1. Study of a Fruit: Inside every fig, there is a withered wasp larvae. The wasp pollinates the fig and dies cocooned in ripening flesh. When the fig is cut in half, cleaved sides of a jewel falling away, the larvae is curled inside like a heart. It’s a reversal of mothering, where the thing inside dies to give birth to something outside. Also it’s exactly like mothering that way.
When the wasp dies inside the fig, it's difficult to know exactly what the fig has become. It’s possible that the fig is a Frankenstein, made up of parts that did not originally grow together but now desperately need each other to continue existing.
Does the fig need the wasp like we need our heart? In this case, the fig may act as our mirror. Everyone is walking around with dead things inside us.
And who am I? Partly a studier of figs, of monsters, of mothers. All of the above, all there is. My face is partly obscured, but this is as much for your sake as it is for mine. I hope this makes what I’m about to tell you more tolerable. I hope this makes it easier to stomach.
2. Roots: The girl has never truly known what her father looked like. His face was waxy and often changed shape, sometimes a beaklike nose made up of all angles, sometimes paunchy and drooping, an endless melting distortion. He had a glass eye, which was the anchor to which his features moored themselves. Each morning he wore a new face, but it never worried the girl because she could always recognize him by his eye, rotating mechanically in its socket. He spoke every language in the world and used a different term of endearment for her every day, so she never knew which was his native tongue.
“Sweet chérie,” on Monday. This is French.
“Sweet querida,” on Tuesday. This is Portugese.
“Sweet gacaliso,” on Wednesday. This is Somali.
“I don’t understand,” the girl would say, and her father would smile, but it may have simply been his cheekbone softening into a sunken hollow.
The girl’s mother and father were in love, or they were afraid to be apart, which functioned about the same.
“You cannot trust a fixed face,” the girl’s mother used to say, but the girl suspected that she meant, “It is safer to love every face than just one.”
The girl and her mother looked nearly identical, even when the girl was small and could hardly reach her mother’s hand to hold. When the girl would smile up at the body she would eventually become, the body would reach down and gently brush her cheek. The girl was glad to know that she inherited gentle hands.
3. How to Hold a Hand Without Touching It: At night, the girl and her father slept with the light of the TV throwing daggers over their bodies. Her father was asleep in his chair, the right side of his face seeping to rest on his shoulder. The girl was falling asleep but made sure to turn her face towards her father like a flower to the sun so that he could know that he wasn’t alone in the room if he awoke.
4. Eve in Eden: Each morning, the girl walks by a gnarled fig tree wheeling up out of the concrete on her block. The tree doesn’t seem to know that it is much too large to be surviving in the city.
The figs hanging from the branches look her in the eye each time she passes. They are the promise of fruit, the promise of something sweeter.
5. Triage: When the girl finally reaches up to pluck a fig from the branches, a gaping maw opens up in her side, right below her ribcage. Water pours out and rushes over her shoes. She cannot breathe but she goes home and spends a night frozen on her living room floor. The next morning, a pool has collected on the floor and she sees her mother’s face reflected back at her, so she cuts a circle in her shirt around the leak so the side can flow freely. When her mother’s face begins to weep, the girl goes to a clinic.
“Does your breathing rattle?” the doctor asks. He keeps his mask up the entire time and he is holding a clipboard. “Does it sound like marbles at the bottom of a swimming pool? Or like wet yarn being pulled through a hole in a plastic bag?”
“Yes,” the girl says. “I think something is poisoning me.”
The doctor says, “Hm.”
He does not write anything down.
“I think the hole in my side is the problem,” says the girl. “It hurts like an emptiness.”
The doctor’s eyebrows knit. “Hm. It’s not serious.”
She wants to say: “I’m very serious about it.” Instead she leaves with a foiled packet of two Tylenol. Her shoes slosh with every step as her side continues to leak across the parking lot.
a. Actions Steps Following “Being Looked Through”
First, access a CAT scan machine. Crawl quietly inside. Take a peek at the happenings of your organs and tissues. Make sure to run all the appropriate tests.
A gaping maw in your side could be caused by anything, really. The only common denominator of this diagnosis is loss. A frequent misconception about loss is that it is an emptiness. What an elusive, oppressive, all-encompassing term, loss. An action and a noun, a word that is alive and animated by its fullness. Loss, then, must be an overflowing of want more than it is an absence of it.
6. Stray: The girl wishes she could unzip her body from throat to navel to relieve the hunger of the hole. Instead, she burns clothes. Clothes don’t actually burn anymore; everything is partly synthetic, so it mostly smolders and melts into a gnarled, twisted carcasse. She stands over the scorched heap on the cement at her feet and when it's finally cool, she can’t quite bear to leave it behind, all alone on the sidewalk. She carries it home with her and it leaves an acrid smell in her bedroom that lingers for several months.
