Secreting our Skins

 The day my grandmother died, we discovered she was made of salt. We: my mother, my sister and I, the youngest of the three generations of women at eight years old. A seminal year already: I had won the sprint that only the boys had before, and my sister had begun high school. One of Lot’s wives, my mother did not tell us what happened to my gran after the discovery was made, but instead of an urn full of ash, she brought us back a large, clear jar, salt creeping to its brim, that never seemed to run out. Salt, self-replicating, like DNA or shadows. The week before I had sat at the kitchen table while my mother, a biologist, talked my sister through her homework, pretending to write while instead I listened, wide-eyed. Inside me were billions of decisions, collisions, taking place, and I had no say in them, I could only acknowledge they were taking place.

Five days after my grandmother died, my mother left my father. We left in the day, because my father was still at work. It felt wrong that we didn’t have to sneak out at night, that I couldn’t watch the water tower from the car window like a bulb in the moonlight as we pulled away, away, away, like a tide; instead, the sun was blinding and sweat kept dripping into my eyes, crystallising on the ledge of my upper lip and my dry, cracked lips. I rubbed it away with a rough fist. My uncut nails nicked a fleck of blood just under my left eyebrow. My sister shoved me over when I leaned on her; she beat me at snap, which wasn’t the only card game we knew how to play, but the only one we could work out how to play in a pair instead of a trio, and then, sighing, cracked open her book. Snap was too young for her; it was already nearly too childish for me. Our grandmother had taught us rummy and black jacks. She had just begun to teach us chess, watching from her seat at head of the table as we practiced moves on each other, but I still couldn’t remember which piece moved diagonally. Anyway, in the car the pieces would have got lost underneath the seat, would have dropped past our bare - and dusted - feet. ‘Dust’ is a contronym. I wrote that in my notebook when I looked it up. My mother had made ‘salt’ interchangeable with the verb. She had swept my grandmother up and away, and now she took the salt-ash and tucked it under the collars of our dresses, lined the soles of our shoes, plaited it into our too-short hair, touched it behind our ears like a tincture and rubbed it on our raw gums until it was all we tasted.

In the new town, my mother started working in a shop that sold food – rice and red lentils and walnuts - people came to collect in refillable containers. She couldn’t bear waste after we’d left the old house, as if the dividing of salt between her daughters had taught her how careful she needed to be with all other things that could be spilt. She laid the salt in thick lines of cocaine-white around the old wooden house we were renting on the edge of town, under the willow and magnolia trees. When there was wind, which was rare, it lifted their limbs and leaves and the salt rose and resettled as a white cloud. At night, salt rustled like a rattlesnake in our sheets as we turned, my sister’s body pressing against mine at midnight; even though the summer boiled like the hot kettle on the stove, I woke up thinking it had rained every day. I shook salt from between my fingers in the morning; I licked my collarbone to remember her and my sister, in the mirror next to me fixing her swimsuit, didn’t say a word. Everyone else whispered around us, like the salt whispered to the wooden floorboards when we walked across them for breakfast; the salt kept us safe until all we heard was the sound of its hourglass rush.

Eventually, my mother took us to the sea. We had lived in the town for nearly nine months, and we had still not gone to the water. My sister had started school and then finished, a month later, for the summer, and still had no friends. I’d been kept home and would start the year after, because I was youngest, and I think my mother couldn’t bring herself to part with both of us. We made teepees from branches in the forest behind our house and my mother taught me the words for every plant we saw. In the afternoon, as she lay, ‘too hot to handle’ as my sister called it, supine on the couch, fanning herself with some flyer that had been posted in at the door, I read her the dictionary. We laughed when I pronounced a word wrong. When my sister got home, she threw her schoolbag down, complained about the state of the house and lack of food, cycled to get groceries – fleshy oranges in wedding dresses of pith for breakfast the next day and almost-raw steaks with pepper for dinner. We didn’t, of course, need any salt. Ashes to ashes, flesh to flesh. Just before my sister’s school was due to start again, my mother heaved herself from her afternoon siesta and waved her arms about. ‘Tomorrow… we are going to the sea!’ She exclaimed, and even my sister looked up from where she was pretending to be alone in the corner with a book that had once been my grandmother’s. It was a book about sailing that she’d probably never read.

We wanted to lose our flesh, too, like our grandmother had done, like a snake fat and overfed in the split-egg-yolk sun, orange and gold. ‘Race you!’ my mother cried as she ran down the beach to where the waves began, like the skirt of my best lace dress. She looked younger, suntanned, dark hair loose round her face, a red bikini like a slash of sunrise on her skin. It was early in the morning; the beach was deserted. Still, she waited at the boundary for us, so we could all plunge in together, hand in hand. It was always us against the world, even when the world was sleeping. I pressed my face into my mother’s side, her soft sandpaper skin, held my sister’s hands under the water until there was nothing to hold anymore. We were draining away until we were nothing and everything and salt was everywhere

through the waves the salt semaphored like seeds

My mother called us back to ourselves. ‘My girls,’ she said, smiling, licking the salt from where it lined her upper lip like the icing sugar she had snuck in her own mother’s home, like white freckles or the coconut oil she scooped like vanilla ice cream into a tin in the shop to disintegrate. She dragged us down further, until the shore was disappearing and my vision was turning dark at the corners, like a night-sky, the one I’d wanted when we left, peeking in at us. We were not waiting to melt ourselves down to the core of ourselves like my grandmother. My mother took us to the beach to tell us there was no one to stop us being who we were. Except - my hands grasped at nothing as my mother and sister dissolved one last time

Why wasn’t I turning to something else, too? ‘Wait!’ I yelled. I wanted to get lost with my mother and my sister in the waves, but they hid themselves away in pockets of salt and I couldn’t find them even when I kept calling –

The paper nautilus builds her salt-thin shell around her body, secretes her eggs like she’d wanted to bury them behind a wall, and my mother, all my mother had wanted to do, was the same.

Now, they tell me it was a man who dragged me screaming and coughing up water and kicking, onto the shore. He must have been walking his dog past, or riding his bike to work the next town over. I imagine her, a child with red-raw scraped knees and a mouth open like a pink flower in fury, lungs and heart heaving, covered in her family’s ash under all that sea-salt.

Tilly Nevin is a graduate student doing an MPhil in Comparative Literature, researching mental illness in contemporary French literature and Iranian women's writing. She has also worked at a children’s museum, as a transcriber and a teaching assistant. She is published in uni publications, The Oxford Review of Books and Banshee Lit. She lives in Abergavenny, Wales.

Anthony Elliott is a queer film photographer based in Bristol. He enjoys collaboration, experimental photography, and shots of light on water.