ANNA: BIRTH by Anna Nygren

     Mike Fritcher CC




ANNA: BIRTH.

 
When I am born I am blue and I am ashamed of my ugliness. No one can reasonably put up with this. I disappear under the white lace of a knitted cap. All those who have come before me must nurture me must hide this ugliness as I lie inside the incubator glass. It glistens there so slowly. I let my heart sound, a quiet murmur. It will settle like a veil over my mother, she will not be able to remember without it. There will come a time when it will always be silent. There will come a time.
     I’m taken home to the Cat. She’s the same colour as the floor, I’m still weird. These old mothers walk side by side. I shake when I sleep. This body is so fragile. It breaks and grows together. I lie in a wagon that my mother pulls with these other mothers. They will remember that we walk there together, it will bind us together forever, it’s not something you can forget. They walk across the old railway.
      All this has been said to me. For I myself remember nothing before the Sibling. Things fall from the sky when I am two years old. Mother says: how she puts us under the tables. Mothers know you can’t trust anyone. Anything that scrutinizes. It must be a real measure. Airplanes in the blue. Bits of my body end up in the Sibling’s. My arm movement as I feel for the eyebrows: it is still there, is where the Sibling grows. I must nurture it, learn at once. At the same time. I feel this something, it must be killed and cut out. The Sibling in me, me in the Sibling. The eyes outside me end up on the movement, mimicking, mimicking, don’t we have eyebrows? We can’t be the same. I must separate. There’s a force in me that wants to centre, gather, everything inside. Me. It’s like it’s important. We. It scares me that it could be out there doing something untrustworthy. The Sibling always moves close to me. It doesn’t want to die it wants to live. I just have to learn the tenderness. 
     Almost at first I don’t remember the different people, their faces blend together. There are three names for men: Lennart, Sören, Roger. I just have to remember when to say Dad and when not to say Dad. The Cat wants me to be a cat so it can scratch me, so it can scream at me, so I understand, it’s still a long way until we can make love.
     We’re going to a party. Lennart is at the party with us. He only has teeth in his face. I look at them, they’re blue-brown. I look and I see my fear of being part of him. He takes over all of me. I need to keep myself whole, keep myself together. I remember seeing mother go to another room but Lennart’s eyes are on me so I can’t move. Lennart turns his head up towards me with a hand on his chin as he talks to me. I look as high up at the ceiling as I can to avoid seeing his mouth. The mouth gets closer and closer. I am devoured by Lennart’s mouth. Lennart merges with Sören. Sören in the house next to the house with the dogs and the dogs and the dogs barking. They are in the house, that’s why I have to go out into the yard. I can be outside the confines of the buildings. I have to stay there because it’s safest. In safety I will give birth to my own children. I am a child who will now give birth to my own children. I need to be left alone.
     I put my face in my mother’s dress. I have to hide from the sun. We’re at a party. A genealogy of my hysteria. A lump of body. I turn my face away from them. I can’t stand so many. They shine from the sun. Everyone else shines so strangely. My body is darkness, and everything is drawn, into me. I devour everything. I devour everything. I eat it in pieces. It fills me until I’m full. There in me it lies, pressing. I wrap my legs around my torso. I wrap my clothes around it. I hide it inside me. Inside, it grows. Soon it’s all over me. It’s in the blood. I’m a little shellfish under the surface of the water. An adult holds me there. I want to come up, but I can’t breathe there. I’m always at parties. But you hardly notice me at all. The adults are closer than the children. I don’t understand them. The children stay away. The adults laugh at me. I feel the shaking of the laughter. It feels like a body.
     I’m just going to lie down under a bush. It’s safer there. The ground is warm against my skin. It nurtures me and takes me in. It wants me to be there. All low and close. I take clay from a pit and build myself a house. A wall until the pit is empty. A wall against the world. There are sticks with thorns scraping against my arms. I pull them there, light pricks and thin scratches. I get all scared.
