Desert Veins

The lash of a mother’s tongue to daughter slashes through her granddaughter’s heart. Only hindsight can reveal this truth, with foresight bearing the open wounds.

I remember my grandmother’s words with clarity: “Whether we know it or not, magic looms in all our cores.” She folded golden batter in a bowl with a flick of her wrist, the sugar and vanilla meeting my nose. I plopped a hard chocolate chip in my mouth as she leaned against the counter. My grandmother reached over and placed her hand into the yellow bag. She dumped two more chips into my palm, winked, and plopped three into her mouth. 

Between her chewing she asked, “Ever notice that some people can always find what they’re missing?” Her voice—thick with New England flair—was weathered in her tones and cadences. “Like a lost remote or a misplaced sweatshirt? Or, they always get a great parking spot, even on busy shopping days?”

I nodded, placing more chips into my mouth.

“Magic,” she chuckled, “but some, like you and me, have true powers.” 

She shuffled over to the sink and dipped her hands into the steaming water. I hopped down from my stepping stool and stood beside her. I grabbed a towel as she poured tap water over the suds that rimmed a drinking glass. She handed me the warm cup, watching as I dried it with my tiny fingers.
“While everyone has magic,” she said as she reached for a whisk underneath the bubbles, “there are few of us who can control it.”

My grandmother’s home swirled with oddities that invoked the restlessness of my imagination. I would rest upon her couch and watch the brown and white upholstery swirl into scenes of villagers. Their fabric bodies played in dark snow by large trees and old-fashioned buildings. One day, my grandmother sat beside me with a warm smile on her face as she watched me contemplate her furniture.

“I think you’re ready,” she said with a labored voice as she lowered herself down onto a cushion, “Do you want to learn to read cards?”

I nodded my head and turned away from a scene of a prancing, velour horse and carriage.

“I want you to have this,” my grandmother purred, handing me a bright, yellow box. She adjusted her wide-rimmed glasses and scratched the base of her stark white hair. Her fingers lingered over the crevices that dipped in her skin, then settled her liver-spotted palms to her thick thighs.

I opened the box, and the cards well-worn edges caressed the skin of my hand. A tingle skirmished past my wrists and up my forearms. My grandmother reached underneath her birch coffee table and positioned three tea candles on the surface.

“Snap your fingers,” she instructed.

I pressed my middle finger to my thumb, letting the pressure build until they slipped past each other.
The wicks revealed their flame. My grandmother smiled, took my hand in hers, and kissed my fingers.
She then placed a small book in her lap.

“These are the meanings of each card. They can help you interpret the message coming for you. I’ll have you memorize them over time,” she flicked open the book, landing on a page with a large picture of a blonde woman with an ornate chalice in her right hand. Rainbow-colored stones supported her bare feet as a river danced around her throne. “This is the—”

“Queen of Cups,” I said, looking up at my grandmother. The tingling in my forearms jolted its way up my spine and through the nape of my neck. I saw words flash in my head; voiceless in its ambience. “She’s kind, but has a lot on her mind.”

My grandmother brought the book closer to her face, her eyes squinting through her trifocals. “You have the gist of it,” she smiled, “Speed reader, eh?”

“I didn’t read it,” I said, “it appeared in my mind, and I just knew.”

She lowered the tome and clapped her hands. A spark from her fingers made the smile on her face shine.

I lived with my mother over an hour away in a small house by a fen. Dark water lingered by thick bushes of sumac, towering hogweeds, and decrepit, bile-colored nettle. When she washed dishes, she would gaze out the window and stare at the wet plants that crept closer to our abode. Her head, covered in straw-like hair, would bob up and down as she scrubbed the plates in monotonous motions.

“Grammy told me we have many powers,” I said walking over to my mother, reaching for a dish towel. I grabbed a dripping glass, eager to dry the rim and feel the warmth on my fingertips. “Just me and her, though. She said you’re not like us.”

My mother went stiff and dropped the plate into the water below.

I placed the dried cup in a cabinet above me and lifted another dish. “Do you know what your magic is?”
Silence. The atmosphere of the kitchen grew thick.

With a quick turn my mother slapped the side of my head, her ring scratching the edge of my ear as bubbles dripped down my cheeks.

“Go to your room,” she said. I looked up as her blue eyes bulged; her thin, pink lips stretched over her incisors as her jaw clenched. “My mother’s teaching you to be a fool.”

I gripped my ear in my hand and held back tears as I walked down the slim hall to my room. I heard my mother splashing around again in the water as I closed my door shut. I fell onto my comforter with a hushed whimper.

