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Growing Life

By Annie ZH Sun 

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Lucy didn’t immediately notice her dead Mama in the middle of the playground. She had been busy having fun for the first time since Mama’s funeral. Sprinting like a bullet, she was a hand, a finger, a hair away from catching Evan, the fastest runner in her grade when something caught her foot, and she tripped face-first onto hard tarmac. A sharp pain split across her temple, and almost simultaneously, she felt the ground beneath her fissure. It was a tiny crack about the size of her pinkie, and she’d easily have missed it, except as warm blood trickled down her face, splattering across the black line, the edges of the earth seemed to pull apart, unfurling a hot stench so sharp that Lucy’s eyes watered. 

Around her, teachers and classmates alike were chattering, hollering and distracted. Nobody noticed she was hurt. She opened her mouth to get their attention. Her lips were glued tight together. No matter how hard she tried, she could not peel them apart. She turned back to the strange phenomenon, and watched, horrified, as the cracks continued to widen. With a hand cradling her injured head, she tried to inch away. By now the hole in the ground was cobra sized and deep within it, a bunch of crystals sparkled like the colour of sunlight caught under sea foams, a startling shade between teal and ice. Lucy’s heart throbbed in recognition. Those precious stones looked exactly like Mama’s favourite brooch, one she had personally pinned to the dress Mama was buried in. Caught in a trance, she let go of her still-bleeding head, and reached for the biggest jewel of them all; a golf sized aquamarine. 

The moment her blood stained fingers touched the stone, it became tender, dark and hot crimson. Pain shattered her left eye. Lucy screamed, and screamed, until all her teachers and classmates materialised by her side, until her throat went raw, but it still could not explain why, inside her fist, she was cradling her own eyeball, fresh, warm and perfectly round. 

By the time Papa arrived at the hospital, the medics were inserting prosthetic plastic into Lucy’s eye. Her own eyeball, which she continued hiding inside her fist, had clouded over, the roundness melting into gooey flesh. Blubbering and mumbling, she filled Papa in on her encounter in the playground, sketching out the details of the crevice. At the mention of Mama’s jewellery, Papa’s face turned into the colour of corpses. 

They visited Mama’s grave the very next evening. While Papa begged and threatened Mama’s spirit to rest in peace, Lucy suffered through the knife sharp pain under her left eyelid, and studied Mama’s tombstone with her remaining good eye. It was pristine and perfect, barely a month old, unlike the surrounding, weather-beaten graves. Yet, as she stared, the first splinter materialised across Mama’s name, only a sewing thread wide, but enough to emit the same stench. Before she could yell out warnings, the smell changed, growing richer, softer, the top note turning zesty and citric, carrying hints of lavender, cooking oil and baby powder. “It’s Mama!” Lucy cried in recognition, “Papa, Mama’s here!”

Papa half dragged a kicking, yelling Lucy back. “Stop it! Your Mama’s gone, do you hear me?” His voice was cold and clinical, the same tone he had used to address her right before Mama’s funeral, demanding her to behave. Lucy went silent under his gaze, but that did not stop the fissures from appearing. 

The crack, originally a hairline wide with many miniature splits, showed up again that same night while she ate her dinner. It opened up a black-blue line in her plate, growing bigger, revealing memories she alone shared with Mama. The jagged opening knew the taste of the midnight oceans—salty, seaweed tangy and faintly despairing—the night Mama had found out the truth. The night they had been on the beach.

Lucy had stared at Mama’s haggard face, and counted the blondes, the brunettes, the red-haired women Papa had been kissing for the past year behind her school parking lot. The line split apart further, revealing echoes of Mama’s sobs muffled under the blankets when she thought Lucy was fast asleep. “I’m sorry,” Lucy whispered, fingers dancing along the cracks, a useless flutter. Guilt painted her insides the same gangrene black.  “I’m sorry you were sad.” 

The lines widened and hummed in response, and stayed open across Lucy’s headboard, mumbling, whispering and still so sad. Lucy didn’t call Papa, and didn’t try to warn him again. Despite her stomach tightening in fear, and the goosebumps pricking down her arms, she tucked her eyeball— now a rotten lump that smelled—under her pillow and went to sleep for the first time with the reminders of Mama by her side. 