     I hear strange noises in the forest. I walk there with other adults. There are a lot of big people. And then me and the Sibling. I feel how the time is different. We’ll find a little cottage here, we’ll escape there when they come to hunt us. I know that soon all the adults will die out and only me and the Sibling will be left. We have to make it on our own. It’s a pity that the Sibling is so bad at everything he tries to do. When the bad guys come, we’ll climb out the windows and down the trellis. I have to help the Sibling even though my body is just as bad. The mud gets stuck in my legs. The fabric around it moves so slowly slowly. We run hidden. The little cottage is drawn on the cardboard. There are strips of curtains in the windows. Here you can live undisturbed. They would never look here.
     The name.
     I write my name backwards and forwards across the papers. Single down over the leaves. There’s a rabbit living under the house, they’re trying to get it out with long sticks. My fur is the same colour. I lick it clean so it shines. I can’t wear panties, but no one will know. There’s something about me that’s all sensitive. Only dresses I can wear. My skin bleeds. It stings and tears. The fabric has to be big and flying to be with me. I hide underwear behind the cushions on the sofa. The mother finds them after I forget. I get scared of all the angry people. When the mother becomes one of them, her body changes. How can this be the same. How can anyone stay the same. I feel I’m not to be trusted. Suddenly I can tear and bite or hit with something. The Sibling has to do as I say or it will be the one that happens to me. It is so small and easy to torture. I’m afraid my gaze will hurt. I’m afraid of me. I have to shut myself in, so I crawl inside the duvet. My mother carries me on her shoulders, over all that is needed. I have to lie still so that no one notices that I am not a mass of wood but a piece of meat.
     Laughter. As I sit under the table, I hear my mother say my name: anna sticks out of the other speech, which is hazy and blurry. She says my name many times, but I know she doesn’t want me to come out and be visible, because the name sounds completely different. She says the strange name and soon they start laughing. I hear the laughter of adults and they scare me. I can’t stand to hear such unfinished sounds. I can’t tell if they become animals or remain something else. I lie flat on the floor. I can never be seen again. I feel it like a pit inside me that grows until I’m lying right in it. Dark earth is laid over it.
     There I lie until the Cat comes. I force myself to open my eyes because the Cat needs me. She needs my tenderness more than anything. I strike her white chest where it’s smoothest, then her back and neck. Around us is a forest of legs. I can’t imagine that I have legs like that too. Mine are under me, folded up. I think they’ve been cut off at the knees. Blood splashes across the fur. I think the war is still here. The mothers will have to run up soon. It comes all of a sudden. In the middle of the party. They’re coming to get us. Only I, hiding under the table, will be left behind. I’ll have to do everything myself from now on. Already I can stir the pots of meat sauce. I know where the sheets are in the cupboards. Maybe the Sibling can stay too.
     Maybe the Sibling and I can lie in the chrysalis and be chrysalis ourselves. Maybe, it has such soft skin. I press my chin against Sibling’s forehead. Rubbing, softly, softly. Remembering Sibling’s tiny little teeth as they tickle my belly button. I love it anyway.
     When Mom calls anna, I hear it again, that’s the way it should sound. She calls me. I need to get through without them getting angry, I need them to be quiet, but all of a sudden the laughter comes. They marvel that I’ve been there all along. What was I doing there. I am so small. Such a little scoundrel. I feel it, like knives in my skin. I don’t want to be this. They have such hard hands patting me. I need my mother to be alone. She asks how it is. I tell her I’m happy. I see her smile. I say I’m tired when she asks. She never notices that I say everything that isn’t. I’m fascinated that I talk like that. I’ve never been able to do that before. I say things that aren’t true. I can’t wait for my mother to look at me and ask again if it’s really true. But she smiles very quietly.
