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Ready to be Seen

by K. J. Isley

My Soul-Ripening ceremony is over at last. The cake has been eaten, though not by me. The last guest bids me harmony and my mother politely ushers them out the front door. Since I had no list of friends to offer up, she invited my whole age set. I begged her not to, but she swept away my objections like so much unwanted clutter.

“The revelation of adulthood only happens once, Firin. I’ve watched you grow. Known you better than you know yourself all these years. This day matters.”

Even so, my mother demurred when they asked if she’d be presenting my Soulpiece during the gathering.

“Firin has always been modest. She will decide for herself who she wishes to share her soul with, now that she is eighteen.”

That’s when my fears coalesced into certainty. Whatever my Piece reveals about me, it must be terrible. Obligations finished, I retreat behind my bedroom door, pleading the need to arrange my gifts. After a suitable time, my mother taps for entrance. She weaves through the mess toward me, the sweep of her neat skirt skillfully missing every obstacle, her dark hair coiffed and perfect. She cradles my Soulpiece in work-worn palms.

Those hands are the only part of her that betray how hard she toils, how much she suffers. Sewing fine gowns for the wealthiest families. Keeping every corner of our house–except my room–immaculate.

“People discard what is out of place, Firin. Belonging is everything.”

I can still feel the ridged texture of her fingertips digging into me. The way she pinched my chin, twisting my neck to face her.

“This is the only way to keep you safe. Do you understand?”

My mother knows well how to mimic class. Has been clawing a pathway into it for her only child since my no-good father forgot his way back home again before I’d yet turned four. She often tells me how the truth doesn’t matter, only what people believe.

She drops to our neighbors that he was lost in the war. A patriot. And though she’s constantly in motion, though she counts the exact amount of every coin for the dreams it can buy, she manages to portray to others a life of quiet ease. Because of her formidable efforts, the only thing standing in the way of my success is me. She never lets me forget that.

“Happy Ripening, Firin,” Mother says, her weak eyes teary–those eyes that never saw me clear, in spite of her claims. “You are a woman today. I pass the guarding of your Soul into your keeping.”

I haven’t even gotten the woman part right, for though the world calls me a lady, I’ve never felt much like it at all. I want to look away, but she’s standing expectant, holding out the soul sculpture that appeared in her bedchamber on the day I was conceived.

It is my essence. It grows as I do, dictates who I will become. I don’t want to look at it, let alone touch it, but I can’t bear to disappoint her. I open my hands. My mother places the sculpture between them. With this passing of responsibility, the ritual of my coming-of-age is complete.

I think she will leave–she loathes the chaos I live in–but she sits next to me on my bed, back against the wall for a moment, facing the window opposite. I appreciate the gesture. Sitting side-by-side, rather than face-to-face, has always been most comfortable for me.

“You are so precious, my darling. Now you can see for yourself what your willful neglect has done, though I’ve tried to prevent it. Your Soulpiece will be your guide now–handle yourself with care.”

The comforter beneath us is twisted and rumpled, mangled beyond redemption in my nightly wars with it. Needle sharp feather quills poke from soft fabric, a last-ditch attempt by the comforter, perhaps, to fight back for the misuse it receives from me. I wonder if the comforter still remembers the plushness and promise of its days in the shop, where it was fresh, airy, new. Or further back still, if it remembers when it was uncut fabric and might have been shaped into anything.

My mother looks to where the blanket twists a snake between us, distaste marring her careful features. She runs the fabric between expert fingers, noting the loosened weave. Pointedly, her gaze shifts to the drab, misshapen figure I’ve hidden from sight between my coltish knees.

Her look finishes the thought better than any word she might utter. Ugliness is what results when I struggle against the shape she’s tried to teach me.

She nods once before rising. For her it is settled. She imagines, in her competence, that with her point now made the rest is easy.

Mother is not wrong in her unspoken judgement. The items in this room, selected by her and rich with potential, suffer beneath my treatment. I worry and wring them into shreds, fiddling to hide inside them, to feel their textures on my face and in my palms.

I suppose this is why my Soulpiece, at first glimpse, matches none I’ve ever seen before. It’s nothing like the graceful figurines that stand on windowsills across the township, displaying the rightness of the people to which they’re bound.

Elegant peacocks, fairies, perhaps unicorns for the women. For the men: dragons, eagles, wolverines. There are humbler shapes in many households of course, but they’re hardly aspirational. Except in comparison with what I now hold.

Mine is twisted. An oblong shape, unrecognizable as anything. Perhaps a hunk of deadwood, or a tuber that’s never found soil rich enough to thrive. Its only detail: uncanny mismatched eyes, with no notion what to look away from for tact or propriety.

A terrible idea streaks through me as I stare into the shame of it, as my mother rustles her skirt to the door. This–this thing…if I can carve it until it looks like one of the others, it might resolve whatever has always been wrong with me.

