Underneath

by KT Amrine

Sometime in 1996, Margo is working the reception desk at a small veterinary practice near Columbus, Ohio. After four years as an engineer (something she realized she was only doing to please her father, who’s also an engineer), she decided to switch gears. All Margo knew is that she had always wanted to work with animals. She stumbled across the ad in the paper shortly after moving out of her ex-boyfriend’s apartment, a man who she thought would propose after she agreed to move to Ohio with him from Pennsylvania. After four years without a ring in sight, she called it quits. Her parents wouldn’t stop asking when she’d finally get engaged, and she was tired of wasting her time instead of making her parents happy. She’s already 26. She’s running out of time to give her parents grandchildren.

As Margo types away behind the desk, Scott enters the clinic looking for his sister,

Angie, who works as a technician here. But when he walks up to reception, he’s stunned by Margo. He’s instantly drawn to her long, brown hair and her deep brown eyes that look up at him as he approaches the desk.

“What can I help you with?” Margo asks. Scott even admires the small gap between her two front teeth that reveals itself when she speaks.

“Hi, I’m Scott,” he says. Can you tell Angie I’m here? We have lunch plans, is what he means to say next. Instead, he swallows and says: “I’ve got a friend’s wedding coming up and I need a date. Would you like to join me?”

Within two years, they are married. They build a house together in a new subdivision north of Columbus, in a smaller town called Delaware. They hand-select the fluffy navy carpet for the living room, the shade of shamrock to paint the front door, and the all-white kitchen appliances. They pick the species of bush leading up the steps and have a choice on the tree in the backyard.

“An ash tree,” Scott decides, putting his degree in wildlife management to use. When they move in, Margo names the young tree Clarence. She names the other trees they plant, too: an ornamental pear named Pricklee and an Asian fir named Molly. For the first four years of their marriage, while they try to get pregnant, Margo has her trees. She waters them while they’re saplings and checks on them out of her bedroom window, which looks over the backyard. In

2002, they buy a real pine tree instead of their artificial one to celebrate their daughter’s first Christmas. They plant it in the backyard afterwards, and Margo names it Chris T. Fir. In 2006, they do the same thing for their second child and Margo names it Frosty.

Margo loves Scott, but she knows how flawed he is. He gets angry, he yells, he hates being wrong. But here is a man who, finally, wanted to get married and to have a family, things that Margo had searched for in every man she’d met. And if she can’t impress her parents with an engineering degree, at least she can be a wife and a mother, like her own mother wants her to do. Margo does not stop to consider if this is what she wants.

Early on in their relationship, Scott finds the scars on Margo’s wrists and thighs. She has no choice but to come clean.

“If you do that again,” Scott says through his teeth, “I will leave you.”

The desire to bring back a blade to her forearms burns through her daily. She wonders what inch of her skin he won’t see, won’t notice until it’s already scarred over or faded enough to be invisible. But she resists. She cannot lose this picket fence that everyone wants for her. She needs this. This is how she can be happy.

My mother’s favorite tree, Clarence, died in 2006, when I was four years old.

“It’s the Emerald Ash Borer,” my dad explained. “It’s a bug that’s killing the tree—that’s why we have to cut him down.” I remember him tearing off Clarence’s bark and tracing his finger over the curved lines in the wood, showing me where the larvae had feasted. It looked like something I could have drawn onto the tree myself at that age—just a collection of nonsensical scribbles. All I knew about it then was that it was a bug, and that it had killed my main source of shade in the summer. On the day Clarence was cut down, I remember peering out the back window to watch my dad’s chainsaw make contact with the bark. I remember keeping the dogs inside since the fence was wide open, watching the truck back in through the narrow opening in the gate, seeing Clarence’s disfigured body loaded into the truck bed branch by branch. My father tied one end of a rope around the remaining stump and the other around the tailgate and had someone watch while he carefully drove forward. Once the rope tensed in the air, it was only a moment before the stump tilted forward, tearing its roots out of the ground. I remember the sound it made, even though the door: thick and disconcerting, like ripping a new pair of jeans or pulling a brush through knotted hair.

While my father uprooted Clarence, my mother was at work, clueless that my father had gone ahead and removed him.

