I found myself nodding along to the constant hum of her thoughts and catching sight of her bright, bright dreams.
She never wanted to go.
Often I figmented other imminent Cures to shift her.
Perhaps more than the noises she made and the hot white sun, those weeks are marked for me still by a taste of blood – everywhere, a taste of blood. Like the air was filled with copper flakes.
Her flesh is somewhere torn. Her blood is landing in my mouth.
I kept a hand at my throat, fearful of swallowing the wilted violet tang.
And I was tired. All the time.
Too tired, even, to dream.
Each night I’d lie down and begin to think of Samson, convince myself I caught his scent, and then there’d come a creak across Lorraine’s shoulders.
Her gut-gurgle bubbling.
Her squeak-lung wheeze.
I’d push it to one side and think of Samson’s hands, the bulge of his shoulders. I’d put my hands over my ears as though the sounds weren’t seeded inside my own head, and imagine him coming back up from The Ground.
I was tracking a piece of cotton, matted and thick, up the length of the lawn. It was headed toward the trees and it struggled over the long and scratching grass.
I walked a little way behind it, the shift I wore rising up over my knees.
Follow me, follow me.
It made a whistling sound, the cotton. The way a man whistles, hard and through straight teeth. I crouched and watched it bob a moment longer from stalk to stalk, to the occasional thistle-stem, and then I heard a voice.
It was Fred Languid lamenting over a stillborn calf, and I was no longer in our garden but in the Languid’s sodden barn and I looked down at myself and saw I was Lorraine.
The dream was a dream of Lorraine’s, rooted in a springtime some fifteen years before.
Opening my eyes I saw the sun was almost up and tasted the blood-taste strong in my mouth.
I went to the bathroom and spat, spat, spat.
–You and your father seem so rarely to speak.
–Often there isn’t much to say.
–It’s a funny way you have, of living together.
I don’t know what she got from this back and forth between us. She was eager, I suppose, for some sign we were even a little bit alike. When she grew tired of asking after Father she’d say
–Tell me about your day.
Never mind whether or not she’d seen me throughout it, and I’d tell her what I could. Of the changes I’d seen in plants, of the growing weight to the air. She’d look at me with pity creasing the skin around her eyes.
–Season’s changing, I suppose.
Thinking Dull girl, dull girl. What a nonsense life you’re living.
All old women, I know, were at one time young.
These afternoons spent sitting next to her while she slept, I started wondering how she’d die, and where she’d be put to ground – not The Ground of our cramped garden, but those stretches kept sacred by Cures. Those stretches Father said we must never enter. Throughout my childhood he told me
We leave the graveyards be.
But why?
Because they’ll think we’re there to make them well, and then they’ll sit up.
Sit up? In their graves?
All their heads will come up over the soil, all asking to be the first saved.
One day the heat was such that she lay down on the couch right away. One hand over her face, the other fanning her breasts. The car hadn’t even left the drive and already she was saying
–Oh put me out, Ada! Put me out! This heat! I don’t know how you stand it.
So I put my hand over her eyes and she was gone right away. Her mouth slack, her chin doubling into her neck. She hadn’t even taken her shoes off, only one heel was unsheathed from her worn leather shoe and her stockings were wetly gathered ’round her knees. I couldn’t keep looking at her. It was too much. The look and the smell of her. I went out on the porch and sat on the steps, thinking thoughts of Samson with my knees knocking and my head in my hands.
Long time in the desert.
Long time long time.
I looked at my feet, my toes weathered with dust, counted ten breaths, and got up to go inside again.
Back in the house the air smelled sweeter and I thought
I’ll wake her and be stern with her, tell her we’ve another Cure.
I tripped a little over something on the floor: Lorraine’s shoes, Lorraine’s stockings.
Lorraine herself was gone.
The couch, where she’d been; ruffled and sagging.
My insides turned liquidy and quick. Where was she? And how had she woken on her own?
If Father sees, if Father sees …
I went into the kitchen, into the pantry, the toilet, back into the kitchen, and then: from the corner of my eye, a white spot moving. She was walking over the lawn. Right over the lawn. Bobbing slowly up and down like the cotton I’d seen in her dream.
I’d never seen a Cure gone past The Burial Patch. It looked like the sun and moon side by side in the sky.
Her feet, outside of their stockings, had a yellow tinge. I opened my mouth to call to her but again thought of Father, still unknowing, and then she was gathering up her dress – bunching it at the hem. She carried on, away from the house, deeply curving the arches of her feet like a dancer might, or like a woman about to step into a too-tight shoe.
When she stopped she bent her knees, letting them splay to either side.
