Genie Hill’s bike tires spit out gravel as she turns off Cavetown Road into the caverns’ parking lot. California’s afternoon sun is merciless and her flesh sticks to itself in the dry July heat. Genie locks up her bike then reaches into her breasts to lift each nipple high in her bra—her mother would have cautioned this vulgar cleavage, but Genie is twenty-six and wants to attract attention.
“Hotter than the Devil’s loins out here,” she says to the white park ranger watching from the entrance to the visitor center.
He’s young, maybe twenty-three, and joins Genie’s laughter—she always reads them right—then he stubs out his joint and stretches to reveal an expanse of hair breaching his beltline. He holds the door open, wide enough, but she lets her hip slide over him as if an accident.
Inside, souvenir satchels of gold-nugget bubblegum, amateur mining kits, and stargazing books line the shelves. A box fly cases the room. Genie walks the vintage diorama, tracking the train as it chugs between the Sierra Nevadas, across a poured-resin river, and into the miniature Old Town. Above it all, the fire tower she’s rented in real-people-size stands guard, and to its north, plastic miners crouch in the river. The ranger makes his way to the register and, while his back is turned, Genie snaps off a figurine-miner in a wide-brimmed hat. She studies his miniscule nose and eyebrows, comes to a conclusion, then drops the plastic white man into her jumpsuit pocket.
At the counter, Genie lies and says it’s her first time here in the Mother Lode.
“This is a unique cave system,” the white man tells her as he hands her a complimentary ticket, smooths open a four-fold map covered in anthodites and cave pearls, and circles a fork she’ll take on the trail. “The caverns moan.”
His pulse is a quickening beat at the base of his neck. He looks clean in his khakis. Responsible, Genie thinks. Like nothing’s ever hatched in his pubes or lived at his groin, like he gets regular check-ups even when celibate.
“I love caves.” Genie bends towards him and breathes. “How cloistered and velvet they feel. Like the womb.”
White men love Genie. They find her safely exotic.
It’s closing time, she’s the last visitor, and he’s locking up behind her. Does she want him to walk down to the caverns’ entrance? He wouldn’t want her getting lost.
Manzanita and madrone line the trail until it descends into riparian chaparral, sunlight catching Genie’s eyes as she walks a few paces behind the ranger. Flies, gnats, and midges orbit their heads. A few yards off trail, an elephantine bay tree drinks from the river. Genie slugs from her water bottle, swishes, and swallows.
“That’s a lovely bay tree,” she says, stopping and pointing through the scrub. “It’s all bulbous and exposed.”
He’s eager to follow and they run their palms over the bay’s mossy trunk. A burl bulges from the bay and she eases him onto it, then steps out of her strappy jumpsuit. His hands are fistfuls of her auburn hair and he doesn’t have a condom but she has an IUD so she stretches her thighs over his. He is not large but he is tender and this is what she takes from him.
She releases her high-pitched moans. Because even though Genie’s mother has been dead five years, she still hears her warning: “When you laugh, Eugenia Hill, remember white boys go after the girl who squeals.”
An hour later, the white ranger’s business card is litter on the trail and Genie is alone in the caverns. Stalagmites and helictites transform into nebulae glittering around her.
Some speleothems are sixty-feet tall, a sign reads. The Bridal Veil formed over two million years, as mineral-rich water seeped down the Cathedral Chamber’s wall. Gypsum. Aragonite. Quartz has never been discovered in the caverns, making the prospect of gold improbable.
The caverns exhale and a breakaway from the river twists through the lowest chamber. Genie leans over a gash in the floor and looks into the underground lake.
This is not the cave of her mother’s ancestral birth.
Water drips around Genie, a trembling splatter, a crackle of cosmic dust, a nursery forming new stars.
Genie found the town’s fire tower on Airbnb and rented it for July and August. It’s research, she tells people, she’s writing a novel about Forty-Niners and caverns. The truth is more complicated, but that’s nobody’s business but hers. And anyway, when truth is based on memory, the truth may not exist.
