She was always lost in the inside self, in the endless process of unfolding and cutting the cortex, strip by strip, to mine the things she found within its folds.

Her room was full of such strips, hanging like mottled silk from the roof beams, the bedframe, the curtain rods. They shimmered and swayed gently in drafts, casting rippled light along the wood-paneled walls.

She examined them by rushlight, millimeter by millimeter, and every now and then the faint putrid flame would sputter and reveal a single flake shining like an ember in the membranous folds of tissue. Frantically, but with great rejoicing, she scraped these tiny deposits, each with its own composition and color, from their wrinkled beds into one of several small lacquered boxes and covered them with gentle, loving hands. She had many such boxes, each a different color to match the various flakes she found. She hid them in a nook behind a panel of the wall, a hiding space that no one knew, not her husband, her daughter, her friends.

By day, she took the boxes out into the sunlight and opened them to let the discerning sky look down. She watched the rippling light flow across the textured surfaces and veined lines of her flakes. The more dazzling the colors, the more authentic the matter.

Some flakes were oxide blue, some golden, some a fiery orange and white. But the bright-red flakes with blackened veins proved the most essential, the most sacred, for they flashed with the deepest pulse of her life, the words she never dared to speak but sought half consoled, half repulsed in the viscous darkness of her bed. These she placed inside a special crimson box.

Year by year, flake by flake, the collection in her boxes grew. The small piles expanded with the accumulations of chromatic dust until they formed mounds the size of a small marble or the pupil of an eye. She watched these glittering piles in the evenings when her husband was away, as thick light suppurated across the sashes of her narrow windows. Most often she held up the crimson box at an angle and let the light ooze across the mound so its color reflected on the walls in stipples and its black veins grew more apparent. She sat there and gestated in the amber, blood-red air until the shadows crept into her cheeks and the strands tangled across her dead white scalp.

Finally, when her preparations were complete, when all oblations and rituals had been properly observed, she took out the whole collection of her boxes and placed them by her chair, and she took down the cortical strips bannering her room and laid them in the shape of a body on her bed. She took potato starch and water and made a paste and set it beside her in a can with a small brush. One by one, she took the strips of gray matter and layered them into cones, elongated funnels, rounded cubes, and truncated spheres. She molded them gently, painting each layer with water and starch. When she arrived at the rough outline desired, she reached for the boxes and, whispering nonsensical rhymes over their lids, took up first the flakes of blue. She squeezed them in her palm with such force that her hand shook and she moaned before dropping a single gem like blue stained glass beside the cobbled figure on her bed.

She repeated this action with the flakes in each box and with each repetition grew paler and weaker, and soon she began to twist her face and arch her back in deep kyphosis.

Last of all, she took the powder from the red box and held it in her hands. As with the others, she tried to press the dust into a ball, but it would not congeal. She squeezed until her face was purple and her teeth chattered. She nearly fainted twice, then she did faint and scattered all her black-crimson flakes across the floor. When she awoke, she picked each fragment up with her nails.

At a loss, she placed all the flakes into her mouth and pressed them between her hard palate and tongue until her eyes rolled backward. She strained until her vision blurred, until she ceased to breath and trembled in her creaking chair, but at last she formed a single point of focus, a single concentration of her self, of the long avenues of cortices and veins, of memory and sweat and glands and loss and rivers of resentment and love, of love so essential and black as black blood, as the space under the bed, as the hole in the panels of the wall.

She spat out a glowing, crimson sphere pulsing with the slow rhythms of a heartbeat.

She laid out the spheres that she had made and calcined in herself beside the pieces of her cortical papier-mache, arranged into the broken corpse of an infant with clear, crystalline skin. She took the tiny globes and placed them in his eyes, his throat, his torso, and his crotch to make his pupils, larynx, vertebrae, testicles. Last of all she took the crimson sphere and placed it in his chest to form his heart, and she put all the body’s pieces together, the bones, veins, muscle, hypodermis, dermis, and epidermis, the follicles, the hair into a single whole.

At first the small body was still. But soon its transparent skin began to ripple, to pulse, then an eye opened, then two. Its fingers spanned the air, and a gentle cry came forth sweetly from its lips like fresh spring water.

But the cry grew into a piteous wail, sharp and cold.

With a heart burning out of her chest she leaned over the small translucent child as it shook with life, with the dark fountain of its life pouring from its mouth, through its pasted, paroxysmic body.

But the scream grew; it outgrew the infant’s mouth until it shook the clear, crystal skin. It outgrew the frame, and the whole small creature trembled. Its skin cracked and she saw the organs deep in its torso splinter. The upper fractures spread and quickly wept black blood.

A wind, pestilential and cruel, rattled the window frames. Clouds gathered. Lions with long, white claws roamed on the edges of the yard.

The tiny globular heart of the infant burst, and the deep blood of all the woman’s memory seeped from its mouth and its eyes until the soft crystal integument broke and the whole body dissolved upon the bed in a single mucinous heap of brown and red and black, which quickly dried and flaked and stained the floor, the walls, the clutching hands of the woman. She didn’t panic, nor yet weep, but calmly swept the broken child from the room and sat in darkness, the alchemy of her remembering tarnished and failed. Her self, an iron, endless cauldron, was empty; the issue of her labors, null. Only the dark wind remained, the peeling panels of the walls.

Had she looked, she would perhaps have noticed in the stains along her palms, between the floorboards, and up the walls were letters, figures, scrawls, faint but perceptible.

But she did not look, and who could say if this new, unnoticed edifice, this weak, untimely, crooked birth of words, would not give way to yet another crash and fragmentation and another quest for vain precipitate in the folds of her brain or the vellus whirls of her hair, for another child who in the end would also melt.

Better, perhaps, to sit in the dark room, to keep the folds of the cortex intact, or pressed with a perfect smoothness, and leave memory and analysis and synthesis to the dead and wrinkled or to those who are whole and, she was sure, surely crept the grounds of earth in bliss, in perfect knowledge of the world that grows in themselves like a pod of sinuous, of uncertain, fruit.

Ben Woollard is a writer and editor from the Pacific Northwest. His writing has appeared in Literary Hub, JSTOR Daily, The Asian Review of Books, and elsewhere.