“You need to ask me before teaching her things like that,” my mother scowled into the phone. I pressed my back against the wall of our hallway, listening to the conversation. I still felt her grip on my fingers as she wrenched my grandmother’s tarot cards from my hands. I was reading their sceneries in my mind like a musician practicing their scales. I tried showing her my gift, to build a bridge between her and I in which she could cross her love over to me.

My mother had the volume of the landline up high. I could faintly hear the other inflections between my mother’s heavy sighs.

“I’m her grandmother, I can teach her whatever I want,” the phone voice said, muffled by distance. “She should learn how to read cards.”

“She won’t,” my mother said with firm indignation. I heard her footsteps heavy on the wooden floor, then the sound of a drawer opening.

From the new distance, my grandmother’s pitch was stifled.
I heard a metallic slice—like shears snipping their blades past each other.

“It’s bullshit,” my mother said.

I leaned in closer, keeping my body covered in the shadows.

“You never could harness power. You’re nothing like her.”
A series of small objects fell to the floor.

“You never bothered with me,” my mother said. She turned the corner where I could see her back turned.

My grandmother’s voice replied, “Why would I ever bother with you?”

My mother twisted her shoulder, letting the phone roll down her arm. She reached over and forced the receiver into the landline base.
“You’ll never see her again.”

I waited while I felt her footsteps retreat. I turned my body to peek past the corner. On the floor were the beheaded remains of my tarot.

Later that night, I went into the field behind our house. The air smelled of mud and fairy shrimp, and beneath my bare feet I could feel the ground sink under my arches. In the distance, the woods creaked with soft movements, twigs snapping and bending under awakening paws. The new moon hid herself from me.

As I walked on, I felt my feet trail into a shallow, vernal pool. I felt the snap of cold water ooze between my toes, half melted frost and slime digging between the nails. I leaned down and picked a handful of rocks, holding them in my palms to feel their weight. A stillness nestled in my breath, my heart aching to clutch their solid texture to my chest.

When I heard the safety of my mother’s snore, I reached under my bed for acrylic paints with silent fervor. I recalled the beheaded tarot and texturized landscapes with thick brushstrokes on the rocks I collected. I swirled a silver sword through a crown; a man carving star coins to a tree; a young adventurer holding a single, wooden staff. I ignited life into seventy-eight rocks, stuffed in a hole under my mattress.

Hidden away in my corner of the house, I used my stones to practice my magic. Each spread I produced felt like freedom in my fingertips, a rebellion dancing from my mind and into my palms.
When I thought of my grandmother and how my mother kept me from her, I would pull the same rocks.

They clattered on the floor:
The Hierophant. The Six of Wands reversed.

The Hierophant’s feminine face and masculine body sat upon a stage with two spectators below them. Spiritual advisor. Expression. The words trickled through my veins and into my consciousness. The voice had been tuned, not sharpened, its intonations like a caged whisper.

For The Six of Wands, the stout man rode a horse, promenading past a crowd of perturbed faces. He held a large, wooden pole bequeathed with a wreath at its tip.
Unrecognized, neglect. Pride before the fall.

One night, as dark clouds cloaked the sky, the telephone rang from the hall. My rocks were before me, scattered in formations.

I heard my mother answer the line from the bedroom, sleep still lingering in her response. Soon, her voice began to undulate different tones; her body rising from her bed to pace back and forth on creaky floors. Our thin walls shivered as she hummed yeses and nos.

She jolted my door open and walked into the room. She kicked my rocks around the floor, unaware of what laid at her toes. She kneeled and grabbed my arm, her nails digging into my skin. She had a smile across her face.

“Grammy’s dead,” she said. I shook my head, but she squeezed my arm harder. I saw her eyes watering with complexity; her pupils enlarged, bloodshot. One eye’s tears were clear, sparkling in her lid; the others were dyed like the skin of a toad.

“I don’t want to hear anything about magic again,” she whispered. She let go of my arm, stood up, and sighed with deep relief. She was taller, shoulders resting back. She looked down and saw three rocks by her foot. They were turned upside down.
“Get rid of these rocks. They belong outside.”

She walked out of the room, and I was plunged into the dark.

My grandmother’s passing changed everything. Visiting my tarot was dangerous—I had to choose the right time to speak with them. Often, months would skip by before I felt safe enough to dig the stones out from my mattress.

When my body evolved with the turning of time, it was no oddity to hear from my mother’s maw her specialty of poison. My grandmother was wrong—my mother did have powers she could wield. It had been trapped inside her, festering like a boil she longed to pick at. They were sour, awful incantations designed to curse and maim.

“Cover your stomach when you sit down. No one wants to see that.”
“Your thighs are bigger than mine. Disgusting.”
“No one would love you, even if magic was real.”