On January 19, 1970, Margo is born. Her mother intentionally chooses a name without any nicknames, any alternatives—a sturdy name. She spells it without the T at the end. It’s unnecessary, her mother thinks, to add the silent letter. Margo is her parent’s second child. Four years earlier, they had Julie—another sturdy name that doesn’t lend itself to nicknames.

Even as a child, Margo fights with her mother and father. Her mother does not like it when Margo plays with the neighborhood boys, when she asks if she, too, can take off her shirt to run through the trees, bare-chested like the rest of them. When her mother says no, Margo doesn’t understand. It’s not fair. But she keeps her shirt on, like her mother says, and still comes back home muddied and heaving just a few minutes after the street lights flicker on. Her mother frowns and orders her to bathe before dinner. She wishes that Margo would just play with the nice girl next door, the one who wears that frilly pink dress to church and holds her babydoll close to her heart. She needs to learn how good young girls behave.

When I was in seventh grade, I wanted to go as Mabel from my favorite TV show, Gravity Falls, for Halloween. The character wore a sweater with a rainbow on the front and a skirt, and she had long brown hair that I wanted to buy a wig for.

“It’s too plain,” my mom said, “no one will recognize you. You have to go as someone else.” No matter how hard I argued, she did not budge. She sent me to my room when I wouldn’t stop fighting with her about it.

In my room, I paced back and forth with all the rage my 13 year old body could muster. “I hate my mom,” I muttered under my breath over and over and over again. The pacing and chanting did not help. Instead, I spied my penguin pillow pet on my bed and lay face down in it, burrowing my head as far in it as possible, and screamed so hard I could feel my uvula bounce off my tonsils. Shortly after I started, my mother threw my bedroom door open.

“What are you doing?”

I pulled my head out of the pillow pet. “Getting my frustration out!”

“Do something else!” She slammed the door again without another word. Exasperated, and more frustrated now than before, I stood up, pillow pet in hand, and did the first thing I could think of: smacking the ever-loving shit out of it on the bed. But this, too, wasn’t quiet enough, so my mother interrupted me again.

“Stop doing that!” she yelled again, and closed the door as quickly as it opened.

The more she told me no, the more angry I got. I started pacing again and I opened and closed my palms incessantly, scouring my room to find something to take my anger out on, something quiet enough that she wouldn’t hear me. I couldn’t find anything quiet enough, anything discreet enough, so without thinking I closed my right fist and punched myself in the jaw.

I stopped pacing. I looked at the door and listened for my mom’s footsteps to come back up the stairs. It was silent. I turned my gaze back to my closed fist, where my knuckles had started throbbing. With my left hand, I reached up to touch my jaw where I had hit. When I found the exact spot, I pushed my fingertips into it. I waited for the sensation to feel like pain, kept pressing in hopes that I could convince myself that it had hurt enough that I shouldn’t do it again. I pressed and pressed and waited and waited, but no matter how much it hurt, it felt good to cause that damage. To know that I had the strength to hurt myself, to know that I was capable of enduring that hurt, and most of all, to know that I could solve my own frustration by doing so.

I kept quiet in between the next few punches, confirming that my mom wouldn’t walk in the room and catch me in the act. After that, I alternated using my left and right fist to hit my jaw, cheeks, thighs, stomach, hips—anywhere I could reach or felt like hitting. After facing ten minutes of my own judgment, I sat on my bed and waited for my hands to stop throbbing. The question worked it’s way into my head: What have I done? I answered it with another question.

What else was I supposed to do?

Since the species was first discovered in North America in 2002, the Emerald Ash Borer has killed over 100 million ash trees. In northeastern Asia, it’s native habitat, this does little damage to the ash trees. Additionally, the food chain keeps the insect in check: wasps and other predators feast on the Emerald ash borer. But in North America and Europe, they are an invasive species left unchecked by other predators. Most victims die, like Clarence. Although the EAB was found outside of Detroit, MI and in Ontario, Canada in the early 2000s, it could have been carried over by packing crates from Asia as early as the 1980s. But no one noticed for another twenty years. Now, in 2024, it can now be found as far South as Louisiana and as far West as Oregon. As a child, I was completely oblivious to the damage it had already done and the havoc it would cause over the next two decades.

