A-Okay

by Court Ludwick

In the wooden swing, in our backyard, in the darkest part of summer right before my seventh-grade year, my mother suddenly grabs me. She grabs the smallest part of my wrist, twisting hard so this fragile underbelly of mine faces up toward the sky and I become a fractal under the light turned shadow, under the overhead tree, under the dimple-making leaves that will eventually flake and fall and die and be swept up by my father’s metal rake.

My mother’s index finger and thumb are bony. Her tanned skin stretches tighter here than finger skin should stretch. No wrinkles. Knuckles smoothed out like knuckles never look. Acrylic nails painted fuchsia pink because true red is for whores. I imagine she tells me this once. No smile lines when I look at her face. In between her eyebrows, there is one line, a sweet deep furrow.

She takes these two fingers, slowly and deliberately, and curls them inward, close and together, until the fingertips connect in a tiny perfect oval. The other three are flared out. Even then, I remember thinking this a weird gesture for her. I don’t remember her ever letting anything be that loose, unstructured, before. This is the universal sign for okay.

In this memory, she holds the okay sign up to my face, so close before drawing herself back, and her fingertips are touching and then they are not. She lets them gape open, unraveled for a fraction of a blink, and I smile. I sit there, dumb and happy, thinking she decided to share a loose thread of herself with me. But then she clasps her index finger and thumb around my wrist, a shackle of bone and good genetics, and I realize I am the loose thread she is trying to sew up, always.

I am somehow both exposed yet held. I grow up thinking that this is what being mother and daughter is like for everyone. Here—I tap my wrist now—her fingertips overlap. And the look on her face tells me to lift my chin, says that I should be proud of this fact. But again, harder this time, the handcuff she has fashioned out of her own flesh tightens. I want to say ow but don’t. I want to say something, anything, as she encircles this small fragment of me, but her eyes flash dark like they always do when she gets angry with me, like they always do five seconds before she tells me to shut up and stop talking back to grownups. I grow up confused about how conversations work.

I am still, afraid as my mother moves her fingers, the makeshift okay sign, up my arm. Her fingertips stay connected, clutched around me more like a hug than anything else I remember, and the divot in her forehead lessens, as if this is what a body should be able to do.

Around my forearm, the tips of her nails click together, still touch. A few inches higher, and my mother’s perfect circle begins to slip away. Around my bicep, there is a loud gap, a sliver of freckled skin in-between her shiny nails, and she squeezes me until the ow finally comes. She holds me like this until I understand that I should be embarrassed. Holds me even after my face reddens and I look down, holds me as though I don’t see the way my muscle and fat look underneath her taut skin and slender bone. This is the place, the part of me, where she decides to stop.

She lets her fingers fall down on my legs. I cringe at the thwacking sound her child-size hands make on my growing thighs. The summer light is made shadow by the dark tree above us. My mother’s okay is made not okay by me, by the shock of skin her round cannot measure. In the wooden swing, in an even darker part of summer, we fall apart. She walks inside, and I hear her laugh. I look down at my wrist until the sun goes to sleep and I am not even a fractal but something that needs to be trimmed, raked up and stuffed into a black garbage bag, instead.

Court Ludwick is a writer, artist, and educator currently pursuing her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing. She is the author of THESE STRANGE BODIES (ELJ Editions, 2024) and the founding editor-in-chief of Broken Antler Magazine. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in EPOCH, Denver Quarterly, West Trade Review, Oxford Magazine, and elsewhere. Find her on socials @courtludwick. Find more of her work at www.courtlud.com.