First Born

by Jordan Walker

Get better hydrangeas, thanks for dinner hydrangeas, sorry hydrangeas, congratulations hydrangeas, welcome to this suburb hydrangeas. My mother collects them with the garden scissors, calls them the showstoppers of the yard. Nearly as tall as me, three-foot orbs pulsing pink, lavender, white. Here, women are always the givers and receivers of these front lawn frills. In the garden, my mother is all laughter, precision, snapping hands. Sometimes I watch her from the kitchen window. But often, I follow, my head resting in the gulch of her hip as she snips the tallest flowers and then lets me try. She shows me how to cut at an angle, tear the leaves from stems, bundle the green globes in my clammy hands, and bind them in twine. Beside her, I push my nose into velvet sepals and the ground arches its slippery back into my bare heels like it’s reaching for something, too. I am a good daughter and I cut and carry the clippings, repeat this without complaint. At school I learn that tectonic plates move at the same rate my fingernails grow; my body is another sedimentary basin dilating, slipping and grasping. At home, my stepfather disappears for days, and my mother keeps tending the flowers, pruning just above the bud, bending to wet mulch. In my mother’s room, we sit at her vanity table. The dark green varnish is decorated in my grandmother’s brushstrokes: acrylic florets and tendrils unraveling in symmetric clusters around the mirror frame and down the legs. My feet dangle on the side of the bench as my mother brushes her fingers through my hair, shows me how to apply lipstick, smears her mother’s push-pop blush along my cheekbone. She pulls my lower eyelids down gently and tells me to look up, so the whites of my eyes show as she brushes mascara on thick. Here, I am taught the beginning lessons—the things women should do in private. My mother tells me not to pick at my skin, not to touch myself. She shows me the pink scars on her knuckles, her palm, the warts I have inherited. A warning. Flaws to be seared off  by the dermatologist, scooped out like cottage cheese with his hot knife. The skin waxy where he singed it shut. I run my fingers over the milky basins of her hands. I imagine the Cuyahoga river flowing north with all its fi re and silt, slipping eventually into Lake Erie. Slanted lines and circles, cotton-candied over her skin. I look down at my own hands and rub one thumb over the three warts forming a triangle on my palm. I hate and obsess over these grody clusters, their arrogant knots and ridges—a constellation of black capillaries and clotted vessels amassing around the center. Here is a scene. Two sisters smoke cigarettes on the back porch of their mother’s house in western Illinois, where the Mississippi river flows just a mile north. The sky is black and tinseled with stars. They look out at the cornfields where the stalks have grown tall as teenagers. Their feet point away from each other and they do not speak. The eldest—my grandmother—holds her belly, eight months pregnant. It is not her first child, but that is a secret she will take to the grave. She imagines how this daughter, the one she will not be forced to leave, the one she will name, will soon run through these fi elds in the summers, fat tomatoes cradled in her arms, yellow corn stuffed in her dimpled cheeks. She imagines painting her—looks closely at the field and decides on a mix of raw umber and charcoal grey, watered down—the shadowed circle where a body will pass through. Before we are conceived, we exist in part as an egg in our mother’s ovaries. All the eggs a mother ever carries are formed in their ovaries when they are four months old, still a fetus in their mother’s womb. Inside of my grandmother’s belly, I am a current in a different oval brine. When my grandmother taught me to paint, she taught me how to mix colors. That acrylics dry fast and are harder to mix, but if you make a mistake you can quickly paint over it. That odd numbers are more appealing to the eye than even numbers. That people are the most difficult to paint. But that everything, even the finest detail, is a shape, and once you learn to see things in shapes you can paint anything. In class, while my teacher talks about saving it, underneath the lift-lid desk I take the craft  scissors to the warts on my hand. I spread my fingers out wide, their webbed beginnings ivory and taut. I open the scissors, grip one blade tight in my clean hand and probe the center of each vascular clump, their seedy channels unraveling and bleeding out. A red yawn, round pain. I stuff  my hoodie sleeve into the rims of the wounds, my pulsing hand feels like a kind of ecstasy. After school, I spy on my mother from the kitchen window as she tends the flowers, her head bobbing above the bushes. I stand still, try not to grow.

Jordan Walker is a queer/nonbinary writer from Ohio. Their work has been published or is forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review and The Shore. Their essay, “Island of Misfits,” won the Prairie Schooner Summer Creative Nonfiction Contest and will be published in 2025. They can be found on Instagram @jwalker_09.