.
“Of course.” I say. “Tell me about your story.”
“It’s about transformation,” she says, eyes glittering behind impenetrable glasses. “A modern twist on an old story. It's about the recognition of horror in the everyday familiar.”
the man putting the lights out in their iron cups. He scowled down at her from the ladder.
“You shouldn’t go looking, little miss. You don’t need to. It will knock on
“We don’t often recognize it,” one of us says, agreeing. “It is the thing that seduces and steals.”
“That’s an interesting perspective.” says the author, or maybe it's me.
We talk more, but it fades into the noise of the cafe. After two hours, we shake hands and I head back to my office.
Before I leave, I make sure that she cannot see that I fling my muffin into oncoming traffic.
~ ~ ~
screamed and screamed and screamed but the forest was large and no one was listening.”
“Are you trying to scare me?” She asked.
“A warning, girl, a warning.”
That morning, she comes down the stairs with paper-thin flowers peeking up from behind her collar and under the hem of her sweater. The petals, thinner than damp paper, rustle as she sits down. They grow pale in shades of violet and rose. As I walk behind her, I glance at the back of her neck. Vines grow out of the column of the knobs of her spine, wrapping around her rib cage.
Another one, then. Each one of her is different, never my girl; I can never get to know any of them, even if I cared to.
Her eyes are the deep wells in the dirt where good things grow. Things that grow and rot and eat all the other good things.
“Good morning,” she says. Her face says, do you like them? do you approve? And my face doesn’t say anything.
“Please,” say the flowers. They quiver and shudder as I look at her. “Please, Mom, please. Please, love me. Love me, Mom, please, I’m begging—”
love me,” the forest echoed. She took a step back. The voice reached her again. “Please, no one can hear me but I don’t care about anyone else if you can. Please, say something back.”
The voice grew closer, smaller. She took a step back. Dug her heel into the dirt. She drew a blade.
“Please.”
She started to run.
I ignore their feeble pleas. After all, flowers are ephemeral.
I smile at her, saying nothing.
She smiles back, green chlorophyll tears running without sound down her downy cheeks, and leaves for school. The flowers have already begun wilting.
I stare at her plate, after she’s gone. I throw it away.
~ ~ ~
The day after that, her skin is as clear as glass—I watch the tea I pour slip through the translucent blue of her throat, dripping rain down a window. I think that I’ve got her when her hand shatters across the back of the chair, but she only gathers herself and rushes out the door.
The cabin burned down. She watched the smoke rise from a distance. Wailing sounded in a wide ring around her.
~ ~ ~
The day after that, her glittering carapace stops her from sitting down. I say nothing, and offer her another chair. She shrinks away, and I close my eyes when she almost shuts the door on a mandible in her hurry to leave.
The village walls had been built higher. She walked through the square, seeing the boarded up windows. The lamps were out.
~ ~ ~
The day after that, she is one shattered mirror in the shape of a girl. For a strange moment, I see my own reflection, cut into a thousand pieces, scattering across her face. Then, my mother. Every time she moves, she cracks smaller and smaller. A wind carries her over the doorway.
The forest is cleaved. Stumps and sky stretch as far as the eye can see.
~ ~ ~
My pen skips across the bone of the paper. A few chapters ago, I had stopped writing. Now, my pen trails across the paper as I cover it in red, wrist sweeping back and forth, back and forth.
Pages, and pages, of red sprawl around me. She is due to return any minute now.
Back and forth does the red trail go.
Back and forth.
Slowly, it stops.
I dream that I am standing on that burning silk ceiling. Light rises from the ground, and my hair tangles with the strands.
I am the only living thing in this room.
She crouches.
The cocoon sits like an object at my feet. Without it, the room is only a room.
There is a groaning, banging on the door of her blackened cabin. Soot rises into the air.
The dust is only dust.
She lifts the knife higher.
The air is only air.
From the other side, there comes a voice.
It is a dead, silent place.
It is screaming.
Yellow light rises from below.
She cannot understand it.
\
It casts thin shadows on the wall.
There is the thrashing of the door, the small bird of her heart, and the voice inside her that cries louder than it all.
Don’t let it in.
Don’t let it in.
Don’t let it in.
I am awoken by the doorbell.
I know she is there. She knows I am here.
The doorbell rings again. Her voice comes muffled behind it.
“Mom? Mom, I’m sorry. Whatever it is I did, I’m sorry. Please, Mom, I'm really, really sorry. Please, Mom, open the door!”
I hear it sob.
“M-mom, please. Open the door.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see the red I’ve scrawled on the walls. I look down at my hands, my arms. Shards of the pen litter the floor.
I look at the door.