In the morning, the socket of her missing eye throbbed beacon hot. The cracks above her head had grown while she’d slept, and all that was left of her eyeball was a blood pink trail that disappeared right into the widest opening of the fissure. Disturbed, she dressed and left her bedroom as quickly as possible. The cracks crawled after her like fat scorpions. She tried to point them to Papa but he was on his phone, and as usual, busy. By the time they arrived at the principal’s office, the cracks were lizard big. They nibbled across the space between Lucy’s ankles as she pressed her ear close to the door and listened in. 

 “…cannot let her near the other children. Mr Wilson, you must understand, your daughter pried her own eye out with her bare fingers. I still have traumatised eyewitnesses to deal with. No pun intended there.”

Lucy listened to Papa plead, bringing in Mama’s death, Lucy’s trauma of discovering a stone-cold body lying in the overfilled bathtub. When none of that could stop her from an indefinite suspension until a therapist could provide a certificate proving the soundness of her sanity, Papa threatened to sue. The language he used was as colourful as the day he had stumbled into the bathroom and found his nine-year-old daughter cuddling a drowned corpse. 

Lucy didn’t mind staying at home. She hated school anyway, hated taking out her dried crackers in front of other children with loaded lunchboxes, hated teachers’ pitiful looks and the pity sandwiches she’d receive were always unpredictable in flavours. She especially hated the after-school gates flooded with enthusiastic parents. She used to be one of the last children to ever be picked up, and she’d spent that time pinning down her potential new mothers based on the other children waiting with her. Though that method wasn’t always accurate. Sometimes her new potential mother was the lady from the cheese counter, other times it was one of Papa’s co-workers who was particularly nice to her. Papa made her promise not to tell in the same way; a shower of presents followed by a series of the worst things that would happen should she disobey. 

She should’ve listened to him. Now, though she was no longer picked up late, she had no mother. It was her fault she had no mother. The crevices beneath her feet listened to her thoughts, and became the width and length of an angry snake, so large and sharp that Lucy grew afraid. Hands gripped into fists, she drew a breath, peered into it, words tumbling out of her mouth in an almost involuntary echo, “Mama? I’m sorry.” 

The jagged lines opened like a giant’s mouth, and through that dark, dark in-between, sprung a silent question. Lucy shook her head violently, legs scrambling back. 

The ground groaned and moaned and continued to grow, eating up the corridor, eating until it choked, and guttered, and began to gurgle. Lucy stared in horror as a bloated mass of limbs and torso began to climb out from the python-sized opening, leaving a trail of rotten and slimy skin. It reached for her ankle and this time, pity and understanding overtook her. Bending down towards the stench, she suppressed the bile rising in her throat, and whispered, “Mama?” 

The broken thing on the ground went silent. Beneath it, a scorpion sized fracture wiggled loose and spidered towards Lucy, pausing for a long second as if asking for permission. Despite the unease, she did not flinch this time. Not with Mama’s corpse looking so pitiful. Instead, she watched, fascinated and horrified, as the crack ran up her palm, then her wrist, finally digging into the tenderest flesh at her elbow. Lucy’s flesh parted and as rivulets of blood welled out, she glimpsed a flash of white bone underneath. That was when the organ-deep pain started, acidic and blade sharp, so intense that it knocked out all the air from Lucy’s chest. She clutched her arm to her chest and curled onto the floor, whimpering, pleading, begging it to stop. 

But those poisonous blue lines kept spreading across her body, cracking apart her arm, her ribs, her stomach, until Lucy was certain she turned into the same state as the corpse on the ground. She must be dead, which explained the singing. Even as adults poured out of swinging doors, their faces apprehensive, even with Papa yelling for her to get up, she heard singing. 

They rushed her to the nurse’s office, calling for ambulances and the ER and God. They attended to her flesh, with the skin and muscles open, curling outwards like semi-sliced prosciutto. They asked her how she had done it, what she had used to split her skin open, who, how, and why.

