"Kya laid her hand upon the breathing, wet earth, and the marsh became her mother."
It’d be arrogant to admit it, but this marsh in Nowheresville, North Carolina, was starting to look like my best work: the birds, the grass, the songs, the silence. It was gray, and dark, and wild, and unloveable, and so, it was a marvel. You’d stare like a child at the candy store window if it were yours to see. It’s not -- these grounds are reserved for my daughter.
You’re not supposed to ask a woman how old she is, so I’ll just tell you: very. As old as Time, maybe older, or maybe Time and I have morphed into each other over the millenia. When one is as old as I am, tears become as vital to existence as water. I cried when my sons, the Titans, were born; when the blades and tractors tore away at my body, one limb at a time; each April 22nd. And yet, I have never cried as hard as when Kya Clark, in all her unfettered and unadulterated vivacity, was taken from me.
Two months she sat on death row, the irony apparent to her, I, and evidently nobody else -- there is nothing to execute so long as her soul and mine are split; we are threads of life, vitally bound by twine and secrets. Taken to a courthouse, given stiff fabric and leather shoes, Kya ‘The Marsh Girl’ is hardly Kya, but Miss Clark, a woman of high society and a shell of the girl I raised.
You see, Kya is an inseparable part of me, and I, her. The lucky belong to friends, family, lovers, and even, in a twisted way, enemies. Kya belongs to me, and me alone. That boy with the red cap merely watched her, eyes reflecting the stars I make dance each night, stomach full of creatures I fill the air with each spring. The other boy didn’t even do that much.
In North Carolina, suicide is considered a crime. This has always puzzled me, amused me. How did they expect this to manifest? What’s the punishment? If the attempt is successful, who inherits the criminal charge? Only humans would try to legislate their own freedom and impulsivity -- the only thing they haven’t yet controlled with those robes and gavels is, in fact, my storms, my fires, the whims of my waters and winds.
Well, that, and the darling, daring, elusive girl that existed in my darkest corner.
Kya brought me one of those law books once. I read about res ipsa and res judicata. I learned words I could’ve used in court to defend her better than any lawyer those bigshots would have hired. But I digress; point being, in medical law, there’s this concept of wrongful birth. If a child is born severely disabled, they can file a lawsuit against the medical team who “allowed” their birth, under the presumption that, had the parents known of the defect earlier, they would’ve had an abortion. How absurd it must be, to stand in front of a jury and try to prove you shouldn’t exist. To try and prove your existence is someone’s fault.
Look. Look how little of yourselves you own. Your births are innocent until proven guilty, your deaths opportunities for vulturous money-hungry suits to capitalize on. Do you even own yourselves? Or do you just own books you haven’t read and pianos you can’t play and stores you can’t keep afloat?
Kya and I talked about this once. She had asked me if she owned me, or merely existed alongside me. I told her nobody owned me. She was barely six, but she looked at me and nodded.
“Then nobody owns me either,” she replied. Ten years later, she returned with a sheet of paper, giving some woman named Catherine Danielle Clark rights over a small section of my marsh. I watched her curiously, wondering if she, too, was finally leaving me behind, but after tucking it under the floorboards of her shack, she began laughing maniacally.
“They think he who holds this paper owns you,” she told me. “That’s silly. Nobody owns us.”
I wonder if that’s what she was thinking about when that boy with the red cap asked to marry her. I’m sure he thought that conversation was private, but I was listening. She brushed off the convention, the procedure, the paperwork, and agreed to live with him but nothing more.
Agreed to exist alongside him, but nothing more.
And then, years later, when he found a shell necklace and poem beneath the floorboards before her funeral, he realized that he hardly ever knew her at all, only a projection of her. In fifty years, he must've thought, surely she's told me everything by now. Surely we own each other's secrets.
But no. It is only my waters that she trusted to keep her secrets, to take her back without judgement or complications, to remain a quiet, unassuming constant. When one is as old as I am, one understands that love is an agreement to own the parts of another they’re willing to share. I'll forever find it funny that Kya refused to do that for him, only me.
You see, the boy was good. The best I could’ve hoped for for my girl, but I’ll confess that us mothers are never wholly satisfied. My problem with him was he thought of me as an analogy, an allegory. He thought he could explain adjectives the poets have failed to name by finding them in me. He thought he could understand Kya by comparing her to me.
But once, far before she learned any semblance of civility, Kya stood on the edge of a cliff, staring out at the crashing waves below.
“You know,” I reminded her, “this isn’t a metaphor.” Her pulse quickened, her eyes squinting into the brilliance of my sun.
“This can just be you, watching the water.”
“And not jumping,” she added.
“And not jumping,” I confirmed.
We laughed.
I was surprised we still knew how to do that.
Since it's important to understand context behind any read, I highly recommend you guys check out this article (or this one) explaining some controversy surrounding the author. As if we needed another reason to rant about the book...
Please enjoy this playlist, created over the past three weeks, for our emotions during the novel:
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