The Generations of Clementine - a short story

When I am born, my mother names me Clementine.

            My mother’s name, too, is Clementine. As her mother’s had been before her, and her mother’s mother’s, and hers, and on, and on. Clementines passed down through the ages, from seed to fruit to rot and round again.

My mother tells me of how I’d grown from the old citrus tree in the yard and how she’d wandered barefoot through the weeds and tallgrass toward me, hopping stones and branches, untended from the months before. Bright orange cheeks gleamed at her from the branches amidst my brothers and sisters – plumper and far riper than any of the others. I was the only child bore that summer. Grown from the citrus tree.

She speaks, drooling from vivid lips curled, of how she’d taken hold of my flesh with gentle hands and dug her nails deep in the skin of my body to pierce. How the sour juice poured! She cries. Dripping like nettles and hellfire, sopping down her wrists as she tugged. Oh, Clementine. She strokes my cheek with a fine-shaped nail. How you wailed! Wailed and wailed and I knew you were alive.

She plucked me down and carried me inside in a patched-up wicker basket that has been surviving in our family since long before my mother and long before her mother, and her mother’s mother and hers, and on, and on. She’d always wanted a daughter, my mother. A sweet little girl of her own grown ripe from the family tree. She need not worry about raising a son, she tells me – stirring honey into tea with a rhythmic little clink as she does every noon – the tree has never been known to bear a boy. And of course, it hadn’t; all Clementines are girls after all.

--

It is late one night, when my mother thinks I am sleeping deeply, that I watch her peel her own skin off in the lone glow of the bathroom light. I watch her from the crack in the door beneath the hinges as she weeps. Ragged breath stifling the sounds of her clawing, as she grows from methodical in her effort to desperate and bold. Festering. Sourness oozes from the patches ploughed in her face like farmland. It is there that she waits for father, naked and skinless and freshly prepared for seed. He sows streaks that drip down to pool in the dip below her throat; her lips bitten bloody. It is the first time that I wonder why she would endure all that she had from him just for the chance to have me.

  In the morning, her skin is raw and crusted over – dried from the exposure to air. She tells me that father is leaving, and I wonder if she means it this time. I don’t ask her for the truth. In a way, we both know that the wish had flown the moment it had left her lips. She says no more about it and turns her back to me to wash yesterday’s dishes. I pretend not to notice as she cries.

--

You are all that I have, Clementine. My mother tells me one night, tucking the sheets in around me. I would die for you, you know.

I wonder if she means that she is going to and consider asking her to stay. She kisses me on the head and rises. It is only once she has switched the light off with tender hands, bid me goodnight in the doorway lit only by the yellow of the hall, and closed the door with a clack, that I cry.

I cry at the thought of her alone, with only the hands of my father for company, and I cry at the thought of staying with her for the rest of my life. I listen to the sound of her footsteps fade down the hall and wonder if she would be happier dead. If I would be happier dead.

--

My mother devours me. In the only way she knows how. In the way her mother devoured her. And her mother’s mother her. And on, and on. It is hard to blame her for the way that she it. When all the hands that have held her have known nothing of love.

Her face scrunches tight like a whirl of lemon zest curling in on itself as she yells at me through the harsh scrubbing of her toothbrush against teeth. I cannot remember why she is yelling; I wish she would be gentler with herself.

Her gums begin to bleed at the sour ache and bitterness in which she spits – with foam and with words – choking on this guilt that swells in the windpipe. Her heart in her throat. She stuffs herself full of the chunks of myself I offer her: giving up my own skin to peel instead of hers, my own gums to bleed, my own life. Her tears flow undammed in a steady stream now. Long gone the days of hiding.

Don’t you know how it feels, Clementine? How it feels to be Clementine?

She slams her toothbrush down against the porcelain and tosses her head against the glass before her. She sighs.

I’m sorry. She says.

I know. And I hold her as she cries.

I know.