Up the tower’s spiral staircase on the second floor is the bathroom and, illuminated in its vanity lights, Genie’s brown areolas are overripe targets. Pale lines left by her jumpsuit split her skin color in two. Beyond the window, someone in a neighboring conifer or the dry eastern ranges with a telescope could be observing her, a cabinet curiosity displayed in artificial light.
She steps into the shower. Soaps her armpits and belly button. Swoops in to cleanse her canal. Her IUD’s twine loops around her cervix, but she feels something else.
Her right middle finger extracts a gray bug.
She pulls back the shower curtain to better inspect its furry body and ovate wings in the light. Genie doesn’t look long, lets the creature slide down the drain with the bubbles.
Come morning, Genie puts on her jumpsuit and shakes her hair from its night twist. She’s been here a week and has set her routine: While the coffee’s brewing she layers on eye shimmer and black mascara, highlights her freckles with bronzer, then brings the whole coffee pot up to the tower’s very-top bedroom to take in the view.
If she bends into the window netting, she can make out the start of Old Town. The river runs jade and halves the gulch below, and to her east are the great Sierras, all sugar pine, sequoia, and granite. Strewn across the desk are spelunking brochures, a laptop, the figurine white man, and a vase of pink jasmine plucked from a neighborhood garden. Genie can collect what she wants when she wants because these small-town people see what they’ve been trained to see of her, and they love the idea of a pretty white girl picking flowers.
Genie understands her freedom.
She opens her computer to write.
A white miner and a woman disguised as his maid ride a steamboat across the San Francisco Bay, then up the Delta. Egrets glide over brackish water as fog sticks to reeds. Outside Sacramento, the man and woman hitch their mining packs to a mule they sell three towns later. Home is two bodies rubbing between blankets on the ground, the Milky Way their chandelier. Her mother hadn’t taught her anything about anything. As wind whips over the Sierras and through a sequoia grove, the white man cuts a compact steel knife into his left ring finger, then into hers, and their blood becomes one.
Genie taps her ring fingers, imagining what the white miner-of-a-man promised. Bile rises in her throat.
That afternoon, she swings her leg over her bike, rides down the property’s steep driveway, turns left-right-right, then soars. Sunlight breaks through ponderosa pine as she opens her lungs and spans the width of the lane. She pushes open the door of the local library.
The librarian (Rhonda, according to her nametag) is a chipper and red-freckled woman who asks why is Genie writing about the Gold Rush and what makes it a new take and were any of Genie’s ancestors Forty-Niners because books based on real people make better novels and—Genie cuts her off, “Really, any materials you have from 1845 to 1855 will do. Thank you.”
Rhonda extricates boxes from a back room, sets them on a table between shelves of plastic-wrapped books, and leaves Genie to flip through photographs, marriage registries, and pages filled with gunshots and brothels that boom blood through her sternum. A laminated newspaper clipping from California’s 150th anniversary slides from a logbook and Genie reads: The Gold Rush incited a great migration of peoples to California and in response to this rapid population growth, delegates voted for statehood in 1849. The majority of delegates thought the use of slave labor gave mining corporations an unfair physical advantage over independent miners, so in 1850 California entered the Union a free state. That year, the census reported 962 free African-Americans living in the new state, a large number successful business owners and miners. Many found riches in California streams, which offered opportunity for all.
In the article’s inlaid photograph, three Black miners crouch in a stream. Genie studies the Black miners’ faces, each man etched with sunstroke and hope. Her elbow aches. She looks up at Rhonda, twirling one of her tight-red curls while immersed in a magazine behind the front desk. Rhonda swats away a fly and Genie slips the laminated article into her backpack.
Genie returns to a box labeled Land Claims and searches for the words cave, caverns, or grotto.
Hours pass before Rhonda asks how’s it going and Genie looks up from the Gold Rush.
“I’d like to find people who lived in caves while they mined,” she says, as if she just came up with the idea. Has Rhonda heard of any?