After a female lays eggs in between pieces of the ash tree’s bark, the larvae hatch and carve serpentine pathways through the wood. In doing so, they destroy the pathways that take water from the roots of the tree to the branches. The leaves wither and fall, the bark cracks and splits, woodpeckers incessantly drill holes in the trunk trying to reach the larvae. The tree dies but remains standing, slowly crumbling at the hands of an almost invisible killer, one that hides beneath the tree’s own skin, one that emerges through spaces smaller than a hole punch, one the size of a rice grain and the same color as the leaves it feeds on. They’re all subtle marks, ones too tiny to see unless you get up close, unless you know the tree. It’s not impossible to tell that an ash tree is dying at the hands of the EAB, but you have to be paying attention.

At Virginia Tech, Margo is a good student. She gets all A’s, she swims well in her meets. She has friends, she has a job, she works hard. She doesn’t pay for college—her father pays for school, especially because she agreed to become an engineer like him. Her mother thinks she is doing well.

Margo is not doing well. She dreads waking up in the morning, confronting the newly scabbed cuts on her body that have crusted overnight. She also dreads the walk to class, when the sounds of her shoes on the pavement aren’t enough to block out all the horrible things that run through her head—why are you here, you are a waste, no one likes you. But in the lecture hall, the professor’s droning drowns out the voices in her head. She takes notes, she raises her hand when no one else does. Afterwards, she meets up with friends or studies in the library or grabs lunch from the dining hall. She quiets the voices any way she can so that they don’t bother her until she gets back to her dorm. There, alone in the safety of her room, she drives the blade into her skin, splitting flesh, spilling blood, finally splurging every horrible thought she’s had all day.

She can finally rest.

I didn’t bruise often when I hit myself, but if I did, I didn’t try to hide the marks. If someone asked about a bruise, I blamed it on my clumsiness—half the time, I couldn’t remember where I had gotten a particular bruise anyway. It could have been self-inflicted, but it could have also been from running into the kitchen table, tripping over a dog in the kitchen, or accidentally smacking or kicking the lane line during swim practice. In the eighth grade, when my hitting turned to cutting, I tried a little harder to hide the marks. I wore long sleeves around my family and washed the blood off the scissors I used before putting them away.

But I also stored the scissors on my nightstand sometimes. I had to reveal my arms during swim practice, where the array of scratches on my left forearm were on full display. When I got hot at school, I would roll up my sleeves. They were not invisible. But no one noticed enough to say anything about it, and if no one thought to say anything, it must be pretty normal for middle schoolers to do.

Eventually, I told my friend group. They did exactly what I thought they would, which is tell me to stop. “I will, I will,” I told them, but I never really did—at best, I would go a month or two without cutting. At the beginning of my freshman year, after a particularly bad episode, my friend Maddie pulled me aside.

“You need help,” she said. “If you do that again, I’m telling someone.”

Of course, I cut again after that. The plan was to keep my sweatshirt sleeves down the next day, despite how hot it was. But at lunch, it got so muggy in the cafeteria that I couldn’t help but roll them up, even though I knew it meant Maddie would tell someone. Part of me thinks that I was trying to call her bluff. Another part of me, a bigger part of me, thinks I wanted her to tell someone, that my whole show of confiding in my friends and rolling up my sleeves day after day was a desperate cry for help that no one would ever listen to, and that finally, when Maddie threatened to tell someone, I had a way out. After bunching up my sleeves at the elbows, I met Maddie’s brown eyes from across the lunch table. I made sure she saw.

An adult emerald ash borer can only move approximately one mile per year. However, it was only February 2003 before it was found feasting on trees in northwestern Ohio—50-some miles south of where it was discovered only months earlier. Transporting firewood, logs, and nursery trees long distances since the emerald ash borer’s introduction, possibly even before it was noticed by humans, had spread the infestation hundreds of miles. Whether we knew it or not, we were part of the problem, transporting the bug to places it couldn’t have gotten to by itself, letting it feast on precious trees. In response to all the devastation, government campaigns like “buy it where you burn it” began circulating to prevent the movement of firewood across state lines and forests, and The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service imposed a quarantine on trees in infected counties, including the ones to follow in the coming years.

