18. Paper Nails
In Budapest during my gap year I got a tattoo for you between my shoulder blades. It’s your star sign. For weeks at a time I forget it’s there until I glimpse myself in the bathroom mirror.
Couldn’t you have waited just a bit longer? Then I wouldn’t have your birth- and death-day as my first memory and I wouldn’t have your potential following me wherever I go and I wouldn’t have to live up to the parental expectations placed on two children instead of one.
After graduation, I drank a milkshake made of magic mushrooms at a bar on an island in Laos and spoke with a man from Canada who told me attachment is the root of all suffering. When he moved his hands, his fingers had comet tails and I swear he was still sitting there even after he walked away.
In Year Two someone told me I was lucky to be an only child. I didn’t cry till I got off the bus and was walking home. I made myself stop before I stepped through the front door.
Uncle Marcus cradled me in the waiting room and the plastic arm of the chair burrowed into my shoulder and there was stress and asepsis in the air. He said everything would be okay and even though I was only four I knew he was lying.
Simon told me he’d leave me if I didn’t get help. I promised I would. Got the referral and everything. But then the world stopped and the borders closed and our homes became our universes and we watched eleven o’clock press conferences as we fed our sourdough starters.
Dad used to buy Mum flowers on your birthday – some years gerberas, some years tulips. She’d trim the ends at an angle and put them in that one Waterford vase they owned and sit them on the sideboard below the bay window.
When I was ten I made friends with a girl named Amelia. After school we’d play Mario Kart on her brother’s 64 and make up dances to the Spice Girls. Her mum would cook us pikelets topped with strawberry jam and aerosol cream. They were Christians and I asked her if babies went to Heaven.
I wish I felt you with me on my wedding day. But that’s just something people say, isn’t it?
At the hospital, Dad said I could touch you, but I didn’t want to. I think I was scared you’d break and I’d have to find a way to put you, and us, back together. Or maybe those thoughts are too big for a child and I was just frightened because your skin was the colour of a fresh bruise and your fingernails looked like paper.
I married someone you’d like – almost everyone who meets him likes him.
At sleepovers I’d lie on a mattress on the floor, my friend’s sibling rivalry ringing in my ears and I wished I could slip into their skin to see what it felt like to hate and love and fear and admire someone who never didn’t know me.
Sometimes, instead of yelling, I bite the web of skin between my thumb and index finger. Other times I lock myself in the bathroom and cry in the shower.
During school holidays Amelia and I stole the cream from the fridge and hid behind the shed, squirting it into each other’s mouths. Her sister told on us and we sprinted out the side gate and ran barefoot down the steaming driveway until we made it to the end of the street where we got stuck in a patch of bindis and had to turn back.
In Peru I wanted to hike the Inca Trail. Instead, I bought coke from a taxi driver and shared it with some Russians who taught me a card game called durak. I called my ex-boyfriend and left him a fifteen-minute voicemail.
I think Mum and Dad tried their best.
Simon and I bought our first home, a fibro cottage by the coast with a garden full of lavender that we spent two days ripping out. I had to climb into the green bin and stomp it down to close the lid. Afterwards, my clothes smelled like soapy evergreen that never washed out. We tried to grow hydrangeas, but they kept dying in the sandy soil.
I can’t remember what Mum looked like when she was holding you in hospital, but you were swaddled in one of those blue, pink and yellow baby blankets. There’s a photo of you on Mum’s bedside table with a lock of your hair pressed into the corner of the frame.
Your middle name is Marcus, but we don’t speak to him anymore.
Dad travelled for work a lot. When I was seven he went to Dubai and brought me home a toy camel – I stayed up late to make sure he got home safe and held the camel all night while I slept.
I don’t know if I feel you anywhere. I search for signs that you’re watching, but I’m always attracted to the cliché. A rainbow in a sun shower. A sparrow on the clothesline.
Sometimes I call Mum and can tell she’s been in bed all day.
At a hippie shop in Ettalong I begged Mum to buy me a dream catcher. I hung it above my bed and hoped I would trap you.
Last year I finally started seeing a psychologist. Her name is Heather. She wears a lot of linen and has a French bulldog named Bodhi. She has a Himalayan salt lamp and her office smells like bergamot.