Genie follows close as Rhonda pulls from the stacks. To Genie, Rhonda’s freckles are evidence, but to Rhonda, Genie’s recognition of brow, nose, and tone is an invasion, a connection she intended to break, and her body sinks as she turns to face Genie. Both women stare at each other in a quiet test of who will speak first, Genie’s lips part, but neither woman will admit to anything, so Rhonda places the pile of books on Genie’s table, returns to her computer, and types in another few searches.
“The major public caverns here in the Mother Lode are the Moaning, Mercer, and Black Chasm,” Rhonda says. “Looks like the smaller ones are all on private land.”
She swivels the monitor so Genie can see the map on her screen.
“I’m sorry I can’t help more.” Rhonda shifts back into her cheerful self and turns on an encouraging smile. “Keep at it, maybe you’ll be inspired to write something else.”
In the fire tower’s top bedroom, Genie pins the photograph and article from California’s 150th anniversary to the window frame above her writing desk. She watches the moon wax full over the Sierras and wane as evenings pass, too fast but not fast enough. She looks in on the historic cemetery, tapes butcher paper to headstones, and rubs charcoal over inscriptions. Three weeks pass since the white ranger in the woods. She flirts with white fathers while taking amateur gold-panning lessons with their white wives and white children. She takes one white father behind a pine-paneled mill and has him enter her from behind while his family eats grilled cheese sandwiches at the Gem Sluice Café. She descends into every public cavern in the Mother Lode. She runs out of milk and drinks her coffee bitter and black.
Perched over her laptop, Genie narrates the white miner and the woman no-longer-disguised-as-his-maid. They trudge up a hillside, fried by sun, mining packs heavy and knives at their belts. The woman spots a rocky overhang and he agrees to its shade. They take off their packs and squeeze into a darkness which unfolds like a primordial womb.
What would the woman have said when she first saw the cave?
Genie eavesdrops on birds for inspiration. Hornets tap and test the window screens. She sees the cave: its limestone drips in torchlight. A hollow wind exhales over moonmilk formations. Genie cannot conjure the woman’s voice.
To clear her head, she walks to the river at the tower’s property line. The day blazes, the scent of pine penetrates her pores, and even in sunglasses she squints.
Genie clambers over boulders lucific in the heat, alert for rattlesnakes and poison oak. Slabs of granite jut from an emerald pool. She leaves her jumpsuit and panties on a rock blistered with fool’s gold and leaps in arms raised. A roar moves through her. The river is gelatin. It consumes her. Genie’s bones and organs dissolve. She imagines herself the Blob, Swamp Thing, Creature from the Black Lagoon, all the monsters her mother used to bring home on black-and-white video cassettes to watch on their Friday mother-daughter date nights, the only night of the week Genie didn’t put herself to bed and her mother didn’t crawl home when all the lights were out, and Genie didn’t have to hear the next morning over cereal how single motherhood sucks the life out of a woman. Ripples magnify the sun, the lines of Genie’s jumpsuit disappear, and her skin darkens towards her mother’s copper.
Back in the fire tower, Genie chooses not to shower and leaves the river on. She slips into a white linen dress, reapplies her gold eyeshadow and mascara, plucks jasmine from the vase, and tucks a flower under each breast. The figurine white man watches from her desk. When she locks the tower’s door, he disappears.
Evening sun slices the valley oaks lining Old Town’s boardwalk. Genie strides through the batwing doors of Shot Prospector’s Saloon. She sits at the bar and orders the pale ale on tap.
Seven minutes later, a long-limbed white man in a Stetson enters the saloon. Strong nose. Broad shoulders. Six-four, she’d wager.
Genie stands and places a quarter on the pool table.
He has a fist of a crotch, no brothers or sisters or parents, and when he reaches around to set their second round of beers on the high-top, he finally asks Genie, Why this town?
“I’m looking for caves,” she says, chalking her cue. “I’m writing about miners who lived in them.”
“That’s beautiful.” He steps closer to her cleavage. “You’re beautiful.”
