Nothing seemed off until I was fourteen years old, eating handfuls of soil straight from the bag. My mom caught me one day with brown flecks in my braces and called the doctor.
Dr. Moultrie was six feet tall and infinitely more beautiful than I could ever imagine myself being. She began the checkup and I hoped she wouldn’t notice the Strawberry Shortcake underwear I was wearing under the paper gown. I didn’t want to tell her about all the dirt I’d swallowed. Dr. Moultrie probably never ate anything disgusting in her life.
“When was the last time you had your period?” She asked with certainty, and my face flushed red. When you’re fourteen years old, periods are only talked about in whispers. When you’re fourteen years old and your period doesn’t come for months at a time, you consider it a blessing, but Dr. Moultrie talks about my ailing ovaries and throws around the words chronic and condition and I zone out thinking about what Dr. Moultrie would look like with dirt stuck between her perfect teeth.
“Just lower your water intake or the flowers will continue to grow. They’re already filling your uterus,” Dr. Moultrie warned me.
It didn’t take long for the flowers to grow. One morning I woke with an itch in my throat. I looked in the mirror and opened my mouth wide and there was a trout lily licking my tonsil. I reached a finger to the back of my throat, gagging as I tried to grab the flower. My eyes watered as I yanked it, so I stopped. During science class I coughed up petals. On the bus, I wanted to eat more soil. I could feel my ovaries rolling in my body.
Each week, more flowers accumulated. The throat lilies were now accompanied by some cornflowers and Dutchman’s breeches. I tried to laugh less because whenever I did petals would shoot out of my mouth. It had been three months since my last period.
After five months with no period I woke one morning to a sprout on my chin. Within a few days it blossomed into a whispering dandelion. My brother came up to me while I was staring at it in the bathroom mirror and ripped it off my chin to make a wish; a dot of blood sat where the stem was attached. The next day five more dandelions grew in its place.
Eight months with no period, I visited Dr. Moultrie again. I tried to pluck my chin flowers but their roots were deeper than ever. She was polite and pretended not to notice the beard, instead asked me if I had any new symptoms, and I opened my mouth to reveal the garden in the back of my throat.
Dr. Moultire pulled long, silver tweezers from her desk drawer and sterilized them. She stuck the tweezers in my mouth. I wanted to gag, I wanted to reject the metal being hoisted where it doesn’t belong, but I didn’t. Dr. Moultrie clasped onto a leg of the Dutchman’s Breeches and pulled. I felt a pain in my pelvis. It rang through my back, up my stomach, through my throat, and out came the flower attached to a three-foot-long stem with a small mass of pink flesh at the roots. I told her that’s enough for the day and went home, cornflowers still populating in my throat.
After Dr. Moultrie pulled the flower out of me, I had a four-week long period. On the last day of my month of bleeding, the moon was full and a clump of my hair fell out. I flushed the mass of black hair in the toilet. Two weeks after my month-long period, lupine grew in its place.
Two months after my month-long period, I met a pink-haired girl at the mall who told me I smelled like her grandmother’s house but she didn’t mind.
“Want to hang out sometime? Can I braid these?” She gently picked up the flowers flowing from my chin. I wrote my phone number on her hand using the sparkly red gel pen I had in my Aeropostale tote bag.
Three days after I left my number on the pink-haired girl’s arm, she invited me to her house. We sat under the sequined purple canopy draped over her four-poster bed, and she touched all of the flowers growing from my head and my chin. She didn’t think it was gross when the tiny baby’s breath fell from my scalp and rested on my shoulders. She turned on Lorde and braided the chin flowers that had grown long enough to touch my belly button.
She asked me to spend the night, and after she had fallen asleep I snuck into her parents’ garden and ate soil with my bare hands. I hadn’t eaten soil since before Dr. Moultrie pulled the flower out of me even though I thought about it all the time. Soil kept falling through my fingers, back into the garden, and no matter how much I scooped into my mouth I still wanted more. I placed my face onto the garden bed and ate the soil from the ground.
“What are you doing?”
I looked up in the dark to see the pink-haired girl silhouetted by the moon. Soil dropped from my bottom lip and got stuck in the flowers growing from my chin. The pink-haired girl grabbed a chunk of soil stuck in my hair and left me alone in the garden. Not wanting to face her after she watched me slurp soil, I walked home under the moon’s glow, picking the grit from my teeth.
Téa Franco is an MFA fiction candidate at Bowling Green State University. She has work published or forthcoming in Barren Magazine, Redactions: Poetry & Poetics, Mixed Mag, and others.