Watership Up

by Anthony Kestner

Content Warning: Descriptions of abuse

I stopped asking about Grandmother after Mother threatened to wire my mouth shut.

I’d have to pour your food in your nose, she said. Think about the pain that would cause me. You don’t want to see Mother in pain, do you?

I shook my head because it seemed appropriate, though I thought it would cause me more pain than her.

Grandmother existed in a bundle of sepia photographs that Mother hid under a collection of Bibles and crosses with rhinestones; a fake gold halo I’d seen Mother wearing on Sundays, when she’d haunt the house in a white nightgown; and cutouts from magazines featuring women in two-piece bathing suits, posing seductively for the camera. In these photos, Mother cradled my aunts and uncles, little kittens swaddled in knit sweaters and pink beanies. Each photo is more faded than the last. I could imagine Mother taking her thumb to Grandmother’s face and rubbing off the colors, until her skin turned raw and started flaking like pastry. Still, there was the curve of Grandmother’s breasts, the polka dot housedress she wore, the tattered apron likely caked in flour. I took the photos, and I looked at them on the nights Mother wailed in her bedroom, pleading for mercy to the god she worshipped only on Sundays. My siblings cowered next to me, their beady eyes skittish and frantic.

Look, I’d say, pointing to Grandmother, pointing to the faces of my aunts and uncles. They’re family.

My siblings thought I was Mother. I fed them the vegetables I refused to eat—exploded peas and mushy carrots, broccoli that smelled and tasted like foot fungus, cauliflower that rolled around in my mouth like a scaly barnacle. I ate, and I’d see them bundled under my feet like fallen clouds with twitchy noses and floppy ears. Feed us, their expectant eyes said. Feed us.

The night Mother threatened to wire my mouth shut, she took a bath in the clawfoot tub. She instructed me to sit next to her while the water progressively blackened.

When I was in school, she started, the kids used to meow at me whenever I’d raise my hand. They liked calling me Pussy whenever they walked by me in the hallways.

She chuckled and lathered herself with her soap. It was gummy, stringy with hair, pockmarked with dead skin. She started humming a song I’d never heard before. She painted her childhood with broad strokes of violent colors, as if she were warning me of something, or pressuring me to take the path she took.

What are you humming? I asked.

A song we sang in school, she said. The kids sang it for me. They called me a witch, said I had three eyes and could see the future. Said that I hated my brothers and sisters because I cast a spell wrong and they didn’t come out right. 

She continued humming, dunking her hand and soap into the pitch water. 

I didn’t hate them because I didn’t do something right, she said, facing me. I hated them because Grandmother fucked them up.

I’ve asked her about Grandmother before. When I was six, I asked Mother at my birthday party as my voice filled the void friends were supposed to occupy. I went to a Catholic school attached to a grimy dirt road—boys in navy blue blazers and black slacks, girls in pastel pink blazers and floor-length skirts that made it seem like we floated. I was oblivious as to why kids pulled on my ears and exposed their top two incisors while I gave a presentation on Mesopotamia. My nickname was Lola. The waistband of my skirt was snapped against my ass because kids were searching for a powderpuff tail. I shut everything away in my heart, expecting to find the answers in Mother, or Grandmother when I finally got the chance to meet her.

On my sixth birthday, candle wax melted into bubblegum pink frosting. I asked Mother why people mistreated me at school. I grew up watching movies on TVs that were wheeled in on squeaky carts with plugs that didn’t reach the wall outlets, dim lights, drawn curtains. Watching mothers giving inspirational speeches to their bullied children. I was different, she’d say, I was special. The music swelled, the sun seemed brighter, the kiddie-pool-sized bedroom I slept in would seem larger. My siblings would crowd around my feet, looking up at me expectantly.

Instead, Mother said, Blow out your candles.

Mother was an angry woman. If she didn’t have the energy to brand me with her hand, she used her tongue to brand my heart. I broke a vase when I was five and she told me she’d superglue my hands to my thighs to prevent me from breaking anything else. I got into her makeup products at seven, because I wanted to doll myself up like the girls I saw on the front cover of the magazines. Her lipstick was gummy. The eyeshadow was pigmentless. The mascara was like wet cement, gluing my lashes together. I winced whenever I blinked.

I showed off to Mother, who was in the kitchen, flipping the yellowed pages of an old cookbook. Mother saw me and said, Bunny girls are not pretty.

She pinned me down, spat on her palm, and began rubbing the makeup off my face furiously. I howled, I wailed, but I didn’t beg. I dreamt that night of Grandmother emerging from the forest surrounding us, cursing Mother in white-and-black robes, a thin fog puddling around her ankles. She saved me, in that dream. 