Genie Hill has never been beautiful. She doesn’t see what these white men see. She looks in the mirror and sees boring brown eyes and boring brown hair, as bland as a moth. She’s never glowed like her mother—her mother’s eyes had radiated and Genie used to study how her mother’s freckles stretched over her nose, thinking that even when her nostrils flared into furious tunnels seeking to swallow Genie in anger, her mother was still the most beautiful woman in the world. Genie had the same arching nostrils, but the little blond girls at school teased her, said her nostrils were so wide they could fit double-A batteries up them, and one day the little blond girls lured Genie behind the portable, pinned her down, and placed a battery up each nostril. Sometimes Genie still smelled their alkaline.
The white man’s stance is a flagpole between Genie’s memories and the Floridian felt of the pool table. He repeats it’s incredible Genie attended the same ivy league university his grandfather did.
“They should have let me in on legacy,” he shrugs, “but fuck ’em.”
He misses her smirk. It’s a good thing he has such thick thighs. Later, she’s going to lick the hairs cresting his jugular notch.
“There aren’t women like you around here,” he says, “you know, on our level. You should see what’s on Tinder.”
His phone’s screen is cracked but his hands are enormous, muscular, veined. She flips her hair, aware of her bra’s lace on her nipples, and contracts her pubococcygeus muscle. His blue ten misses the pocket.
He tells her she looks a little exotic.
Genie senses her hook in his gut. Mediocre white men are always tempted by the something else in her. It makes them feel like they’re explorers.
He bends down and sighs, “It’s amazing I found you.”
His eyes are gold-green, then flicker into yellow wasps, his lashes beating wings. Genie maneuvers around him, leans over the pool table to knock in the red 3, then points to a corner and knocks in the black 8.
When he opens his mouth to speak she puts her lips to his.
“I think I’m falling in love,” he breathes.
Genie kisses him quiet again.
He lives in a clapboard house like a Victorian sugar cube with purple shutters and dilated pupils for windows. Overgrown confederate star jasmine lists its white picket fence. His mother died recently and left him the property.
“I haven’t been able to clean up yet,” he apologizes as they ascend the front steps. “It’s still a mess inside.”
“We can sit out here,” Genie says, relaxing into the porch-swing. Dead mothers is probably the only thing they have in common but she keeps this to herself.
She asks him, how recent was recent?
Five years.
Silver-washed moths flutter in the porchlight. He brings out whiskey, a gray wool blanket, and a worn book of his naval ancestors. His name radiates from the pages. He flips them for her. Commanders, Captains, Admirals. His fingers brush ships named the Hero, the Black Joke. The Monkey. The Hope.
Genie does not tell him that her mother’s ancestors were also seafaring, but in the bowels of those ships.
She wants to look at the stars.
The white man spreads the blanket on his parched lawn and turns off the porchlight. Genie takes out a joint and they lay back, smoke filling their lungs. THC pulsates through her nervous system, making fireworks of her synaptic junctions. The sky is a black wall shot with holes. A breeze carrying the Sierras rolls over them and he tucks her shivers close. His mother has been dead five years. Genie imagines his mother had lumbered up those stairs and sat on that porch-swing for hours, said she never tired of the view, but he wasn’t fooled and the tubes, ruby-red chemicals, and diapers couldn’t do anything to save her. She’d been in line at Lucky’s when brown ran down her legs and she asked the checkout girl for paper-not-plastic then drove home, folded herself into bed, and didn’t get out. He—a dear mother’s boy to his core—found her one evening and, knowing she was afraid of the dark, left her nightlight burning, changing its bulb every few weeks as her body bloated then liquified into the sheets. Flesh flies gathered to keep vigil and he is grateful for them, he thanks them each evening as he kisses his mother goodnight.
He thinks Genie wouldn’t understand these primal obligations so he keeps her outside on his itchy blanket of history.
Except Genie does understand.