By 2007, the EAB could be found as far east as Pennsylvania, as far south as West

Virginia, as west as central Illinois and all over Michigan, including the upper peninsula. By 2012, ten years after its discovery, the insect had already killed 100 million ash trees across the midwest. I can’t help but think about how much we could have prevented if we had noticed

earlier.

When Kt is fourteen, Margo gets a phone call from Maddie’s mom. She says Kt is slicing up and down her forearms. Self-harming. Margo panics. In college, when she rolled up her sleeves in front of friends, they’d stop inviting her to dinner. When she confided in boyfriends, they left or threatened to. Even now she questions where she could take a razor to her flesh in a place her husband wouldn’t find it. She hasn’t identified a place safe enough. If he found anything suspicious enough on her body, he’d leave her—he said so fifteen years ago, when they got married. He probably wouldn’t take the kids either—she’d be stuck thinking about death more than she already does, just without another parent to balance out her neuroticism.

Kt cannot live the same life that she has. Margo cannot let her daughter grow up with scars that strangers ask about, bright white gashes that burn too bright on her skin for people to ignore. She must learn to suffer in silence, to keep it out of everyone else’s business. How else will she keep friends? How else can she be comfortable in her own marriage, without the threat of him leaving?

That night, she pulls her daughter into her room. “You can’t do that,” she says. “I’ve done this before, and I know: people won’t want to be around you. People will dump you and drop you. You don’t want to do this. You have to stop. Promise me you’ll stop.”

The look in her daughter’s eyes tells Margo that she has something else to say. For a second, Margo wants to ask. She wants to know: How did it start? Are you okay? What can I do to help? But she knows she cannot help. She knows that whatever the answers are, she is not capable of hearing them. She wishes she could ask, thinks that maybe, if her mother asked her the same questions, she would know how to ask them now. But her mother did not ask. Her mother didn’t even notice. So Margo doesn’t ask either. She is doing her daughter a favor.

Kt promises, and to Margo’s knowledge, she follows through.

I didn’t take health class until I was a junior in high school. All my friends took it earlier in their high school career, but I had been putting it off. At the time, the word penis made me laugh and learning about periods, sex, STDs, or anything of the sort was embarrassing or uncool. But, since the class was a requirement to graduate, I couldn’t avoid it forever.

To my surprise, it wasn’t all about sex and periods and STDs. We started the semester off by talking about physical and mental health. As a part of the mental health unit, we all took screening quizzes for depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation. There were about ten questions on each form, and we had to rate each statement on a scale of “not at all” to “nearly every day.” We were instructed to answer every question honestly. Incapable of lying, I answered most of the questions either with “more than half the days” or “nearly every day,” the two highest options out of four. I didn’t see an issue with my responses. Everyone feels this way, I thought. A high score has to be normal. When we were done, the teacher collected our tests.

The next day, I’m called down to the office and put into a room with a slow, quietly-speaking woman.

“Your screening test scores from yesterday were slightly concerning,” she says. “You said you think about ending your own life nearly every day. Is that correct?”

“Yeah,” I answer. “But like, I would never actually do it. I just kind of consider it.”

She cocks her head. “What do you mean by that? Do you have a plan?”

I think for a moment. “It’s like how sometimes I think about running away. I think oh, I could just open my window and jump into the bushes down there, but I know I’m never actually going to jump out of my window and run away,” I say. “Same thing with killing myself. I think, oh, I could grab the gun my dad keeps loaded on the top shelf of his closet, but I’m never going to actually do it. I’m too much of a coward.”

“Your dad keeps a loaded gun in his closet?” She jots something down on the notepad in her lap, then leans forward.

“Yeah,” I say, shrugging. “It’s in case of emergencies, in case someone breaks into the house when I’m home alone. He always told me to either get out or grab the gun if I could. He taught me like, gun safety and stuff too—I know how to handle it.” This was true. I was raised in a gun-owning and gun-fearing household. My dad taught me how to load and shoot his .22mm, but also how to keep my trigger finger relaxed on the side of it when I wasn’t shooting.

