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When they sprout, their flesh is the colour of bruises The sun beats down and they cook and seep and split open    The heads take shape    Not bruises The ghost of mother’s words, an image of her mouth pressed tight as she knelt to sew up gashed skin, pliers on the soil beside her They are more than that   The sprouts, as they emerge from flat ground, smell of the butcher’s block When the Reaper was small, she squatted before each head to track the turning of skin She traced the violence of blues smudging green Yellows curdling into ochre She watched flesh deepening, like things browning and decaying, into russet and mahogany But it was the opposite of death The bruised skin smoothed, their cheeks plumped The heads bloomed fresh and new At dawn, the Reaper crouched close to watch their pores dew When mother wasn’t looking, she dug her thumbs into their eyes, her tongue into tender flesh   There are no more bruised ones left The newest head sprouted the day mother left, and in the months since, it has mellowed to a birch brown It hasn’t spoken once, mouth slack, eyes leeched Its hair is the shade of cut papaya, but the Reaper can’t bring herself to touch it Mother used to sit in front of each sprout, sinking oil-slick fingers into their hair, kneading their aches, soothing sunburns with dabs of aloe and milk The Reaper begged to help, carefully held lengths of hair as they were braided and piled up snug For the ones who asked, mother sharpened scissors, snipped and trimmed and sometimes sheared bald The weight, they said, reminded them of crowns They spoke like wealthy women with nothing to do The Reaper imagined them stopping by air-conditioned salons, servants waiting at the door, ready to whisk them off to galas and banquets thrown in their honour    That was when the Reaper wasn’t the Reaper yet, when she was too young to understand what it means when a woman’s head sprouts from the ground   *   She wakes with the heft of mother’s pliers in