The last time Genie saw her own mother, nine years ago, they were home—only one county over, in their dry-dusty town that was not suburb nor foothills nor farmland, just a pitstop for tourists en route to Yosemite. Genie was seventeen and they were packing her life into two duffle bags, readying for her first semester at that ivy-clad university her mother always dreamed of. After Genie left, every Thanksgiving, Christmas, and summer she stayed on at school and when her mother phoned, Genie never picked up, not even her final semester senior year, when her mother said via voicemail that doctors found a tumor running through her, its roots invading her organs. She had her thesis and finals, Genie texted her mother back, but as she sat in that ivy-white library, Genie stared out the window, rubbing the aching healed bone of her left elbow, remembering the childhood summer she’d wandered the black oak grove behind their home, broken elbow in cast, collecting worms and bottle caps and silver gum wrappers and the dead finch she’d brought her mother as she kneeled tired in their vegetable patch.
“Ma?” Genie asked on approach. “Where did this bird go? I mean, her alive part?”
Ma glanced at the bird in Genie’s palm then went on pulling weeds. “Where all living beings eventually go. She floated up and became a star.”
Genie looked down at the little finch, in her hand yet in the night sky.
“Does that mean you’ll go up to the stars, too, Ma?”
“Yes.”
At Genie’s frown, Ma added, “But not anytime soon, and you’ll hold my hand when my spirit leaves.”
Ma reached for the fingers sticking out Genie’s cast and gave them a tickle, gave her belly a tickle. Genie held the bird snug with her good hand while she giggled. Then Ma’s gaze drifted over the corn, peas, and tomatoes that helped feed them each night.
Ma snapped her fingers.
“Now pass me that spade, Eugenia Hill.”
Genie walked back into the black oaks and buried the bird.
As Genie’s final college semester came to a close, Ma called and called, chemicals consuming her body and voice, but Genie had promised she’d never come back.
“No matter what,” Ma said that last day as Genie readied to leave, two bags at the door, her lineage begging to be hidden behind her.
“Promise me, don’t you come back.”
“Yes, Ma. I promise.”
Ma shut the door and split Genie in two.
Genie curled up in her dormitory bed and listened to her mother’s voicemails and tried not to remember, she tried to forget, while Ma, all alone, joined the stars.
Constellations blink above Genie and the white man. He is too quiet and her heart hammers so she points up and asks, “Is that a planet?”
He answers erroneously but Genie wraps her thighs to his and sucks him into her.
He is hard, thick, Christian-cut and pounding. She flips over and pins him to the ground. She too can have sex like a white man. She contracts so hard the condom rips and he pulls out, calling Genie’s name as he sprays her pelvis white.
In the tower’s bathroom, Genie withdraws another insect from inside her.
Water pools on the tile as she examines its feathered antennae and teardrop wings under the vanity lights. The bug looks like its wearing a fur stole and its legs bend with tiny kneecaps. Its wings seem too large for its ball-of-a-body and they detach quick with tweezers. She holds one to a lightbulb. Kite-like, the wing is iridescent and dark-veined.
Genie flushes the bug’s pieces down the toilet.
She spends several hours the next day in the library, brushing off Rhonda, wrenching books from shelves and heaving them to a table. Encyclopedias of entomology and lepidoptera and trichoptera and arthropoda pile around her. They are sulphur males and silken girdles, vestigial mouth-parts adapted for sucking. Cocoons. Chewed wood bound by silk. Sometimes the pupa lies in a chamber hollowed out in the earth.
Pages rip as she turns them.
She must be more careful.
Fluorescent lights buzz and Genie rubs her elbow raw as larvae and compound eyes and suctorial proboscises and labial palps surge into life. Chrysalises crack open and wings beat before her. Long tongues unwind to lick library dust mites. Her fingers run an entry: Aquatic or semiterrestrial larvae. Dwell in damp habitats and caves. The imaginal stage is the last of the insect’s metamorphosis.
Genie compares fur patterns and membranous wings and antennae lengths and forms a decision: Psychodinae.
Moth flies.
“I’ve never met anyone like you, Genie,” the white man texts the evening after she let him spank her on his lawn. Wanna come over again?
“I can’t,” she replies. “I’m writing tonight.”
“Can I have you tomorrow?”
Genie navigates Google Maps in satellite mode. She searches wineries that store bottles in caves. She sends emails to addresses beginning with info. She feels an itch at her vulva and reaches into her underwear. The moth fly wriggles in the light of her laptop and she leaves the white man’s text on read.
