Lu breaks things. She has broken things since she split her mother open and pulled herself down into the world, though she doesn’t remember the moment. Her sister, Vivian, doesn’t either, and she was there—already a woman by the time Lu was born, already known throughout the valley for her skill with a needle and thread. They remember only on Lu’s birthday, when they visit the grave mounded up at the bur oak’s base.
Every year, the same. There’s a cake soaked through with honey. Berries drowned in cream. Vivian swaddles a slice in parchment, and they carry it down the hill, arrange it like an offering on their mother’s headstone. To Lu this feels like taunting, though she never says so. She leans against the oak and snaps twigs into slivers and watches her sister paw at the grave, sinking her arms in up to the elbows. When Vivian finds what she’s looking for, she holds it up for Lu to see: a fleshy orb the size of a shooter marble, slick as a skinned plum beneath the clotted dirt. A memory, Vivian’s, extracted from her chest the day Lu was born.
Lu is always struck by the smallness of it, the plainness, like any old pebble plucked from the river. But then she looks closer and images blossom across the memory’s surface. Vivian’s hands, spangled with scarlet. A sewing needle blanching in a blue-throated flame. And their mother, her body already still, already shed, a carapace only shaped like the thing that once was living.
Lu never looks away. She watches herself, the sister who breaks things, slip between her mother’s thighs, gelatinous and mewling. She watches Vivian, the sister who fixes things, fail to mend what mattered most.
When the memory is replanted and their mother’s grave patched up, Vivian takes Lu’s arm and leads her home, and they forget. It’s safer there, she says when Lu asks why. Memories don’t keep when they’re constantly handled.
Lu has seen twelve summers—a dozen sirings and shearings in the neighboring pasture, a dozen solemn exhumations of the memory—enough to know that there is an ache at the core of everything, a low and hollow sting that flows through her when she holds her breath and listens. She listens for other things, too, like the hens announcing their eggs, or the gate announcing a villager has come to collect their garments. Lu isn’t allowed to help. Eggs crack when she gathers them in her skirt. Thread snaps when she winds the bobbin. So she sits outside Vivian’s window and listens to visitors come and go. She hears the tick of Vivian’s knitting needles, the rasp of Vivian’s scissors. She hears the brittle shrill of housewives, the squeals of their children, the smothered laughter of their men.
One day Lu hears Vivian’s laugh, bright and jangling, like the bells the farmers hang from lambs’ throats when they’re big enough to wander. She peers over the sill and finds everything where it should be. Vivian’s needlecase, unfurled on the workbench. Vivian’s sewing basket with its pincushion lid. And then Lu sees something else. A man. She knows at once that the man is no local farmer, no hen-pecked husband. His clothes are too crisp and his cheeks too clean, cleaner even than the families who drive through the valley on holiday, their shining faces pressed against the car windows. Vivian stoops to measure his sleeve and the man’s uncalloused hand alights on her hip. She flutters her lashes, laughs again.
Come with us to the city, Vivian says to Lu a month later, checking her teeth in the mirror, dabbing perfume at her wrists, her neck. We’ll make such fun memories, she says, but Lu doesn’t want to leave the old ones, so she sits outside the window and breaks the dirt up with her fingernails and watches Vivian vanish over the hill like she’s flinging herself from a sinking ship.
Lu sits. She listens. Above: the vacant murmur of raindrops on the windowsill. Around: night insects humming themselves awake. She finds a rock the size of a memory and cradles it in her palm. She sends the rock through Vivian’s window. The shatter ripples down into the valley, startling a pair of mourning doves from the bur oak’s branches. It doesn’t summon her sister.
Lu takes the sewing basket from Vivian’s closet. It’s early morning, still raining, a sanguine light congealing on the horizon when she reaches the grave. As she digs, she pictures Vivian’s extracted memory, relived and reburied twelve times over, souring in the ground right beneath her, in that shallow but uncrossable space between her breathing body and her mother’s breathless one. This time, she doesn’t dig it up. She fishes the scissors out of the basket. She uses them to break herself open.
Lu finds the memory of Vivian leaving and pries it loose, ignoring the pitiful way it pulses in her hand. She feels lighter for it, buoyant, dizzy with relief once she’s free of the weight. But there’s a lesson she learned from Vivian, one she won’t soon forget: plucking out a thorn doesn’t guarantee the wound will heal. What good had it done her sister, to rid herself of a painful memory but refuse to uproot the good ones? To leave fragments of their mother festering in her chest? Vivian left as soon as she got the chance, and to Lu that meant only one thing: she had never forgotten, not fully. Had never forgiven Lu for what she broke.
One by one, Lu removes the memories of her sister. The glutinous lumps spasm in the soil like earthworms stranded on asphalt. She nestles each one in the hole. She rakes the dirt over top. She is careful not to crush them.
There’s an emptiness beneath her ribs. A puckered scar at her sternum. Lu ghosts from room to room in the hilltop house, nagged by the thought that there’s something she has forgotten, that she was dreaming a dazzling dream, but it dissipated the moment she opened her eyes. The pantry is empty by the end of the season. She stares into its gaping maw and tries to remember where the deflated sacks and hollow canisters came from. She eats eggs, crushing the shells to pieces, breaking the sunny globes up with a whisk. The hens watch her with eyes not unlike the empty pantry: wide, waiting. When winter comes the hens stop laying, and then she breaks them, too.
