Origin Story

annika clark

In Minnesota, the mosquitoes are enough to fly me away. I eat Nilla wafers, standing on a pink stroller by the bay windows and waiting for big brother and big sister to come home from school. By eight months, I am walking. By nine, I am running. Mom can’t stop me. It’s nice that I can think about a world before September 2001, a world with me in it. I was standing already, before that September. I like to think about that when I feel weak. When I am scared, that thought makes me less scared.

*

I associate the smell of vomit with love. At night, at mass, in the northern chill of March, my father drapes me across his arms. He wraps me in a stiff, grey coat and walks me across the lamp-lit street, home. I see him fill the bath from the floor, gather the towels, walk in silhouettes, backdropped by the frosted windows, even more amazing than the son of god against the stained glass of the candle-lit church. My father bathes me of my grime and the water smells like someone who cares more than the desire to keep clean hands. Before the bath goes room temperature and freezes, he draws me out by my armpits, and for a moment I am alone on the bathmat as he takes the soiled towels to the washing machine.

*

I trod across the yard after a foot of snow has fallen. One of my purple boots lodges without me, and now I’m pink-sock-deep in the wet snow. I don’t shiver, it’s not too bad. The yard is quiet and big and empty, like Mom isn’t watching me from the house, even though she surely is. Everything is muffled and nothing is panicked. I do not mind being this way. Who would? There are many kinds of alone, but this full, cold aloneness is my favorite. Believe me when I say I don’t mind being this way.

*

The edges of the stickers peel and crumble. The yellow ducks wear sailor hats and carry umbrellas. I like to think they are my first friends, on the mirror in the bathroom. Mom says “duck” was my first word, but she doesn’t quite remember. We have two sinks in one bathroom because we are very well-off. This is my idea of wealth.

*

Sometimes, I think I get photos confused with memory. But there are no photos of my lip splitting under my teeth or the cutting skin of my scalp. No one pulled out the camera when the nurses laced the black stitches through my palm. I don’t need photos for those. I have kept my scars. They are what I carry, always. When everything else has faded, they will still be here with me. I look at my reflection and do not see that mark on my face, shadowing below my chin and jagged in hard tissue. I see my face.

*

Sophie and Kate are visiting their gramma today, so I am allowed next door to play with them. They are sisters, but they aren’t nice to each other. I wish that I were at home with my brother, playing with Hot Wheels and train tracks on the living room rug. In the downstairs bathroom, Sophie and Kate’s gramma keeps overnight things for them. By the sink, the night light illuminates four sparkly princess toothbrushes. I pick one up and hold it in my hand while the faucet runs, turn it over, pretend it’s mine. I leave the bathroom before anyone might start to wonder why I’m taking so long.

*

In spring, the playground smells like pesticides and sugar beets and floodwater. When the spray truck emerges, the children run for the slides to hide from the fog that spreads throughout town. When the sugar beet trucks drive up the road, the children use the pointer fingers on each hand to plug their noses. When the winter thaws, the ice jams, the tilting floodplain drains into the Red River Valley, the children learn that their river is the only one that flows north. Our ancestry is made of natural disasters; our inheritance is survival. It’s funny, the things we know so young. It’s funny what they teach us first.

*

Mom’s sewing machine thrums. It heartbeats. It heartbeats all the chilly day. Sometimes I think she’s put her heart into the machine, operating by the foot pedal, rather than in her chest, operating by whatever she has left. Dad flies airplanes. He flies them across seas I will never swim in and mountains I will never scale. I don’t want to swim in them; I don’t want to scale them. I want my brother and my sisters and my mom and my dad to be under one quilt, in front of the fireplace, keeping warm until the whole house darkens and begins creaking in the winter wind.

*

My big sister sings to me and my little sister as we fall asleep. She sings Amazing Grace. Mom comes in, holds our hands, and prays for dad. I ask her what the weather will be. She says snow. I lay my blue blanket over my face and my red blanket around my shoulders. In the next room, my brother listens to fantasy novels on tape. I can’t sleep. When I sleep, the nightmares come. Black circles grow under my eyes. They remove my adenoids and tonsils. I still have the black circles. I still have the nightmares. I still don’t want to sleep. I lie in bed, narrowly awake, remembering. If I stay awake long enough, I can convince myself that I remember being born.

ANNIKA CLARK has previously been published in The Best Teen Writing of 2018 and is a two-time National Gold Medalist through the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. She was a 2017 Virginia B. Ball Creative Writing Scholarship Competition finalist and is an alumnus of the Iowa Young Writers Studio. Annika loves PB&J sandwiches, glitter glue, legos, and her job as a babysitter. She lives with her family in Fountain Hills, Arizona and will graduate high school in 2019.