Earth’s orbit enters the debris of an ancient comet and Genie drags her bedding outside. The moon sets early and the sky is spilt milk. A meteorite cleaves the horizon in two. Genie used to sleep outside with Ma during August’s Perseid showers. Ma: expert at warning. She would prop herself on her side and whisper Genie to sleep with the story of how their Very-Great-Grandfather Hill took his family’s freedom and crossed the continent to sell knives to men who’d strike gold. His shop held more knives than a birch had leaves. Then one spring his only daughter ran away with a white miner. A whole summer and autumn she lived with him in that cave. She birthed their daughter in its winter darkness.
Stars pulse above Genie, each its own heartbeat.
Did he tell her he loved her?
What did her voice sound like?
Where was the cave where is the cave where is the cave?
Very-Great-Grandfather Hill had the most beautiful daughter in all of San Francisco, in all of California, in all of 1851. A handsome Irishman arrived late to the Gold Rush and wandered San Francisco, preparing to unearth his fortune. When he took a wrong turn and entered Hill Tools, he didn’t know what was more exquisite, the girl sharpening her father’s blades or the blades themselves. Her skin looked brushed in the gold he sought. The white man returned each afternoon for a week and she withdrew boxes of blades like long boats or slender clams. He asked quiet questions and her lips rose at his intensity, at how he would not touch the knives, at how it felt like the blades and boxes and walls and roof and entire sky would crash around them if they moved too quickly. Even the flutter of her eyelashes made him nervous. Be careful, the dust seemed to say.
Friday before he was to leave for Gold Country, he paid for a compact steel knife with a cedar handle, useful to skin fish or fit between a man’s ribs. She took him behind the shop, where he flung the knife at a redwood wall. The blade clattered to the dirt. She picked it up and he reached out but she stepped back and shot the knife at his scuff mark. Metal embedded into wood and wobbled as the white man leaned in and kissed her high cheekbone.
Before sunrise, she packed a pair of her father’s pants, a thick wool coat, and her father’s two favorite knives. She signed her note with her father’s last name and her new first name: Hill, so you’ll always be with me.
Hill slid out her family’s home, to where the white man waited.
Disguised as his maid, they rode steamboats up rivers, then slept under Sierra stars. Spring became summer and cedars oozed sap Hill turned into incense to ward away insects. New life stirred inside her. They panned streams, climbed boulders, found a cave. The white man spread his hands over the mountain’s insides and explained how gold runs in veins.
“Veins?” she asked.
He ran two white fingers along Hill’s inner wrist, up the brown skin of her arm to her neck, and rested on her thumping jugular.
“Veins,” he said.
Genie awakes, her dreams like cobwebs, her shivers so violent she hurts.
“I need you, Genie,” the white man texts.
His words turn into calls she sends to voicemail.
Humid in bed at the top of the tower, Genie rolls onto her stomach, stiffens her middle and ring fingers into a phallus, and rubs against her palm and thumb. Her orgasms come violent, as if dosed with guilt.
She pulls out a hand flecked with three moth flies.
Her phone buzzes with voicemails proclaiming his love.
She needs to see how much he loves her.
He will gather all the wool blankets from his mother’s house. He will haul them from cupboards, beds, and drawers, and out to his sloping lawn, where he will tie them in nautical knots and twist them as rope to hang from an oracle oak. He will climb to an uppermost branch and dangle and die among the leaves for her.
Genie powers off her phone and puts it under the kitchen sink next to the Comet with Bleach.
Outside the fire tower, she has two steep acres to roam. The land is ochre and amber and when nerves spark like lightning down her lower back, the white man watches from the chaparral. Genie spirals to the base of the tower and he follows along near the property line. Night falls and she whorls through the kitchen, bringing provisions to the top of the tower. From every window Genie sees him illuminated by falling meteors, pants at his shins, tugging himself for her.
“Love me,” he whispers.