I discovered, then, that it’s the unspoken lessons in school that translate into your life. Instead of finding square roots, I found an invisible zipper at the corner of my mouth. I spoke when spoken to, or provoked; a peer once asked me an ironic question that I felt baited to answer and my ego wouldn’t let me keep quiet. But I generally kept my hand down when my teacher opened the floor for discussion. 

Instead of reducing fractions, I reduced my agency. Mother ordered me to pull dandelions from around our trailer for a dandelion pie; a girl asked me to pull my skirt down to prove I didn’t have a powderpuff tail. I never told anyone because I thought I was getting a good education. I was taking lessons I’d learned and translating them in my everyday life. Isn’t that what school was for?

Two evenings later, Mother was making cookies. The batter pasted to the grooves between her fingers.

What happened to Grandmother? I asked.

She died, Mother said. I killed her. I killed your aunts and uncles. They were helpless.

She let her hand sink into the batter.

Grandmother loved them more than me, she said. That’s why I hated them.

There were so many stories about me when I was in school. Mother made deals with the Devil at crossroads before I was born, and she gave birth to three of his own children before she could have one of her own. Mother was a witch who conjured me out of her bubbling, smoky cauldron under a blood moon, and three curious rabbits were hypnotized and stayed with her. Mother was a goddess; I was sent from Hell as a constant reminder of what she couldn’t have; Mother was insane; Mother hated me the most because I was the mishap. Mother wasn’t just Mother: she was a shifting, nebulous shape that spoke Latin and ancient Greek, and casted spells under the light of the moon. Instead of pulling on my ears and calling me Lola or going tail-hunting on me, their energy was redirected to their tongues. Their words became folk music passed down to the incoming students and transfers.

Spring died gloriously in a rainstorm that bloated the river that ran by our school, flooding the basketball courts. The water seeped into the kitchen, where hags in hairnets stirred chunky tomato soups and pressed grilled cheese sandwiches on grease-stained flattops. It flowed into the hallways. Leaves, pine nettles, acorns, and dead flowers were flotsam in the river that occupied our school. I trod through shin-high water with the rest of the students after the storm. Summer came the following day and spiked the temperatures into the mid-nineties, the air conditioning broke and the heat crept into the building like a jealous lover. I sweated in places I didn’t know had sweat glands. 

Carried along the river was the story of Mother and I the night before. We were in the forest, with Mother’s bubbling, smokey cauldron, summoning the storm. We wanted to show our power, the heft of our wrath. It was a warning, the students said, staring at me out of the corners of their eyes. A warning for all of us. It caught up with me in art class, where I pocketed a tube of red paint. The next day, I smeared dirt on my face. When asked about it, I said, I was honing my third eye.

A day after, I used the paint to try on a third eye. Mother saw me and smeared it with her thumb.

Don’t get caught doing something foolish, she told me.

Was Grandmother foolish?

She smacked the wind out of me and stormed off. I grabbed one of my siblings and carried her with me. I wanted them to see evidence of Mother and I’s power. I redid my third eye in the girls’ bathroom and cursed people under my breath during passing periods. I cursed a girl before her bowling team tryout; she dislocated her thumb on the release. I cursed a farmer’s son and, later in the week, his arm was chewed off in a combine. I made them avoid me, give me a wide berth in the hallways. My sister gnawed on carrots I got from the cafeteria. I sat otherwise alone, watching everyone. I pretended I liked it that way. Liked eating my food alone in the cafeteria and giving passersby the cold shoulder.

Don’t sit next to her, a girl with pigtails said to a new student, a chubby boy with polka dot freckles. She’ll give you bad luck.

I told my sister I loved her each time she stared at me with those big irises. Those searching, longing eyes, as if she knew I was not Mother. That we were still searching for Her.

One morning, Mother’s head was in the oven. My siblings sniffed her Achilles; some were nibbling at her hand, dangling lifelessly out of the stove. I gave them the photos like they were the Eucharist.

Here, I said. Eat this, don’t eat Mother.

They took turns eating the tops of the photos, consuming Grandmother's faded head and Mother’s stern face, as if the photos were taken without her consent, or she didn’t like the feeling of her own brothers and sisters in her arms. I went into the kitchen and sat down next to Mother. I didn’t have the courage to lift her out. I thought if I did, I’d see her flesh baked, sucked onto her bones like a raisin.

I leaned next to the open door, the gas invading my nostrils, and started whispering to her:

Once upon a time, there was a girl who had rabbits for siblings. She was born with three eyes.

I told her my tale. From out where I sat, I imagined I felt her smiling.