The Ground will take her.
I went out the back door but she had already lowered to The Ground, hoisted her dress up further.
She was all contentment, all swagger.
She turned from me to show the house her buttocks, all pale and quiver, naked of their usual skein of aged silk and frayed lace.
She squatted, deeply. Paused.
The urine left her in an even streak. The sound of it on the grass, the crackling dry lawn.
Father will hear it.
It felt loud as a storm.
She stood up straight again, turned slow – too slow, and walked back toward me.
–Lorraine?
Coming back towards the house her face was blank, the skin ’round her jaws drooping. Lifting her knees high, one calf in front of the other, each the colour of clotted cream.
–Lorraine? Are you awake, Lorraine?
She brushed by me and I could only follow her easy gait into the sitting room where she lay back down on the couch and settled herself. Closed her eyes and started her deep-sleep-breath.
I could see her nipples toughening through the cloth of her dress.
When I woke her she’d looked at me and was herself.
When she left the house she was entirely herself.
I went to bed early so as not to speak with Father, who I was sure would hear the nervous rattle inside me. I only dared go outside the next day, once morning came with its spare and pale blue sky.
I went and stood on the grass. Looked down at where Lorraine had been squatting.
It was still so early the wooden parts of the house had yet to start groaning, resisting the heat after the cool of the night.
I could smell it. The yellow tang.
What had happened to her while she slept? What had taken seed? And what if Father noticed this patch of yellow in the middle of the lawn?
I pulled at the hem of my dress, felt on my shoulders the keen eyes of a magpie, strutting behind me on the roof.
Later that day, we were brought a young boy Cure.
Cormac Kent was the mildest kind of ill: when he ate, he felt a little fire inside.
Just as well, I thought, knowing I was too tired and fretful for anything more testing.
He was small, freckled and pale but he spoke pushing down on his throat, willing his voice to deepen. He was at that age of acting out the motions he’d learned in the company of men. Hence his insistence on shaking Father’s hand, and his
hard squint at my chest.
–You go with Miss Ada, Cormac, his mother said. A small woman who wore a hat.
I took him to the porch and told him to rock in the chair we kept there until he began to feel cool. He kept his eyes on me while he leaned into his feet and set the chair to creaking, the yellowing boards beneath whining hard and yellow and long.
It was rare for us to take a Cure outside, but often the younger ones were too tightly wound upon arrival. I rested against the house and counted the creaks, thinking after thirty-five or so he might be ready to open, but I lost count – kept thinking about Lorraine and the yellowed grass.
– I’ve been hearing all about you—
–What’s that?
But when he spoke he’d a child’s phrasing again.
–We hear all sortsa things ’bout you.
I had my hands deep in my pockets.
–I’d say you do.
I’d keep my gaze on the driveway as long as the boards carried on creaking. I wondered if this was in fact a hotter summer, and if it was the weather that saw Cures getting evermore strange.
–I hear your girl parts are on the wrong way ’round.
–Yessir, and upside down. You feeling any cooler yet?
The creaking stopped.
–I’m just here because my mamma says you can fix me, but I’d never let you inside of me. No way. You kill us kids so you can eat us. You eat up our arms and then you leave our legs for Sister Eel.
–If you don’t want to be cured then you go tell your mother so because it doesn’t matter to me whether you can keep your dinner down.
It took me a moment to realise he wasn’t moving, that he was staying perfectly still. I’d put him to sleep without touching him – without meaning to at all.
His mouth was a little way open, his eyes out of focus. He looked like he’d drowned and was floating in the water that killed him.
I could smell the hormones splicing inside him. I could smell the sweat in his glands that had yet to disperse and stain his brown pressed pants and yellow shirt, stretched thin about the shoulders by his brothers who’d worn it before him.
Poised and helpless. Captive bird.
I unbuttoned his shirt and quickly, without my usual care, opened up his stomach and squatted low to look inside. There were indeed some sparks flaring along his gut, which had in fact worn dangerously fine; I plucked them like berries, one by one, and threw them like darts into the ground. They left little scorched marks on the wood. The tune was a strained one. It wanted to catch on a loop, to jolt and skip, even as I welded his skin back together in a thin line.
–Cormac, wake up.
He didn’t move, and his pupils were the smallest of pricks in the centre of a muddy haze.
I bent down to look him in the face and said again
–Wake up.
And this time he did. Looking pained and afraid.
–You had some fire in you, but it’s passed.