“But you’ve thought about grabbing the gun for other reasons,” she continues.

I furrow my brows. Is she even listening to me? “Yes, but again, I’d never actually do it. I’m too much of a coward. I’ve just kind of thought about it sometimes—considered all my options,” I repeat. “I feel like everybody does that.”

She hesitates, then says: “Not everybody thinks that. It sounds like you have a plan.”

“It’s not a plan,” I reiterate, “because I would never do it. It just crosses my mind sometimes, and I think about maybe doing it but I never have, and I never will. I’m too much of a coward.” I’ve raised my voice now, trying to convince her that I’m telling the truth, because I am.

She can hear the annoyance in my voice. “Okay.” She nods and I can tell she still doesn’t believe me. We talk for the next 20 minutes and I feel every word off my tongue incriminate me: yes, I’ve cut myself, but not because I want to die; yes, I’ve been hopeless, but it’s because my girlfriend just broke up with me; yes, I’m fidgety and restless, but I’ve always been worried about something.

“I feel like this is normal,” I repeat, growing less confident every time she smiles pitifully at me or jots something down on her notepad. She doesn’t say it, but I feel it radiating off of her body: This isn’t normal. You need help.

By the time she sends me back to class, I wish I had lied.

My body is not Clarence’s—or any other ash tree’s for that matter. We are marked, but my scars are rough, raised, and direct, caused by my own frustration and inability to cope with it. Clarence’s are a soft violence, carved and inverted, not one done by its own hand. It’s easy to point the fingers back at ourselves and say, “We did this. Intentionally or not, we brought the emerald ash borer across the Pacific, we didn’t notice it for up to twenty years, we killed hundreds of millions of ash trees.” It’s harder to tell who's at fault for mine. But sometimes I wonder if that piece even matters.

None of the articles about the Emerald Ash Borer really seem to care that we caused all of this through international trade. It’s the one killing, it’s the one damaging, it’s the invader. Every news story seems to ignore who’s to blame. They do not ask the question: how did we cause this? Instead, they ask: what can we do, now that we’re in this situation? And that might be the better question for me to ask, too.

“The tree’s dead,” Scott says about Clarence. “It just doesn’t know it yet.” Even so, Margo begs him not to uproot it. She points out the treatment the Homeowners Association offered to every house in the neighborhood that had an ash tree—a two thousand dollar plan that had a slight chance in reviving the tree. She begged him to consider it. “It’s just a tree,” he said. “No use spending that much money on a tree.”

Scott thinks he is doing what’s best for the tree. In fact, he knows it on account of his degree: he’s putting it out of its misery. Margo knows what this feels like—part of what she does for a living is put pets out of their misery. In fact, years from now, when their dog Koko grows old, Margo will be the one to realize that Koko’s eyes have gone bad, that she can’t hear anymore, that she has trouble getting up from laying down and won’t fetch tennis balls anymore. She will be the one to plunge the needle into Koko’s skin and inject her with the liquid that will kill her. She is used to ending the lives of animals that need to be put out of their misery. For some reason, she is unable to do it with plants—with Clarence. But Scott cannot be argued with.

When Margo comes home from work and Clarence is gone without warning, she pretends she is not bothered. She attempts to assure herself that he did the right thing, that it really wasn’t worth the money, that it was past saving. But sometimes she gazes out the window above the kitchen sink as she washes dinner plates and misses watching his colors change during the fall. Sometimes she glances out the back door and does a double take when she’s not met with his comforting branches. When her youngest child is born, she realizes that they will never know him, never know the feel of his bark or smell his flowers in the spring. All they will know is the hole in the middle of the yard, the one that takes months to be filled with dirt and years to sprout grass. Even then the grass is different. Margo can tell the blades are thinner, not yet infested with crabgrass and weeds that litter the rest of the yard. Sometimes, when she gazes at the space Clarence used to occupy, she is reminded of how easy it is for Scott to get rid of what’s sick; of what’s hurt; of what’s dying. She is reminded to not be any of these things.

Kt Amrine is an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama where she reads and edits for Black Warrior Review. She earned her BA in creative writing from Denison University. Their previous work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.