Genie transfigures the perimetrium lining her uterus into a fine gold net. She directs it through her belly button and its filaments swell into an aureole shielding first her body, then the tower, then its lawn. Her force glimmers down to the river and traces the property line. She forms a perfect seal.
The white man scrambles over boulders, manic in her force’s light, palms searching for weak nodes.
Genie Hill will not yield.
She turns from the window.
Midges squeeze through the screens and gather around her bedside lamp. The sun rises and sets and rises again, the water in her vase of jasmine lowers to empty, petals drop and brown, and Genie smears peanut butter onto brown bread. Her bowels contract and release over a bucket she covers with a book called Charmed Places.
Her cervix ripens.
Lying in bed, she holds both hands to her abdomen as muscles beneath her hips combust.
Genie swoops a finger inside herself and bears six moth flies. Mucus wraps each like a caul. She wipes them gently to the nightstand, where they break free and squirm, blinking up at her with compound eyes, mandibles opening and closing as they nurse the air.
“Love us,” they tell her.
She swoops in again and births seven more, nine, twelve, Genie can no longer count because her fingers are full. She sets the moth flies to her shins, thighs, and forearms, and they dry and march up her limbs, hungry for her, and when they reach each swollen breast, the moth flies nuzzle her, pucker their lips, extend proboscises, and Genie understands she’s no different than Ma, no different than Gramma Nettie Hill or Auntie Cheryl or Great Aunt Martha, no different than Very-Great-Grandmother Hill, who’d awoke swollen and alone in that cave and stumbled to the fire’s spent embers. The white miner had left the pots she’d transformed into their hearth and home but taken her father’s knives. Hill gripped the mountain’s insides and screamed and squat as she forced the baby out. She severed the cord with her teeth.
When Hill came to, she held the mewling girl to her breast and stared at those walls barren of gold. The baby fit to Hill’s hip like she’d been waiting for her, and when they stepped out the cave and into the sun, the baby’s skin turned too dark to pass. In a way it was relief. At least this way the baby girl had a mother.
She gave the baby her father’s last name, Hill, so he’d always be with them.
Too ashamed to go home, Very-Great-Grandmother Hill entertained in dim rooms. White men loved Hill. The other women taught her how to halt their seed.
Ma made sure Genie also knew.
But daughters cannot always obey their mother’s warnings.
Rather than avoiding white men, Genie seduced them as conquests on her list. She mounted them, stole from them, rendered them powerless as she made their bodies hers. She enacted revenge. She’d started for Ma, but it wasn’t any of her women’s faults that the white men fucked them then left them, babies at the teat.
A gust of wind blows through the fire tower and the moth flies take to the air.
The white men are different in this Mother Lode land. Strengthened by proximity to their prospecting forefathers, these white men claimed Genie’s womb as theirs. All her choices led here and these white men hold no pity for Genie’s thoughts of free will. The white men’s children wedged as larvae into the crevices of her intrauterine device, where they developed legs and wings and now they descend her twine like rope.
“Love us,” the white men’s children command.
Genie holds up a mirror to see her dilation. As the moth flies crown and drop, she sees herself in their many eyes, and can no longer separate her self from theirs. They crawl across her body, a living extension of her, their mother, and she lays in bed and scoops and scoops, birthing their mucus-folded wings of miscegenation, her small fuzzy children, and as they dry and flutter in warm swarms around her, she becomes amazed at their beauty, gilded in California sunlight, and she loves them, Genie loves them as they build nests in her hair and the crooks of her collarbones, loves them as they latch and suckle at her breasts of liquid gold, loves them as they suck their lives from hers.
Contributor Notes
Jane Marchant is an interdisciplinary storyteller working with writing, photography, plants, and collage. Her work has appeared in ZYZZYVA, Guernica, Apogee, Catapult, Columbia Journal, and elsewhere. Jane is a 2024 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation grant, and Lucas Artists Fellow at Montalvo Arts Center. She has received support from the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Foundation, Tin House’s First Book Residency, Headlands Center for the Arts, Ucross Foundation, and Oak Spring Garden Foundation, among others. She lives in Oakland, California.