My mother nicked a void inside me that couldn’t be filled. When she smiled at my grandmother’s death, that was her first incision. Bit by bit, she tore away at me, picking and plucking at my insecurities, feasting on them to remind me magic had died with Gram.

I could only fight back with my tarot. The rebellion of scattering them like stars on my floor was the only action that kept me from being weak.

But I was tired. Desperate. I would do anything to fill the hollowed cavern in my chest. To be seen again. To be loved.

When he hit my side with his swinging briefcase in front of a local bagel shop, I ignored my tarot depicting a lithic creature looming over a chained woman to a man—The Horned One.

Walden was a new source of comfort. A reassurance that I wasn’t alone. That I wasn’t truly worthless. That I could be desirable.

I told Walden of my grandmother believing I had magic on one of our series of dates. Instead of laughing or calling my memories a child’s fantasy, Walden drawled, “Of course you have magic. We all do.” He trailed his fingers over my knuckles and up to my wrist. “One day,” he paused, massaging the blue lines that wrapped under my skin, “I’ll show you what I can do.”

I only knew Walden for a month when I moved in with him. I craved his presence that felt like a lifeline. In secret, I packed what I could and slipped out of my childhood house, hoping my mother wouldn’t catch me for the last time. A deep part of me felt nauseous walking away without confronting my mother—without closure.

She never tried to find me. Her indifference another bloodless slash, another tear of the void. My departure set her free, the last reminder of her mother bolting out the door.

When I settled my last box of items by the entrance of Walden’s home, he led me to the bedroom, smiling with hazel eyes. Tea candles circled his space. I snapped my fingers and lit them all at once.
Walden kissed my neck, “Do you want to see my magic?”

I nodded my head, and he drifted closer to my mouth. He took his lips, parting mine, and used his tongue to lick the edge of my teeth. He sat me down on the bed, his mouth opening wide. A few grains of sand fell from the back of his throat down my uvula.

“Swallow it,” he said, watching as I chewed the minerals between my teeth. “I’m the only one that can fix you.”

When I gulped his gift, I felt the sand move through my body, twisting past my organs, through the veins of my legs, and settling at the tip of my pinky toe.

As I laid next to him, his warm body rising and falling with every breath he inhaled, I could feel his sand moving in my toe. It was warm and felt like it had brought me back down to earth. It was ecstasy that lingered behind the red-polish. I moved my foot up, crossing my leg over the other. I pinched my toe and saw the grains rise in my arteries.

I looked over at Walden, who was beginning to open his eyes again.
He reached for me, and I welcomed him.

Every day, Walden would open my mouth with his lips and drop two or three grains of sand down my throat. They traveled through my body and rested at the base of my feet. Two grains, three grains, a teaspoon; Walden would increase his gifts to me.
It felt like stars traveling through me. He would smile and kiss my neck as the sand found its way to the bottom of my body. In between those moments of pleasure—where the sand drifted from mouth to base—I felt as if the voided sphere of where my heart used to be could fill with Walden’s promise of happiness. Magic was allowed in my life again, not hidden in the acidic words of my mother.

I kissed Walden every morning searching for sand with my tongue in his mouth. Soon my feet were filled with his silt.

I would try and hide chocolate chips in the freezer. One day, Walden saw me with a ring of brown moisture around my lips. He licked his tongue across my mouth and said he could taste the wild cocoa.

He placed my face into his hands and looked at me with sorrowful eyes.
“You’re not happy?” he asked, kissing my forehead. He took his thumb and rested it on my lips. “Am I not enough?”

I shook my head and promised that I wouldn’t worry him anymore. He parted my jaw and slipped his essence past my tongue.

Sometimes when I woke up in the morning, Walden had already begun to pour sand down my mouth. I would wake up with him on top of me, his lips parting mine, sand trickling out like a punctured cornhole bag. His body would contort, undulate like a python swallowing antlers. He grew stronger as he emptied into me, his muscles and bones thick for days.
I told him I wish he would wait until I was awake, but he kept doing it anyway.

“You need this,” he said, “I will keep you fed.”

The sand had reached the bottom of my knee, and I could the feel the grains begin to seep into my venules. “Stop overthinking it,” Walden would say after I asked him, again, when his sand would fill my void.

I stopped kissing Walden in the dawn light to try and avoid the taste of dunes forming in my throat. But on the mornings where Walden was on top of me, his hands wrapped around my wrists while dark grit poured past his lips; I couldn’t stop the taste from drying in my mouth.

