Mandragora by Lori Sambol Brody
Editorial intern Laura Billow on today’s bonus flash: Every time I read Lori Sambol Brody’s story about a homunculus at grief yoga (!), I notice a joke I didn’t catch the previous time, and I feel the trouble and the emotion even more deeply.
Mandragora
I bring my homunculus to Grief Yoga. I know it’s a bad idea, but he lies quietly in the folds of my mat bag, arms flung up, hairy fat legs twitching with dreams of mud and magic and the close clutches of the soil and the pulse of the incantation pushing him into light. I’d just made him, following the spell from the Grimoire of George Burroughs: Would you like to make a homunculus? A mandragora, from a mandrake root? On the Monday after a blood moon, bury it in a cemetery and water it with semen and goat’s milk in which you’ve drowned three bats. . . I ordered mandrake from Amazon and buried it in the pet cemetery in our backyard, between the cat that lived for three years and the dog that did not even make it to one. My husband tells me, death cap mushrooms grow on the graves. In class, the homunculus sleeps while Indira guides us through deep stretches. During the Oms, I hear a scratching against the wood floor. When we’re in dead bug pose – I refuse to accept the new name of this position – hairy thighs run past. He runs past the woman who lost her husband in a boating accident, the woman whose mother had a heart attack, the woman whose son died of malignant melanoma. We are all women here, ghosts twinning us. Indira says we hold trauma in our psoas muscles. But I hold grief inside my entire body, in the blood vessels that once swelled, in the breasts I soothed with cabbage leaves, even on my palate, sucking the name I can never say like a piece of stale candy. My mandragora darts through Indira’s legs as she demonstrates reverse warrior, We are warriors, aren’t we, wonder women, amazons. The ponytail of a woman with unspecified grief brushes the ground as she folds into downward dog; he swings onto her hair like he’s Tarzan and relays onto her back. She screams. Everyone straightens to look at her. Even Indira stops murmuring Rumi. Some women’s psoas have already released their grief and they whisper through tears, What the hell is that? I know he’s a second-rate baby; he’s no looker. He doesn’t even have a head. He’s my newborn. The weight, the first and last time I held her. Please control him, Indira says, and I scoop him up in my arms. She says, Let us continue with the ending relaxation. She doesn’t say shavasana, corpse pose. I extend my legs up the wall, the pose advised for menstruating women, although I don’t have my period back yet. Legs up, keeps the semen in, I had told my husband. The mandragora writhes his fibrous limbs. Its toes are only narrow taproots. Perhaps I was naïve in making him. I open my mouth, suck him in, bite down on his limbs. He doesn’t fight me: my teeth are strong.
Lori Sambol Brody lives in the mountains of Southern California. Her short fiction has been published in Smokelong Quarterly, Tin House Flash Fridays, New Orleans Review, Wigleaf, and elsewhere. Her stories have been chosen for the Wigleaf 50 and the Best Small Fictions 2018 and 2019 anthologies. She can be found on Twitter at @LoriSambolBrody and her website is lorisambolbrody.wordpress.com.
