Juliet Cook

BLEACH

My mother flung living sand dollars
into a bucket filled with bleach
so we could take sterilized pieces of landscape home with us. I thought vacation meant escape, but this wildlife was seized and made to meet her expectations. Brittle doves like broken teeth.
Cilia burned dry. The reek of dying.

My hair dead handfuls on display.
I didn't want to be the same color as her.
I didn't want to be the same molded shape.
I separated myself, snorted chemicals, made my own poison. Coked out of my mind and ready to be mounted.
She poked fun at my outfits, labeled my pierced nose perverse. But I remember when she pierced my ears; pricked fake cherries into my holes.

I remember the baby shark jaws
pried out of their skulls and ready to be mounted.
I remember the delicate seahorses frozen into place with shellac. Glossy, bulging eyes. Flattened representations of life converted into tchotchkes.
Shelves stocked with polished and priced remains.
Painted acrylic claws clutching shopping baskets.
Muzak. Mutilation. Mucilage. Cheap coconut deodorizer.

I remember a time when I kept my shells inside a Strawberry Shortcake lunchbox; when I ate cupcakes with marshmallow frosting so sticky it could pull out my teeth even if I had rows and rows of them.

Even if I was nobody's prey, I was my mother's object of scorn. She said just pluck the beastie away if I wanted a nice specimen. But the beastie was a body inside a seashell. She used tongs to rip the growth from its home. Another display-worthy carapace.
The inside of my nose stung.

It was the Shark Tooth Capital of the World.
With a little persistence, we could have dug up plenty of fossilized teeth on the beach.
But she was already spouting the bleach.
Yellow jug, plastic bucket, a different kind of burning.
They didn't have visible mouths, but I heard them turning white. For years, I dyed my hair black; sometimes burned the scalp. Pretended to be tough and uncaring and maybe I am like my mother.

She said just pluck the beastie away.
She said this is how everyone does it.
She said just don't think about it that way.

But sometimes I think of my heart as a sea urchin.