I thought I was wrong for taking Walden’s kindness towards me for granted—his attention and affection pouring into my body. He was trying to fill the void that I had, trying to erase the self-loathing that seeped inside me. Walden was right when he told me I was overthinking.
I was forgetting that feeling of stars in my toes, that ecstasy which drifted all inside me. The memory of my grandmother’s influence. I felt guilty that I hadn’t felt that feeling in some time.
I wanted it back.

I knew Walden believed in magic, but I was still haunted by the memories of my mother. Sometimes, his smile matched the one she wore as she reported my grandmother’s death. I cut a hole in the bottom of his mattress and placed my stones inside.

When Walden wasn’t around, I reached down with my arms and scooped the painted pebbles out, shaking them in my hands to warm their metaphorical muscles. I never had a question for them—there wasn’t a point in asking anything. I knew what would come true. That the sand filling me up could bring back to me all that I had lost.

When I would finally pick from the pile of stones, or if one dropped out of my palms as I shook them like dice; the Five of Cups appeared. I had painted a man standing, his back to me, head bowed while a quintet of goblets splayed around him. A city ahead of him posed against a gray, cloudy sky.

Lost in disappointment; wishing you could change the past, the voice said in my mind. Brittle. Meek. The words appeared in my head, but I couldn’t abandon the little hope left in finding peace with who I was and what I had become. I couldn’t let go of the hurt inside me waiting to be removed by Walden. If I gave up, I would be losing my grandmother forever.
I picked up my rocks and stuffed them back into the mattress. I coughed beige onto our sheets.

Walden began to dump cups into my throat.
The sand, dense in my body, accentuated who I already was. I reminded myself that I didn’t yet understand the collected power underneath my pores.
That I couldn’t yet understand the magic Walden and I shared with each other; the way his sand was going to fill my emptiness. How I thought he was making me better, his love filling me up every morning and every night.

The Sahara filled my breasts.
“I love you, like no one could. You need me. I will help you, I promise.”
I stopped believing that my grandmother would come back to me. Yet, I consumed Walden’s sand anyway.

Walden had gone to work one day when I slumped over the bed frame and wiggled my fingers through the fabric to collect my scattered stones.

I shook them in between my palms. I let the sound ripple, imagining a question seeping into every picture. I knew I needed to ask them something, anything to get them to come back to life again.
“What is wrong with me?” I said, my voice brittle, meek.

I dropped them on my blanket, face down, and moved them around. I picked up three from the middle and turned them over: the problem, the suggestion, the answer.

The Chariot.
The Six of Pentacles.
The Fool.

I refused to listen to the muffled dialogue inside my head.

The sand had begun to pool at my ears when I hid myself away from the world behind closed shades. It was too much for me to move out of bed every day, to hop in the shower and wash my hair with restraints. I didn’t want the sun to touch me and boil the sand inside my skin.
I wanted darkness again. I wanted to be left alone.

“You only have me,” Walden said when I asked him to cover up the mirror on my vanity dresser. “You’ll never need to worry about what you look like again.”

Walden made sure I didn’t need to eat anymore—the sand had filled the cavity of my stomach and esophagus. After a while, I didn’t need to get up to go to the bathroom—the sand had blocked any liquid from getting through.

The Chariot.
The Six of Pentacles.
The Fool.

It was unbearable to leave our bed. Once, I had been able to create sparks with my fingers. But now there was nothing. I turned my head and saw a candle sitting on the nightstand. I tried moving my fingers once more. Nothing. The wick stayed white. The sand which had consumed every part of me snuffed away the chance of producing a flame.

I rolled off the bed, thunking to the wood floor. I began to sob thick grains of sand. A few of my tarot stones fell to the floor. I kept snapping my fingers, over and over, until the skin turned raw. I wanted to burn myself, to feel something touch my skin. To feel the warmth that I had once felt with my grandmother.

No.
To finally understand what it was like to be whole with myself.

Then more stones fell, dropping on their faces.
Through the haze of shale tears, three images looked up at me, the only rocks facing up.

The Chariot. The Six of Pentacles. The Fool.

I let the meanings come to me.
The Chariot: someone is controlling us, a voice said, this time, giving its last breath of energy into screaming past its cage. Someone won’t let us take the reins.

The Six of Pentacles: lift the veil of illusion we have. We must lose to gain.
I felt a tingling at the base of my toes. The voice inside of me grew familiar.

The Fool is answering our pleas. Find love in us. Believe, rely on us, the last word ringing like the final gong of a bell. Intentional. Direct. That the fool I had become wasn’t veering towards a dangerous cliff—as depicted on my painted stone—but towards deliverance.

