Ode to Tile Her
Hazel stood in the doorway of the bathroom, holding the first hexagon of honeycomb ceramic up to the morning light. October in rural Oregon meant everything was wet—the cedars, the air, the ground that squelched beneath your feet—but inside this tile she could see something dry and ancient, like crystallized honey from a hive abandoned decades ago.
Her mother had ordered these tiles twenty years ago. Never opened them. The boxes had been stacked in the hallway closet like a decision deferred, the delivery tape gone amber with age. On the top box, in her mother's handwriting: "Ode to Tile Her." Hazel had stared at those words for a full minute, trying to understand. A poem? Instructions? A bitter joke about covering herself up?
She'd driven fourteen hours from Sacramento to deal with the house, telling herself it was about the estate, the paperwork, the practical matters that death demands. But really, she'd come for this—to finish what her mother had penciled on the walls in her strange backward counting. Seven, six, five, four. As if tiling toward zero.
"Begin with the shoulder blades," she said aloud, surprising herself. The words felt like they came from somewhere else—maybe from the "Ode to Tile Her" her mother had written on that box, as if the phrase contained instructions Hazel was only now decoding. Her therapist would have called this "embodiment," but Hazel thought of it as something else—mapping her mother's body onto the room where she'd chosen her particular exit. The waterline from the Santiam's last flood still showed at shoulder height, and this seemed right, seemed like the place to start. These walls had held water. They could hold memory.
She mixed grout the color of morning fog, adding volcanic ash that still sifted through the cedar walls. Mrs. Thiessen from down the road had mentioned it yesterday—how nothing in the valley ever got clean of St. Helens, how the mountain had marked everything permanently. "Like grief," the old woman had said, then caught herself. "Well. You know."
The first tiles went up easily. Hexagons at the shoulder blades—those wings that never opened. Hazel thought of her mother standing at this same wall, pencil in hand, planning her pattern. Had she known then? Had she already decided that drowning wasn't about water but about weight, about what you choose to carry versus what you choose to release?
For the collarbones, she chose subway tiles, white as the lies they'd all told each other. "Mom's just tired." "Mom needs space." "Mom will call when she's ready." She arranged them in the herringbone pattern her mother had sketched—pointing toward and away simultaneously, like every conversation they'd had that last year.
The work had a rhythm. Mix, spread, press, hold. Her body remembered this from childhood—watching her mother tile the kitchen backsplash, the bathroom in their first apartment, always making homes more beautiful before leaving them. "We're improving it for the next people," her mother would say, but Hazel understood now that her mother had been tiling herself into spaces, then out of them, practicing departure.
When she reached her mother's sternum on the wall—the place where the heart's percussion would have been—she used the obsidian. Volcanic glass from Oregon's own flows, black mirrors that showed her own face, her mother's face, the family face that knew how a person could drown in three inches of river water if they wanted to badly enough. If they were tired enough. If the current of leaving finally got stronger than the current of staying.
A knock at the door. Mrs. Thiessen again, this time with her granddaughter, a girl of maybe seven who immediately gravitated toward the boxes of tiles, touching each one like it might be warm.
"We're going to the river trail," Mrs. Thiessen said. "Thought you might want to come. It's where your mother walked."
"I'm tiling," Hazel said unnecessarily.
The child picked up a piece of river stone. "For the soft parts?"
Hazel stared. "What?"
"The soft parts are harder," the girl said, as if reciting. "That's what Grandma says. The soft parts need smooth things. No edges."
Mrs. Thiessen looked embarrassed. "She listens to everything. Come on, Juniper."
But Hazel held up her hand. "No, she's right. The soft parts are harder."
She looked at the river stones her mother had collected, tumbled smooth by decades of snowmelt. Her mother's belly, her sides, the vulnerable spaces—these would need the gentle stones. No edges left for cutting. Just green moss light, lichen yellows, granite greys like morning, like forgiveness, like the decision to stay when leaving would be easier.
They worked together then, the three of them. Mrs. Thiessen mixed grout while Juniper sorted stones by color and Hazel pressed each piece into place. The child hummed something tuneless—rain, maybe, or wind through cedars. The sound made Hazel's ribs ache with something that wasn't quite grief, wasn't quite joy.
"My mother tried to tile me once," Mrs. Thiessen said suddenly. "Not literally. But after my father died, she kept trying to protect me from everything. Armor, you know? Took me forty years to realize that beautiful armor is still armor. That protection can be another kind of prison."