I found your ashes once when I was playing dress up with Mum’s shoes. You were in a box on the floor at the back of the wardrobe. Inside the box was your urn and a bunch of dried lavender tied with a blue and pink ribbon. I went to bed that night wondering if you’d crawl through the wall and into my room.
At The World Bar I kissed the man I’d end up marrying. We were only twenty-one and the smoke machine made the room smell like syrup and we drank Long Islands from teapots. I rolled my ankle and tripped down the stairs on the way outside for a smoke and the bouncer didn’t let me back in.
When we got home Mum put amethyst around the house and drew five-pointed stars on the doors and window frames. Some mornings I’d come into the living room and see her kneeling at the coffee table arranging tarot cards in a horseshoe shape.
There’s a kookaburra that comes and sits on the deck most afternoons. I like to think it’s the same one every time, but I hope you’d be a little more creative than that.
I’d say Mum looked severed. But that’s just a guess because how are you supposed to look when your body expelled something you so desperately wanted to keep?
I wonder what nicknames I’d have given you. Cal? Or something else? Something from a funny story that neither of us could fully remember but that stained your identity so indelibly it became part of you.
Hell is a hospital waiting room.
People see the fish and ask if I’m a Pisces. Most of the time I lie and say yes because I don’t need to unpack my trauma with my Tuesday barista. Occasionally I’m honest and they apologise as if they should’ve known my brother was dead.
Mum used to put Play School on for me and lock herself in the bathroom. I’d press my ear against the door, but all I ever heard was water from the shower head crashing onto the tiles.
When I’m put on hold I catch myself drawing pentagrams on empty envelopes and rates notices. Over and over and over again until the pen punches through to the kitchen bench.
When I was pregnant the first time I asked to be tested for toxoplasmosis. The doctor asked if we had cats and I lied and said yes.
We bought a dog after you died, a black standard poodle I named Daisy. She would come into my room and chew my Barbies, pocking their plastic limbs with teeth marks. I’d call her my sister and hold her too tight, pushing my grief onto her fur because it was too big and I was too small to hold it.
Heather says she thinks I have PTSD and Bodhi sleeps at my feet while I ask her about generational trauma.
When I was little, people would say you were my guardian angel. I remember being angry at you for not protecting me enough… as if you watched from afar and decided I was too much.
You have two nephews now. I nearly gave one your first name as their middle. Callum. But I couldn’t give him your name. Not even in the middle. I don’t want to be seeing and saying it everywhere for the rest of my life.
After school I’d steal honey jumbles from the pantry and hide in the cellar under the house. I’d lean against the wine rack, the bottles pushing into my back and I’d press the pink and white icing against my tongue until it cracked. It was only ever Daisy who found me.
I don’t think you had a funeral. Not that I remember, and not that I’ve ever asked because if I do Mum will cry and I still don’t know what to do when she does.
At Brownies we learned to make God’s Eyes with paddle pop sticks and yarn. Our Guide Leader said that some people in Mexico believed they were portals to the spirit word. She gave me extra supplies and I made two more at home and hung them from the handles of my wardrobe.
When I gave birth the first time I couldn’t stop shaking and watched in the metallic reflection of the domed surgical light as the surgeon sliced me open. The anaesthetist injected something to stop the shaking and we heard the baby cry and I started to breathe again.
When Dad came to get me in the waiting room he looked like he’d been crying and I don’t think I’d ever seen him cry before.
You’d be thirty-one now and I never want to be the one who texts first on your birthday. The flowers Dad sends are now emojis and the vase is tucked away at the back of the sideboard with Granny’s champagne coupes.
Sometimes I stand in the kitchen and watch the boys play. I want to scream because how dare you leave me with the constant wondering and wishing and wanting what they have. But then I hear them squeal and chase each other down the hallway and my chest softens.
You never did crawl into my room, but I see someone I think might be you in my dreams. You’re a grown man, but I never remember your face. It stays in my sleep.
This piece was shortlisted for The Varnish Prize for Fiction 2025.
Emily Rodríguez is an emerging writer based on unceded Darkinjung land. She is currently studying a Master of Creative Writing at Macquarie University, but don’t ask her what’s next. You can follow her on Instagram @emilyjrodriguez_.