Lucy couldn’t answer. She bled, and bled, and apologised for bleeding. No matter how much anaesthesia they administered, she remained awake, single eye blinking into the operation light, her body feeling every stitch, her lips mouthing the lyrics her Mama’s voice sang.

After that, Lucy no longer saw the cracks, but they were there, right beneath the stitches. She could feel them wriggle, feel Mama grow. Papa came to visit her in the hospital ward twice a day. Lucy didn’t speak to him, barely noticed his growing concerns. She was busy growing life, becoming thinner, and thinner by the day. The doctors gave her more supplements, ran extra tests but could not find the problem. They wheeled her into the psychiatrist unit. By then, Lucy had figured out how to lie. With Mama’s voice guiding her, she found the exact right words to say. 

One morning right before visitation hours, she felt Mama’s physical presence for the first time. It was the spot across her ribs, between the stitches holding the seam of her skin closed, the first bud of a finger pushed out. Lucy half passed out in pain, but holding onto the rail of the hospital bed, she managed to haul herself up, and drag her body into the bathroom. She hummed and sang, soothing herself as Mama’s toe crowned out of her forearm. Lucy continued to sweat and labour, pulling deep breaths into her bleeding body. The black crevices danced across her broken skin, carrying the taste of earth and blood. When Papa’s voice called from the other side of the door, they scattered across the floor, making their way across the lock. Almost in mutual agreement, the bolt of the door unlocked, and Lucy called out weakly, “Come in.” 

Papa stepped in and gasped. He pointed at the puddle of blood, then at the sight of an oversized hand pushing out of Lucy’s side, ripping through bone and cotton, attempting to wriggle free. 

“It’s Mama.” Lucy explained. 

He squeezed his stomach and between dry gags of air, he turned and fumbled with the jammed bathroom lock, calling weakly, “H-h-help!” 

“They can’t help!” She hissed. “Can’t you see? I’m growing her back to life because I’m the reason why she died. I told her about you. I told her everything I wasn’t supposed to tell.” 

He went quiet. Trembling, he faced her, watching another finger break open her blood-slick flesh.  He began to sob, head shaking like a rattle drum. “That’s not your Mama! She’d never hurt you like that. We need you to be operated on. Whatever that is, we need to get rid of it!”  

“But she’s not hurting me.” Lucy said, “She loves me. In the exact same way you love me, the same way you loved her.” 

Papa’s eyes grew large, and larger as the cracks opened up towards him, slithering like nightmares over his shoe, his calf, finding home between his legs. Lucy crawled towards him and let Mama’s hand trap the scream inside Papa’s chest. “We can grow Mama back,” whispered Lucy. “Together.”

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Host Commentary

I was going to go all researchy on this and look into Chinese Gu spirits and talk about how they possess people and eat them from the inside out and try to sound all clever… but I’m not even sure that’s what’s going on here; in fact I’m not entirely sure it’s Lucy’s mother. So I threw all that away and asked myself, “How does this story make me feel?” Well. Here’s how I feel – horrified.

Of course, there’s the body horror, that’s the most overt.

I mean, in the first few paragraphs a little girl is having fun at school and then she falls over and hurts herself badly and then she PULLS HER OWN EYEBALL OUT OF HER OWN HEAD and oh man I did not see that coming! It really did give me a visceral reaction; I think I flinched and swore.

Then it’s all cancerous cracks appearing everywhere, eating the eyeball and infecting Lucy’s mind with memories of her mother and how sad she was. And Lucy comes to some kind of agreement with the… thing… and it invades her and then it’s all excruciating pain and chest-burtsy limbs and reaching toward Papa who, I think, does not have long.

But there’s another horror here, and that horror is guilt.

Lucy thinks this is all her fault. That if she never told Mama the things she wasn’t supposed to tell, none of this would have happened. And that guilt is so bad that Lucy will do anything to atone. Even let Mama–if it even is Mama–claw her way out of her own body. Because if Mama comes back, it’s all worth it, right?

And the last line is somehow the worst. “We can grow Mama back,” whispered Lucy. “Together.”

Annie and Yiun Yee–you’ve invaded my nightmares. Well done.