Outside

Kelly Luce
· in ,

The first thing I remember is the sound. The sound of her heartbeat, of blood surging, of fluid swishing into and out of places it needed to be, needed to be no longer. My mother’s body was a country- side where there were no floods and no droughts and the law of the land was balance, was safety.
Then I was born.
I didn’t want to come into the world. Being born was the worst thing that had ever happened to me—until that point. Being born meant I had to leave her. We had the bright part of one day separated by two dark parts, and then I didn’t see her for fifteen years. When I hummed her melody the people who raised me smiled, assuming it was something I’d made up. I told them my mother sang it to me when I was still inside, and they said no one could remember being inside.
At a birthday party a friend of theirs from the university recognized the tune, called it a Bohemian lullaby. “Her birth mother had Czech roots,” my dad said, surprised.
This was how I learned about voices, which were the one part of a person that existed everywhere. My mother had sung it so often; I was surprised to hear it coming out of her mouth after I was out- side. All the other sounds had stopped—the beating, the swishing, the gurgles, the wind of her breath. How, then, could I hear it?
“It’s the gypsy memory,” the friend said, sipping sangria. “Boiling in the blood.” It had always been there.

Kelly Luce’s story collection, Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail, won the 2013 Foreword Review’s Editors Choice Prize in Fiction. Her work has been honored by fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Jentel Arts, Ragdale Foundation, Kerouac House, and Michener Center for Writers, and has appeared in The Chicago Tribune, Salon, O Magazine, Crazyhorse, American Short Fiction, Electric Literature, and other magazines. She’s the editorial assistant for the O. Henry Prize anthology and editor-in-chief of Bat City Review. She hails from Illinois and lives in Austin, TX.