The internal utterance grew silent. It was if I had never truly listened to its cadence before. It was proverbial, like my grandmother. But different. A roiling current that had been held back for so long. It was magic. It was me. It had always been mine.

I knew I would die on the floor if I didn’t heed my stones’ words that echoed from the voice. I tried lifting myself onto the bed again, but the weight of my body rooted me to the ground. I rolled onto my torso to try and crawl out the door, but the sand made it hard for my arms and legs to move past their density. I was trapped with Walden dumped inside me.

I rolled onto my back and looked up to my nightstand. A pair of tweezers hung on the edge. I rolled my leg slightly, knocking into the furniture. The piece of metal dropped and landed in my extended hand. I puffed up, my upper body straining to reach my toes. I began to pick at my toenail. I pulled, tearing with my might, digging into the skin at the base of my cuticle. The metal dug through dried nerves and clogged clumps of sand.

It wasn’t working. The picks at my skin weren’t enough to release the buildup inside of me. I reached over and snuck the tweezers underneath my big toenail. With one swoop of my leg—with all the energy I could muster—I bashed my toe against the end of the bed.

The pain was excruciating, resonating throughout my body in waves. I arched my head back and wailed. But the scream felt good—like I was alive again. I breathed hard and knew I needed to keep puncturing the skin to be free of the desert in my veins.

I kept kicking until the tweezers were halfway into my toe, sand dripping out the tiny fractures of my wound. With my last ounce of stamina and a tired moan, I tugged the tool from my toe. A river of sand began to pour out from me.

I heard a rattle, and rose my shaking body to see a small, compacted stone tumble from my open wound. Its sharp edges were a kaleidoscope of red, yellow, and orange. A rebirth of a memory covered in my gore.

I drifted into darkness.

When I came to, I felt light. With weakness coursing through and out my body, I looked down and saw that my whole leg had been emptied, the sand a mound hill by my bleeding toe.
I had blood again.

I rolled onto my right side, and felt my left leg begin to empty out through the opening. Relief overwhelmed the pain. I shook my limbs for what seemed like the first time. I jiggled my body, the sand coursing its way out of my nooks and crannies. I could sit up without gasping for breath.
My thick thighs were mine. My pouch of stomach was mine. The curves of my body were not Walden’s sand, but my own muscle, cartilage, and fat. I was magnificent.

With soft hands, I scooped up my rocks into a clean sock. I felt the soft, protective energy of the cotton flow through them. I reached down and touched the new stone by my toe. I took it into my fingers and felt a pulse jolt through me.

I stood up, dripping Mojave.

I didn’t immediately leave Walden’s place. I couldn’t slip out unannounced like I had done before with my mother. I waited in the shadows of his den for him to come back, sand dotting the floor from the bedroom to the office. I sat in his chair, swirling the blood on my new stone into a scene. Of an older, bespectacled woman smiling as she stirs a spoon in a large, chalice bowl.

When he eventually arrived, Walden tracked the trail I had left and found me sitting on the black, leather throne. His jaw unhooked; tendons and sinew dripping wet sediment.

“What did you do?” he said, eyeing my body as it emptied out on the hardwood floor. His voice slithered from his throat as he tilted his head sideways.

“I’m leaving you,” I said, tapping my fingers on the arm rest.

Walden’s eyes darkened. He slinked into the room, his skin already rippling with anticipation.
“We agreed you are nothing without me. You are worthless.”

I lowered my right arm and felt the tips of my fingers. They were still raw, but I snapped them together. I felt a spark. But the flame wasn’t strong yet.
“I am everything,” I said, punctuating each word. I felt a sharp heat slide across my skin as I moved my fingers against each other once more. White, flickering energy pulsed against my nails. Not hot enough.

“I will fill you up again,” Walden said, his voice grainy and tumbling past his tongue. “I’m the only one that can make you feel good.” He inched closer and opened his mouth wide. He pushed the desk between us to the side. It crashed against the wall. I remained still in the chair. He drooled a cascade of sand into his hand. “Don’t you want to feel again?”

I took in a large gulp of air before lifting my arm in front of his outstretched palm. I snapped my fingers, concentrating everything on the friction forced between my prints. The rage bottled up inside me shattered, and a blaze of blue-violet lightning wrapped around Walden in a flash.

His body encased itself in a tube of petrified sand, his fulgurite fingers just out of reach from my throat.

I stared up into Walden’s eyes. Glass formed over his pupils, wide and dilated. I rested my arms back to the chair, and kicked the fossilized statue of Walden in front of me. It clattered to the floor, glistening with rainbow striations at my bare feet.

I lifted my new, painted sandstone to my lips, as plasma dribbled from my toe like a river.