Hazel's hands stilled. She looked at the wall, at what she was building. A shell. A carapace. A beautiful trap.
"But some parts," Mrs. Thiessen continued, watching Hazel's face, "some parts you leave untiled. On purpose. You choose what stays permeable."
The old woman pointed to the corner where Hazel's mother's pencil marks stopped. Not because she'd run out of pattern, Hazel realized, but because she'd decided something. Made a choice about what needed covering and what needed to stay exposed to the world.
That night, Hazel worked by kerosene lamp, finishing the floor. She left spaces—deliberate gaps where the wood showed through. The threshold especially, that liminal space between water and air, between drowning and breathing. These weren't failures in the pattern. They were decisions. They were her mother saying: here is where I stop defending myself from the world.
Juniper had left a drawing tucked under a tile box—a woman made of small squares, but with her hands, feet, mouth, and eyes uncovered. At the bottom, in crayon: "Ode to Tile Her." Hazel's breath caught. Had the child seen the writing on the box? Or was this some strange coincidence, some echo across generations?
"So she can still touch things," Juniper had explained before leaving. "So things can still touch her."
Hazel understood then what she was really doing. Not tiling her mother's memory into place, not building a monument or a tomb. She was completing a conversation they'd never had. Her mother had started it with pencil marks and ordered tiles. Hazel was answering with grout and gaps, with the decision to finish but not complete, to protect but not imprison.
The spine was last—she created a keyboard of black and white tiles running up the wall, each vertebra a note in a song never sung, the melody of staying upright when you want to dissolve. She thought of her mother's spine, how it had curved in those last months, bending toward earth like a plant seeking darkness instead of light.
At 3 AM, she stopped. The bathroom wasn't finished—would never be finished in the traditional sense. But it was complete in the way that mattered. It told the story: here was a woman who tried to protect herself with beauty, who numbered her days backward, who left when the weight of armor became heavier than the weight of water.
Hazel walked out to the river trail in the darkness, her boots clicking on wet stones. Everything here sounded like rain—footsteps, breathing, the river itself. She found the place Mrs. Thiessen had described, where the current eddied and pooled, where someone could wade in and never wade out if they chose.
She thought about her mother standing here, making that choice. Then walking back to the house to order tiles online, to pencil a pattern on the walls, to leave a project for someone to find. Not a suicide note but a suicide pattern. A map of the body that had carried too much.
"I would have tiled you differently," Hazel said to the darkness, to the river, to whatever of her mother might be listening. "I would have left more spaces. I would have used more color. I would have made you a door instead of a wall."
She thought of those words on the box—"Ode to Tile Her"—and understood finally that it had been both poem and prophecy, both love song and dirge. Her mother had been writing instructions for tiling a woman into safety, into beauty, into the kind of armor that becomes your tomb. But also, maybe, leaving clues for how to untile her. How to leave her human.
The river answered with its constant sentence, neither yes nor no but simply: continuing. Simply: current. Simply: the sound that everything makes here, which is rain, which is time, which is the way forward when there's no way back.
When she returned to the house, the bathroom glowed in the lamplight. The tiles caught and held the flame, turned it into something else—not light exactly, but the memory of light, the promise that morning would come and find these surfaces waiting. Ready to be beautiful. Ready to be useful. Ready to hold water or let it go, depending on what the next person needed.
Hazel packed her things slowly. She would leave the house like this—partially tiled, intentionally incomplete. Whoever bought it could finish it their own way. Or not. Maybe incompletion was its own kind of perfection. Maybe her mother had known that. Maybe that's why she'd ordered exactly enough tiles to tell the story but not enough to end it.
She locked the door, leaving the key under the mat where the realtor would find it. The cedars dripped their eternal rain. Somewhere, Mrs. Thiessen was probably awake too, walking her own trails of grief and recovery. Somewhere, Juniper was dreaming of women made of tiles with human hands.
Hazel drove away as dawn grayed the sky, thinking of armor and prisons, of rivers and wings, of the soft parts that are harder to protect, of the terrible freedom of choosing what to expose and what to cover. Behind her, the bathroom waited—a poem of tile and space, a conversation between mother and daughter, a map of the body that insists on both protection and permeability.
She would never finish tiling her mother. That was the gift her mother had left her—the understanding that some projects are meant to remain open, that some patterns are more beautiful for what they don't contain, that sometimes the best way to honor someone is to leave spaces for the rain to get in, for the light to get out, for the story to keep telling itself in voices we haven't heard yet.