     I always dream about my body. Four years of body. How it swells up from everything I eat. The only thing I can take in is spaghetti. I eat it like long worms. The worms crawl around inside me and multiply. They grow with me and I with them. I think for a long time about all this inside me. I worry but nothing can be said. Later the worms become crustaceans, crayfish, crawling inside me. There is something about this body that I cannot grasp. I hold it around me. In the dream, I eat for a hundred years and my body fills the world. There is something reassuring in this, but I am also very scared.
     I hear voices from the basement. There are other great people there and overall most things in this world are very great. I am in my body like a dough. I feel it and I feel shame.  It is a shame I enjoy. I want everyone to see my body for the meat it is. I want it to be emptied of otherness, there should be only body left here. A body that clings to the things around it. I like things so much.
     Sometimes it’s gift day and that’s the best part. I feel so much for the things I get. I like getting a lot. Which things are not so important. I love everyone fairly. It’s very important that it’s equal and fair. If no one is loved, they get sad. I feel strongly for everyone sad. So, if I think someone is ugly, I have to hit my arms. First ten then twenty then thirty. I have to blink at every snow pole the car drives by or something bad might happen. I could accidentally kill an evil person or thing.
     I’ll dye my eyebrows then, until they grow together. I want it to be like a border between the eyes and the forehead. I want all the parts to be clear. I paint with markers on my face. There’s a twin living inside the mirror and we help each other paint. Then I paint the Sibling but it’s so contradictory. It doesn’t understand the importance of order. When my mother sees us, she is horrified. I don’t know why. I think it’s right now. But mother thinks otherwise. I have to learn what other people think. I’m no longer part of her. I miss a father who would wedge himself between us and protect me from the warmth of my mother’s body. It’s so strange that I’ve become a body here. There are arms and nipples and knees and feet. I examine everything every night and morning. It could disintegrate at any moment.
     So far there is only this house. Only the mother and the Sibling are really here yet. I dress him up as a friend. He says nothing and he does as I say. We are a circus in silence. I don’t have to think about him for him to exist. He lies like a ball under my sweater. We are so close. He goes to the neighbours but always stays inside me. My mother says we never fight. We are so, smiling, long long straw, we are so close in age, pseudo twins, close in time. When I’m with the Sibling, you never notice anything inside me stretching, twisting, bunching up in my skin. 
     Now the Sibling lies heavy in my arms. I have learned everything from him. The mother and the Sibling, the sun on the brown plastic floor of the Home. The Sibling and I lie close together on the floor under the table. The mother is looking, where are we? The Cat is in our house. The fluffy dog and the Cat. The Sibling and its sibling, me. The siblings, stitching themselves together.
     The mother gets lost with the car when we go to the supermarket, she cries and says that we are lost. The Sibling looks at me. We cry together. We are a salty, salty sea. Everything, everything is sea. The mother buys ice cream from the ice cream truck. We go no further. The car is broken. The ice cream runs off the stick but only the Sibling gets a new one, I should have learned. Mother doesn’t see when Sibling gives me his new one. What is given is also a theft. Me and Sibling are a circus, the clothes hanging from the drying rack are our tent and our curtain. The ring is the brown plastic floor of the Home. The narrow claws of farm animals in the soft sand. Applause.
     I try to imagine that this is a childhood but I can’t see that I am the child. I feel so very old. The Home has a brown plastic carpet that I stroke with my fingers. There are little potholes and I shrink into a caterpillar, crawling over the potholes. I can live in a little hole. I try to save something but it’s probably too late. My mother calls out to me, anna. It’s a punishment every time I hear the name. I want it whispered close, anna. It’s all about the distance. I’m so far from other people’s eyes. I can’t see that they see me as anything but other. There is nothing reasonable in my revelation. I’m supposed to be in this Home. It will be a strange place for me. I will get into the cracks between places. I’ll lie there until the next phase begins. I’ll lie still and maybe cry. Pacific Ocean. I float across the dust.    
 
 
 
Anna Nygren, is a writer and artist, based in Gothenburg, Sweden.  
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