7. [ ]
8. Vice, Virtue, Patience, or Paralysis: Now when the girl falls asleep under the light of the TV, she is alone, but she angles her face to the door just in case.
9. Repose: The water from the bath has tangled steam all the way up to the ceiling, and the girl lays under a sodden fog with her nose flush to the surface of the water. She has brought a bendy straw with her so that she can lay under the water and take agonizingly slow sips of air with the bathroom lights off, hearing only the hollow lap of water on the porcelain sides of the tub and the echoing gurgle of the drain begging hungrily in the darkness. The bathwater flows into the hole in her side and soothes the ragged flesh, filling the grotto right where her stomach sits.
10. Compromise: Time passes. Eventually, all the girl’s clothes have windows cut in the sides to accommodate the gaping maw. The edges of the hole become leathery. When she stands with her arms crossed, her right hand falls naturally into the concave opening. One day when she walks past an alley a few blocks from her house, she swears she smells rotting fruit.
11. What Happens When A Problem is Given to a Bystander: The girl stands in front of someone that she is suspicious of loving- after all, how to trust someone with only one face? They examine the hole with tender, probing hands and say, “It leaves something to be desired.”
The girl throws her hands up. “Exactly!” she says.
12. Cross-Contamination: No one wants to swallow a wasp, but it’s difficult to avoid. Figs are served in plastic containers at grocery stores and pair well with sharp cheeses and are mentioned 16 times in the King James Version of the Bible.
13. Weight of Contemplation: The girl considers leaving the straw out of the bath and letting the water fill her completely. There is something inside her, maybe an animal, that is writhing to get out.
14. Staying Power: In the end, she decides against it because the restless animal all bound up in her ribs calms itself for a beat. The girl’s heart slows to a normal rate.
15. We Are Unable to Meet Your List of Demands: In Christian mythology, Jesus of Nazarath curses a fig tree because it refuses to bear him unseasonal fruit. He names this refusal as a betrayal and condemns the tree to be barren. It is His right to be borne fruit; it is an act against God for the tree to refuse. In the end, the curse sets in and the tree spoils from the roots up.
But the fig tree and Jesus of Nazarath are bound to different gods entirely. The tree that does not exist in the same world that Jesus of Nazareth does, or at least it abides by different rules. The tree does not defy, or obey, or do anything but be a fig tree. The tree is ruled only by the sun and pollination of its fruit and the paths of the fig wasps, and it simply does not care for the wants of Jesus of Nazareth. Ultimately, it pays for this indifference in rot. An unfortunate turn of chance. The tree simply must not have known that its homeland was located in the dead-zone between resolve and self-destruction.
16. Log It, Mill It, Or Just Plain Burn It: Outside, the sound of blades grinding their teeth.
17. Knockoff: The girl feels an intense sadness and perverted satisfaction when she sees the fig tree cut bluntly at the roots. It was beautiful and it was her friend, but she is glad that she has endured the suffocating embrace of the city longer than the tree did.
18. Waking In a Dream: For many mornings in a row, the girl opens her eyes in a cloud. She has been wearing her mother’s face for weeks, or maybe months now. It is difficult to discern where she is, so she keeps a checklist folded in her pocket. It’s March. I don’t know my father’s face, but I can’t stop seeing my mother’s. When I look down, I’ll see a hole in my side, but that’s not cause for alarm. It’s March. This helps her get her bearings and keeps her whole body from ascending into the cloud around her head. This keeps her from unknitting.
b. Is it cowardly to tell you this story from a distance? Even now, I’m deeply sorry that I cannot reveal myself fully to you. In an effort to apologize, I’ll tell you a secret in a strikethrough. Someone once said to me, “Strikethroughs just make you want to read the line more.”
Maybe. But isn’t there something inherently manipulative and sneaky about a deliberately ineffective shroud, an omission that implies a kind of NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN carnival attraction? Isn’t there something insidious about the controlled laboratory of the page?
Anyway, a secret that was meant to be obscured never would've made it to fruition in the first place. The strikethrough implies being let in on a secret that’s already been released to the public. It’s a used-car-salesman-wink. It’s a tease. It’s a sales pitch.
I haven’t loved anyone like I did when I was 19. It made a Frankenstein of me. What a waste. It opened a hole in my side.
What exactly am I selling by admitting this to you?
It’s in this way that accidentally discovering a secret may be the closest you’ll ever be to yourself or anyone else. The lurking consciousness that slinks at the base of your skull and emerges only when your defenses have let themselves go lax at the same time that emotion swells in flux. A perfectly choreographed dance. Still, I’m deeply sorry. I am sorry I could not surprise both you and myself with a secret. Anyway, to let you in on a real secret would cause this story to rot. It would spark an apocalyptic end to my disguise. It would reveal my face to you fully.
