Talk Vomit

By River Allen

Once upon a time, a grieving couple fashioned a girl out of mud to replace the daughter they’d lost. For her bones, they used branches, waterlogged but sturdy. For her hair, they used bulrushes, woven in a crown. For her eyes, a pair of white stones from the creek that ran behind their little house. 

“She’ll wear our daughter’s clothes,” said the mother, as she dressed her. 

“She’ll have our daughter’s smile,” said the father, as he carved it. 

They laid her in their daughter’s bed and hoped that she would wake—and because grief can move mountains and rip the world asunder, after a time, she did. 

“Who am I?” Mud Girl asked, a frog-croak in her throat. 

“You’re our daughter,” the couple said, “and we love you.” 

As the years passed, Mud Girl got older, but she did not grow. All that she ate, she spat up in the garden after supper. Her parents gave her rules: smile like so, speak clearly, bite your thumb when you read. Laugh wildly, like you’ll never die. Do not go outside when it rains. 

At school, the other children pulled worms from Mud Girl’s ears and scratched her skin until it crumbled. “They say I’m made of mud,” Mud Girl wept to her parents. “Sometimes I wonder if they’re right.” 

The couple only laughed. “You’re our daughter,” they said. “And we love you.”

When Mud Girl slept, or pretended to sleep, she felt creatures wriggling in the soft soil beneath her crusted surface. She began to keep a cup of rainwater by her window, and drank from it in secret, though she did not know why. 

Every morning Mud Girl’s mother would brush and braid her reedy hair, weaving it with lavender to mask the smell of loam. “I spoke to the school nurses,” Mud Girl whispered one day, as her mother buttoned her dress and smoothed her collar. “They said I might be made of mud.” 

“Don’t be ridiculous,” her mother scolded. “You’re our daughter. And we love you.” That night they nailed her window shut so she could not taste the rain. 

As time went on, Mud Girl hardened. Her core congealed. Her surface dried. Her lips froze in a pleasant smile, like the portrait on the mantle that everyone said was of her. Her teachers praised her for sitting so still. Her parents posed her each morning in their daughter’s favorite chair, and crossed her arms as they laid her in her bed each night, planting kisses on her cracked and peeling face. The squirming beneath her skin slowed, and then stopped. 

“You look troubled,” said her father one day, as he glued her finger back on where it had snapped off at the knuckle. “What’s the matter?” 

“I’m made of mud,” Mud Girl rasped, mostly certain of it now. 

Her father scoffed. “A daughter made of mud. What kind of parents would we be?” “Unhappy ones,” Mud Girl replied. “But I wouldn’t blame you.” 

That night, a thunderstorm opened over the countryside like a torrent of tears. The windows of the tiny house rattled in the bitter wind, but held. Mud Girl rolled out of bed. She was heavy, like a brick, and dented the floor, but her parents did not hear her for the rain. They did not hear her as she fumbled to stand, as she opened the curtains, placed her hands on the shuddering glass. When she was younger, she had prayed that the water would find a way in, would bleed through the walls, the roof, the floor, would soak her heels and soften her heart, so she would not have to force her way out. So her parents could think she’d been stolen, or swept up in the current all daughters must someday set sail on. But the rain had never reached her, though she’d begged, though she’d pleaded, her throat cracking, thirsty. The rain had listened, but walls are walls, and no story can end without a fight. 

Mud Girl lifted her rock-hard fist and punched it through the window. The glass and her hand exploded. Light and dust and tendrils of old wood, worm bodies exhumed from the tomb of her skin. The rainclouds growled and laughed, a booming welcome. 

When her parents awoke in the morning, the river had burst from its banks to scoop chunks of their yard into the flood; their garden, their path, their daughter’s grave which they’d tended to so lovingly. And Mud Girl, never theirs to begin with, was gone, not transformed but returned to the silt and the soil, her bones and hair to fortify the homes of beavers and birds, her white eyes to drift downriver and settle at the bottom, pointed up.