My Soulpiece shivers beneath my sweating palm. I can feel its horror at the mutilation I’m considering. My knuckles turn white with it.

Cutting directly into a Soulpiece once its birthing is completed–I don’t know if it’s ever been done.

I clear my throat to speak. The moisture has fled, as if the mere notion of hacking up my errant soul has sucked the juices out of me, and my words come thick. My mother pauses, waiting for what I will offer her.

“I’ll do my best, Mama. To make it better.”

Her smile crinkles, lightening her face. Watching and worrying over my Soul all these years has been hard. For the first time, I see the weight she has carried because of me lifting.

She looks like the sunrise. Whatever it takes, it must be worth it for that smile. She flits back to drop a kiss on my temple.

“Your best is all I’ve ever asked, Fir. You’ll be amazed how a little effort will transform everything. Before you know it, we’ll be putting your Soulpiece up in the window for some handsome gentleman to fall in love with!”

She sings the last few words in an exuberant soprano, dances a wedding dance leaving the room. The blood flees from my cheeks at the notion of any man’s hands on me, but I glare down at my Soulpiece, scolding the lump that once I’ve repaired it, I’ll feel different about that too.

*

The only furniture in my room that has weathered my violence unharmed sits in the corner. A mahogany desk, once housed in a palace on the continent and shipped to our little town by my mother on the eve of my 16th lifeday.

It is filled with hidden compartments, covered in artists’ carvings. A fanciful Poseidon rules over its aquatic theme. It has mermaids for legs. Coy fish for drawer-handles. No matter how I prod and pet them, they never seem to mind.

Mama saw the wistful quirk of my mouth when I looked at it, how I ran my finger across its bronze gilding, imagining myself diving into the magical waters it depicts. It was enough to make her decide I should have it. I know what it must have cost her, but she loves me that much.

I settle into the spindly, barley-twist chair that stands in front of it, laying out my tools across green and gold leather. Paper, ink, a fountain pen, a pocket-knife, still sharp after all these years, ready for whittling hardwood.

The knife, with its mother-of-pearl handle, is the last remnant of my no-good father. He carved such animated figurines that–looking at them when I was young–I almost believed he must be a Lifebringer.

After he left, I imagined he’d been called to join with the other Soul Singers and Carvers in their distant tower on the mountain. Men and women who pluck the essence of unformed souls out of wisping clouds. Moonbeams. Lightning. Their breath and vision work together to shape each new life’s potential before they whisper the Piece out into the kingdom, its nascent shape telling it where it needs to reappear.

Better this unlikely tale than the truth: my father left because of me.

My mother speaks of my precious, babbling, baby-self often. Avoids mentioning the year I fell silent. Only on her bleakest nights, when the coins are light and the work heavy, does she break for a moment. When I’ve driven her to distraction with my infinite obsessions or rocked my body for peace in strange contortions beyond her strength to ignore. Then she abandons all pretense.

On those nights, her proud face crumbles in momentary defeat. She pleads with me. Grabbing my hands, crushing them as she speaks her despair over how, for so long, I wouldn’t even look at her. How alone I make her feel.

“Just tell me what to do for you, Firin! Tell me how to fix it!”

I put my Soulpiece down behind my tools, my hands splayed to either side. My feet rub, one across the other, rhythmic beneath the desktop. There’s a special compartment that pops out from the central curve when a lever is released. I gather my thoughts, pick up the fountain pen, dip it in ink.

I will write a list of my strange truths and mismatched musings. Hide them in the secret drawer and forget they ever existed. Even as I’m desperate enough to risk my soul for my mother’s happiness, some perverse part of me cannot bear to lose these. I don’t know where to begin, so I start with anything.

Clothing is ridiculous. Especially when it is hot outside or when one is in the water. I don’t want to be forced to wear clothes when I swim in the lake.

Once I give myself permission, the ink flows from my pen in a turbulent cascade. I’ve been holding back this flood for years. I write how I have no use for gender, how I wish I was a tripod fish or sea hare. How mudfish are unequivocally the most fascinating water creature I’ve read about. I confess to contemplating their complexity for hours at a time. More and more. A list with no end.

My Soulpiece softens. Shimmers. Grows almost liquid. As if the writing alone will coax some deeper shape to emerge.

Whatever it would be, I know it is unacceptable. I ignore the Figurine, along with the pounding longing that wails against my stomach, urging me to act out my forbidden thoughts. Filling page after page until I am done, I fold the papers and stuff them in the back of the drawer.

Moving down to the rug, I raise the knife above my Soulpiece, letting it hover as I sort through memories of the most wonderful sculptures I’ve seen. Who do I want to become?