Winter brings another birthday. There are no eggs for a cake. No cream. Lu wanders to the bottom of the hill, stopping to rest on the oddly-shaped boulder at the bur oak’s base. A feeling burrows into her like a root tunneling through dirt—restless, thirsty—and she drums her heels against the stone to drown it out. Shards of rock chip off around her feet, settle on the swell of earth beneath her. Lu relishes the release. She kicks harder and hears a crack; her boots come away tacky. Golden liquid seeps from the boulder, pooling at its base.
Lu cups a hand beneath the trickle. She brings it to her mouth. Honey, unmistakable. A slightly-singed sweetness that clings to her tongue. It tastes like caramel. Like sadness. It tastes like a dream she can’t quite remember.
Palms sticky, scar prickling in the center of her chest, Lu drinks her fill.
Spring, and new lambs are fitted with bells in the pasture. Morels join the honey in the pantry. An old woman arrives at the top of the hill. Vivian, the woman says, she mended it last year, and presents a tattered winter coat. Lu doesn’t recognize the name, but three fat coins shimmer in the old woman’s palm, and there’s a sewing basket tucked away in the spare bedroom. Lu takes the coat, the coins. Pockets the promise of more when the woman returns.
She finds the spare room open wide to the forest. Broken glass like crooked teeth above the windowsill. A breeze licks through the house, fringed with the damp of coming rain. There’s an answering twinge in her ribcage, a muffled motion beneath her scar, but she can’t recall why the window shattered.
Lu retrieves the sewing basket. She chooses a sturdy-looking thread and the needle with the widest eye. Can’t make you look worse, she says to the coat, and the coat says nothing, so she buries the tip of the needle in the wool. When she finishes, Lu examines her stitches, precise and somber as ants in a line, and the image makes her suddenly aware of her solitude, of the fact that she must have once belonged to a colony of her own, hemmed in.
Her scar itches. An almost-remembering; a phantom limb.
Lu finds a knitting needle in the sewing basket. Her arms lift up and jerk down again. The needle snaps over her thigh.
Liquid gushes from the wood, gleaming white, streaming down her forearms, dousing her anger. A tide of longing wells up in its place. She closes her eyes, tries to pinpoint its source. The longing has a taste—milk, sugar—but Lu can’t give the longing a smell, a shape, can’t ascribe to it any sort of logic, and so she decides it must be nothing more than that unavoidable ache, the one that trickles like an underground stream through all the world. She collects the cream until her cup is overflowing, until it runs in pearlescent ribbons down the sides, and when she drinks she doesn’t stop until her stomach bulges, until she can almost pretend the empty space inside her is filled.
The days are quiet, long, sometimes serene, and always lonely. Lu fixes frayed hems and loose buttons for the tired housewives who show up on her doorstep. The old woman returns, and she exchanges the coat for another coin, a jar of the honey for two more. When there’s nothing left to mend, she sits beside the broken window. She stares at a photograph tacked above her bed. Women, she thinks, but their features are fuzzy. No matter how long she looks, she can’t make them out. Looking at the photograph makes Lu’s scar itch. Looking at the photograph is like wading in a river, slippery creatures darting around her ankles, skittering away too fast for her to catch.
Spring shudders up the hillside, scattering berries across the yard. Another woman arrives on Lu’s doorstep. Her coat is sharply tailored, each stitch an obedient ant.
I shouldn’t have left, she says. I’m sorry, she says.
What needs mending? Lu asks, and when the woman laughs the sound is tinny. Bright as a jangling bell.
I should have guessed, says the woman, grabbing Lu’s hand. I was the one who taught you to forget.
They stumble down the hill, hand in hand, and find the forest ribboned with frostweed, the honey frozen in delicate needles along the edges of the boulder. Lu waits, watches, as the woman rakes through the dirt. And then the woman rocks back on her heels and Lu sees what they’re supposed to be searching for: a cache of memories, shriveled as seeds, small and discolored where they huddle in the ground.
One by one, Lu picks them up. Examines them in her palm. Remembers.
Vivian, sewing; fingers blurring over gingham or linen or lace. Vivian, baking; drizzling honey, pretending not to notice swiped spoonfuls of cream. Vivian, always mending, always making, moving gently through a world Lu can only seem to break.
Something feverish foams over inside her and, in half a heartbeat, time spiraling into itself, Lu snatches the memories and throws them as hard as she can, flinging them out into the gloom of the forest, where they roll beneath rotting logs and rumpled leaves and wink out of sight.
The woman takes Lu gently by the wrist. She marches up the hill, walking right in when they reach the house, ignoring Lu’s startled bark. In the spare bedroom, she looks at the broken window but says nothing.
The woman retrieves the sewing basket, the scissors. Shrugs off her coat. Lu can see the warped seam of a scar beneath her collar. The sight of it makes her own scar throb. She feels a pressure where the emptiness used to be —a fullness that builds and builds, and then: rupture, release, tears spilling from her eyes and into her mouth. The taste, Lu realizes, is different than she expected. Salty, yes, but satiating. Undeniably sweet.
I’ll share some of mine, the woman says. Won’t be the same. But it’s a start.
And she drives the scissors down into her breast.