19. Keeping Company: In an empty room, the girl is surrounded by her mother and her father and people she has suspiciously loved and above all else, the undying, lurking sweetness of budding fig blossoms.
20. Desire: Even with his seemingly unchecked fury, it is possible to sympathize with Jesus of Nazareth in his cursing of the fig tree. It’s not all that difficult to imagine a want so all-consuming that the only response to a denial is annihilation.
Anyway, wasn’t Jesus of Nazareth something of an unmoored child, too, not unlike the girl herself? Transported from a haven to a world of squalor and mess, abandoned by the family that promised to protect and cherish. Of course, he did eventually go home, despite all this. He must've forgiven.
c. [f]orgiveness. Think of a time you’ve forgiven. You will be submerged in the shame and utter despair that existed at the crest of the wrongdoing. It is of paramount importance that the badness candy-coats your grace and makes it palatable, in a sort of throat-choking way. Make sure you swallow fully before you speak again. There’s a power in extending mercy, but not while you’re gagging.
21. Mercy: During a trip to an Urgent Care Facility, it is finally easy to get a clear view of the hole in her side. From the weathered edges, small green buds have begun to crane their necks. They stretch their arms up and out. The girl dances delicate fingers over this fur of sprouts.
“I was trying to drown it,” she says. “I owe it an apology.”
The doctor’s pen hovers over the pad uncertainly. ““Probably just fluids and rest,” he says, shaking his head slowly.
22. Monsters, Mothering: Long before the death of the wasp takes place, there are first male and female fig trees with budding male and female figs, called caprifigs.
Male caprifigs are initially inedible, and require pollination by the female wasps in order to catalyze the growth of any fruit. The female wasps work their way into a caprifig violently, often losing their wings and antennae in the process. There, inside the darkness of the caprifig, they lay their eggs and die shortly after. When the wasp larvae hatch, the males mate with the females, then promptly eat their way out of the fig’s flesh. The male larvae usually die at this time. Slowly, the female larvae work their way out of the fig. Now fully grown fig wasps, the female larvae fly to other trees and work their way into other budding caprifigs, thus continuing the cycle.
But what is left of the mother, abandoned within the fig’s dark recesses?
d. Here, think of your own mother. How does she stand as you walk away from her? Like a wavering stalk of grass? Like a square of fabric sewn into a patchwork?
Inside the fig, an enzyme called ficain is produced. Ficain breaks down the proteins in the female wasp’s body and renders it into many fragments. It is in this way that there always is or was at least one female wasp inside each fig. With her remains no longer in question, she is swallowed by the fruit entirely.
Of course, a fig is not actually a fruit. It’s an inverted flower. When the female wasp dies inside this flower, it is always either of exhaustion or starvation, but it’s unclear exactly why the female wasp is compelled so strongly to pollinate the hidden flower in the first place. All this, for what?
Perhaps she is trying to draw herself close to what her body knows more than her mind does, the dense warmth of a time before her conscious life. She will be left completely undone by the fig, and yet she pursues this process endlessly.
23. Bearing Fruit: The girl’s face is now nearly indistinguishable from her mother and father’s faces. Her eye rolls in its socket. From the hole in her side, fig leaves have unfurled and caprifigs have begun to bud.
To cut the girl in cross-sections would reveal a thousand bodies, flaked sheet after flaked sheet documenting people who leave family behind, of people who leave mothers behind, of people who cross from one world into another and keep all their tightly compacted history shelved in a library of muscle and cartilage.
When the girl blinks, it is with her father’s eye.
24. Mary Shelley, or “Monsters, Mothering Part 2”: A frequently-searched question regarding Mary Shelley asks, “Did Mary Shelley write anything else?”
Meaning, perhaps:
How could a body housing the origin of Frankenstein’s monster possibly hold more?
Or…
2. Can a mother truly conceptualize, have, love, and raise a multitude of children? Can she know each one fully?
Shelley wrote several books besides Frankenstein and was known as a frequent editor to her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley’s romantic and philosophical poetry. She died at age 53 of brain cancer. She had three children, but perhaps more like four.
For certainly Frankenstein’s monster must have been loved by Shelley as a mother loves a child. To set a patchwork creature loose in the world without truly knowing it would be inhumane. But of course, this is exactly what mothering does anyway. Made up of a thousand stitches and miscellaneous parts, a child is set free and practically spills over their own edges.
h. Think of a time when you, like Frankenstein’s monster, like the fig tree, like the girl, have been colored by a bottomless want, an umbilical yearning for the open arms of a motherland. Think of a time that a hole has opened in your own side.
And who am I?