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After that startled awakening and chase through the woods bears lumbered almost nightly into her dreams
but by the time she married, she couldn’t remember why even the smell of porridge could scald her tongue.
She has a baby now, and her broken sleep is invaded by bears again – their coarse dark fur smelling of resin and fungus.
Sometimes she wakes with honey in her throat hands as cumbersome as boxing gloves flat white nails thickened to ebony.
When she slides from the bed it seems natural as breathing to pad across the carpet on all fours.
Grey light seeps through loosely woven nursery rhymes. She unravels undertones of talcum powder, sweat-damp hair
and hints of her own milk on sleeping breath. Her baby. Is he hers? He seems so separate
folded in on his unblemished self as though he’s tumbled through a crack in time and she can’t touch him.
A scrawny boiling fowl from Heathfield Market fly-spotted watercolours of Italian lakes, bone china cups with faded roses you can see your fingers through— I help unload my mother’s car.
She still has her stall in the antiques centre, open again after last October’s flood. A vapour of sodden plaster and spores of fungus hung in the air for weeks along Cliff High Street. Have you ever left cut flowers in a vase too long ? Lilies and orchids are the worst. Their slimy stems. You nearly choke tipping the viscous liquid down the sink. That river will never be trusted again—its low-tide smile exposing wet grey gums.
For once, she’s letting me prepare the meal. How easily this skin slides off, all in one piece a puckered wet-suit, white and slippery. Gaping legs glisten like Clingfilm. Then the shock of perfect, naked yolks—four of them, graded down to an aniseed ball. No albumen. No shell.
This morning she grazed her wrist, fetching logs from the shed. Hands strong as a man’s. They could chop, saw, pummel grip and stroke, thread needles, comb out tangles, conjure shadow rabbits on the wall beside my bed. Her skin used to cover her. I’ve never given it a thought. That it might not last her out.
Years back—that pheasant. Somebody’s car had clipped it onto the verge. Orange, speckled with green and gold. Neck slack as old rope. As she carried it home beads dangled from its beak, one by one and spattered on the road.
These days, you buy them plucked. Take care as you tug off stubs of quills. That thin skin tears so easily. There, where blood has gathered under a bruise there is almost no skin.
White has a different meaning underground. More so in that hollow time before thin hours swell to daybreak. If this mile-long corridor held stores of words blank walls would be awash with abstracts— detachment, dislocation, distance. Single travellers seem to cast no shadow— landing, they’ll brace themselves, not against the jolt of wheels on tarmac, but the delicate reintegration of self to self.
****** A wall of plate-glass holds the heat at bay. Light waves stream through, skid to a halt on marble tiles. The floor’s a lake, the way it draws down smudged blue lines from strip-lights and dark Aegean blue of check-in counters, sky-blue monitors floating below them.
I’m trying to label blue I’ve left behind. Shutters opening on white walls are easy but sea defeats me—flash of kingfisher, a peacock’s eye, can’t catch that shade between taste of spearmint and smell of eucalyptus. Blue fades so fast. How will I keep it?
****** Voices. Man and wife, an awkward wall around their son. Squat wheels skew out under luggage. In the marble lake a creature stirs. The boy treads ice, hand on his father’s arm until bare calves make contact with my bench. Eyeballs swivel like a startled horse. See nothing. The mother’s words like fingers on his face, We won’t be long. You sure you’ll be all right?
Does he know there’s someone beside him? He’s fumbling a remembered blanket rocking his body like a metronome. My hands lie clammy on my lap, veins like blue worms. The usual offering won’t help me now, the smile, the nod, that gives me haven in eyes of strangers.
Blue’s just a name for certain waves of light.
October is the time to harvest light, on days when lingering strands of summer drift into a sky that rings like glass, honing the dulled edges of your sight to gather all the shift and shimmer of slanting sun on trees and tawny grass, gilding the familiar with surprise.
This morning I escaped into a park where light lay ripe and waiting for my eyes, trapped on wet black mud — splintering on dark green spikes of holly into shards so bright I’ll feast all winter on this hoard of light.
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