I found it so easy to scribble all the things I’ll be discarding, but now I realize I’ve no notion what would fit me best if I shed those things.

Stretching after an answer, my fractured mind only finds my mother. Her sleek confidence. The way she blends effortlessly with everyone she meets. The way she loves and protects me.

I recall that during the year I spent in silence, she would squat next to me where I rocked, sometimes talking to me for hours. Soft. Slow as a creeping vine. Like she knew that any loud or unexpected noise might hurt me.

When my rhythmic movements became wild enough that they might hurt me, she would rock with me, just the slightest bit, in echoed solidarity. Mirroring. Calming me back to the present. Reaching me wherever I’d gone.

I think of how before she brushes my hair each morning, she sings a nonsense song about tangled weaves. The same one every time. Then starts to comb at the lowest tip so it never hurts. I never even think to scream.

There are so many things she notices and tends to. Food for my hunger, warmth for my skin. I love the straining electricity beneath her placid surface whenever she intends to fight for me.

What kind of Soulpiece is she?

With shock, I realize I’ve never seen it. Mama doesn’t display her Soulpiece on our windowsill the way most people do. Either because of her misdirection, or as a result of my own self-absorption, I’ve never thought of this before.

Flipping through her different faces–she could be anything. But I remember a tale she used to tell about an ugly duck, and decide I will carve myself into a swan.

Keeping my blade steady, I lower it toward my amorphous shape. The Soulpiece writhes, resistant. Makes itself slick trying to slip away. Pulses like a heart. Wails in my mind like a desolate child.

I prick its surface. The door of my room opens. I look up, startled.

My Mother stands there on the threshold, frozen, holding a piece of Lifeday cake on a tray. I hide the knife behind my back. Bob up then down again, tucking the Soulpiece beneath my skirt. But she has seen.

Her eyes widen, tears leaping into them. Her lip trembles.

“Firin, no…” she breathes.

She shakes her head: angry, I think. Her expression is twisting, saying so many things that I can’t track them. She thrusts out her hand. When I hesitate, she rattles it, widening her palm. The crackling stillness of the rest of her body punctuates the command. Her voice goes sharp.

“Now!”

Shamefaced, I bring my clenched fist out from behind my back, exposing the knife I’ve tried to hide. Her lips, thin before, disappear completely. She strikes for the blade, snatching it away from me. Stumbles to the window, blind to the piles in her way.

Clothing scatters. An errant ceramic bowl breaks beneath her heel. She braces on the wooden sill, yanking up the lower sash. It squeals a protest as the swollen wood threatens to splinter. Once she gets the window open, she reels back her arm and launches the pocketknife out of it.

I’ve never seen her like this. Not even during those nights of desperation. I pinch the soft place between my thumb and forefinger. Begin rubbing.

She turns her back. Strides out the door, leaving me alone. I stumble to my feet. Hear crashing from her bedroom. The sound of things breaking. Her neatly constructed world, thrown in disarray. She is back before I can wonder, holding a figurine, her shoulders quivering.

“This is my Soulpiece, Firin. Look at it!”

The first thing I see is its elegance. A swan, like I’d imagined. Every detail, from the arc of its s-shaped neck to the bristling spray of feathers on its outstretched wings speaks of beauty and mastery. It glides across an invisible surface in the moment before flight.

But looking closer, dark splotches mar its body. The curve of its beak is unsteady; the tip of its tail covered in white-speckled mold. The smell of wood rot wafts into my nostrils as she thrusts her Piece toward me.

“My parents,” she spits the word, “hired your father to come and re-carve me in secret while my Soulpiece was still in their keeping. You know what a talented artist he was–they thought no one would know the difference. They said I would thank them later. With the shape he made me into, there’s hardly enough left of me to disagree.”

Her voice is flat. Dead as the life she’s describing. As if even now she can’t break from what they made her into.

“The pain, it’s almost intolerable. I think my parents eventually realized their mistake. But it was too late to change it.”

The second I touch my mother’s figurine I want to rock with a ferocity I haven’t displayed in years. Its texture is awful. Writhing. Wrong. I’m holding an animated corpse. The impression of bleak despair fills my body. A desire to escape. A terrible hunger that can never be filled.

Except the wings. The wings are alive. Magnificent, but disjointed from the rest. Belonging to a different creature long since erased. I put the desecrated Soulpiece down, scrambling to move away from it.

My mother nods, closes her eyes, plucks at her skirt self-consciously as if my reaction is all she deserves. I want to take it back but can’t bring myself to get near the thing again. With a jerk, she kicks it beneath my bed, and I flinch.

I wonder what she would have been. Those wings… I think of the electric straining I sometimes sense when I’m around her. She would have been something fierce. With a sharp beak. Razor claws.

The self that was taken–her feelings and passion–my heart breaks realizing that in my memory, she’s only ever expressed real emotion when something is related to me. Her soul grew its love for me after the violation was complete. Perhaps because of that, she can find a fragment of her lost self in it.

She starts pacing, tearing at her perfect hair, her voice rising in a shriek.

“I married your father because he was the only person who could ever love that.”

She gestures wildly towards my bed, where the maimed, half-dead thing, still pulses wrongness from beneath its frame.

“Your father was an arrogant man. When he looked at me, all he saw was himself. His dreams of becoming a Soul-carver fulfilled.”

I am horrified. So sad for her. But angry at her, too. What happened to her was awful because it wasn’t her choice. She shouldn’t use it as an excuse to take my choices from me.

Her Soulpiece is lovely if you don’t get too close. She only worries that no one will want to marry me. But Soul-bonding doesn’t matter. She matters–making her proud. She’s stealing my only chance. No matter what I do, I disappoint her.

Desolation makes me defiant.

“But it worked, didn’t it?! You’d like me better if I was more like that!”

I point at the bed. She cringes, shaking her head in denial, but I am not through.

“Why else do you hide me from everyone?!”

Then my greatest secret shame,

“Why else did papa leave us?”

My mother huffs out a breath, as if I have punched her in the stomach. Her self-righteousness deflates. She collapses boneless onto my bed.

“Your father didn’t abandon us, Firin. I kicked him out, terrified he’d re-carve you too. I swore I’d protect you. I know how cruel people can be. I thought I could teach you to hide, so no one would ever…”

She looks up at me, back straightening, temper flaring once more.

“But it’s all happening again, only worse! Better to show them everything than ever think of doing that to yourself!”

“If you really knew me, you wouldn’t say that!”

I’m yelling. Cornered. Desperate to make her understand. To hide from her at the same time.

“Of course I would! You think I don’t know my own daughter? What is so terrible I wouldn’t accept?!”

Before I can think better of it, I storm to my desk, slamming my fingers to release the secret lever. As it pops open, some internal mechanism snaps and I know I won’t be closing it again. I smash the pages toward her chest, anger and shame thrumming through me in equal measure, daring her to read them.

She clasps them like they are something precious.

The room is still, save the rustle of paper. She flips through the pages, her eyes caressing each line. I examine her face, her posture, but I can read nothing. When she’s done, she lets her hands drop to her lap looking up at me. The silence stretches between us. At last, I can’t take it.

“Well?!”

I will burst if she doesn’t say something. I’m replaying all the worst things I wrote. Any moment, she will go find that knife and hand it back, letting me finish what I started. She clears her throat. Is silent again for a long beat.

Then…

“No clothes at all in the lake?”

I cross my arms.

“None.”

Air escapes from her nose in a low hiss.

“…Alright then.”

She gestures to my Soulpiece where it lies on the floor, waiting until I lift it, then stands and strips off her kirtle, her undergarments, shedding all her layers of craftily tailored guilt until they lie discarded.

“Mother! what are you doing?!”

She raises her chin.

“I’m going for a swim. I was wondering if my–offspring–would like to join me?”

She looks at me with such love. The same way she’s looked at me all my life. But now she knows everything. Now, I can believe her.

I crouch down, fishing her Soulpiece from beneath the bed to give it back to her. The beak looks sharper, straighter, more defined. The neck has compressed slightly, appearing a little sturdier. Like maybe, despite all she’s suffered, her true soul is still in there, fighting toward the surface.

I’m unbuttoning the front of my own stained dress, my bony elbows fighting the fabric, straining to be free of it, when a sound escapes my mother’s throat. I pause, worried. She breaks into bubbling laughter.

“Firin, your Soulpiece!”

It doesn’t look so different. The eyes are the same, the oblong shape. Now though it has grown whiskers. Smoothed out. I stare at the lines of a gaping alien mouth thrown wide open. It has grown fins. A tail.

Mudfish are the only aquatic creatures that will survive for extended periods outside their natural element. They can live away from the water for weeks or months in a state of partial hibernation. They squeeze into small spaces, bury themselves in damp leaves, until the end of a dry season, when they emerge again and thrive.

“I read somewhere,” mama says, “That mudfish are, unequivocally, the most fascinating water creature.”

“You don’t think it’s ugly?”

“I think…” She reaches out and takes the Soulpiece, examining its needlelike teeth, its scaleless hide, “I think it might be the most beautiful animal I have ever seen.”

She sets it out on my desk beside her own figurine. As if she is proud of it. As if she wants everyone to see.

It looks right at home, blending with the aquatic theme.

The strangest sensation. A feeling of belonging. Of knowing how things fit together at last, tingles across my naked skin. The surface of my Soulpiece shimmers. As if to say, the dry season is over, and there are future shapes inside me, just waiting to be revealed.