I leaned in the door and called to Father and then rested my back against the house again. Cormac Kent didn’t speak, only sat in the chair with his shirt undone. He looked down at himself and then his child’s hands began fumbling with the buttons of his shirt which was very worn, and much too large. He did them up unevenly, his collar sagging, and I knew then – by his harsh breath and flickering eyes – that he’d not slept while I was inside of him. He’d been stilled only, and very much awake.
When Father came to the door Mrs Kent was busy in her purse behind him. They carried on speaking and so missed the look, already waning, on her son’s face. Father was looking at me and I was telling him with a nod that the illness was gone.
I don’t know how we were paid because I kept watching the boy, thinking he’d surely evidence some sign. But he only looked at the ground, at the pockmarked wood, his baby mouth a little way open. One over the other he laid his freckled hands across his stomach, which I knew now to be a whitewashed pale. I knew also that he’d wait until he was home and alone, to cry. And that of my witch’s hands rummaging around his gut he’d never say a word.
Never let you inside of me, no way.
Father’s idle words. Mrs Kent already inside the car. Already simpering at her son.
A few days later I was lying in the grass while the morning was still mild. Thinking of Samson beneath me and pressing my hips into The Ground, rolling my shoulders and turning my head side to side. I could feel him there, and it soothed me.
Father came out of the house behind me. I heard his steps: soft and slow. He stood beside me and I felt his shadow across my knees.
–Lorraine is here.
–Already?
I rolled away from him, onto my side. I’d decided Lorraine’s waking up was a sign she’d been put to sleep too many times, that she was growing a kind of callous toward it. But I couldn’t tell Father. Couldn’t tell him I’d left a Cure unattended. And I didn’t know what I’d do with her today, if I couldn’t make her sleep.
Behind my eyes I saw Samson’s thighs, their muscle-bulge.
–She’s been acting strangely.
I clenched a little. I knew he hadn’t seen her in the garden, and that he thought a tomcat had yellowed the grass. He’d poured a certain broth over the poisoned patch to help it regain its green.
I snorted, made myself sound disinterested – calm – and said
–She’s a Cure.
–She’s been saying things that don’t make sense. Like she’s had a fit and her brain’s misfiring.
–She’s just talking about her old life. It doesn’t make sense because she always starts in the middle.
–It’s not stories, just sentences.
–Like what?
–‘Long time in the desert’, ‘Not a bad man’.
I opened my eyes and looked up to Father’s face but he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at The Ground. I kept very still.
–Must be going senile.
–Bit before her time.
–…Should I look inside her head today?
He rubbed at his scalp. The grey-blond hair flickering. Kept staring and staring at The Ground.
–No … no, maybe it is just her memory looping.
Still, his eyes on The Ground, crinkled – almost closed.
Then, eventually,
–Be careful out here, Ada. Even in sunshine. Everything’s feeling strange.
Lorraine was smoking and looking out the window, one knee rested on the couch.
–How are you feeling today, Lorraine?
She turned around quick, smiling.
–Morning Ada. Feeling fine, just fine.
–You want to lie down?
Which she did, stubbing the cigarette out gently so she could return to it again.
When I put her to sleep she twitched a little, which wasn’t unusual. Her lips made themselves thick and her eyelids shrivelled shut. I sat back on my knees and watched her. Waited.
It didn’t take long.
Her mouth came a little way open, and there was a rattling sound.
It sounded like her spine was shaking and the sound was coming up through her. I’d never heard such a sound, a body trying to ground some portion of itself to dust.
–Why are you trembling, Lorraine?
And then her head snapped back and her mouth opened fully. I could see the large teeth near the root of her tongue gleaming wet and silver where the air had not yet seen the spittle dried. She opened her eyes and they were wide, unseeing. She reached up to me, her square fingers carrying the lightest touch of yellow.
–Come down to me, Ada.
Her mouth moved with a roundness that didn’t match her words.
–Why will you not come down?
–Come down where, Lorraine? You’re right here.
For a terrible moment I thought she meant for me to kiss her, or embrace her in some way. I felt a simmering warmth in my loins that sickened me.
–What’s happening to you, Lorraine?
&n
bsp; –You keep me waiting on you like a dog, Ada.
That swirling warmth in my groin. Sweet and thick. No, I thought, No.
My loins filling up with sweet wet hurt and that pincer heat inside me.
And then Lorraine spoke again but her voice was not quite her own.
–It’s been a long time, in the desert.
I went outside. I was shaking, I think.
I felt a stream inside me was quickening.
I meant to taste the hot dry air and wash out my mouth.
I’ve dreamed it, I’ve dreamed it. I’ve dreamed him too strong and called up some strangeness. Made the words take root like a growth inside her.
I stopped on the bottom of the stairs and hit at my groin. Made a fist and wedged my hand into the softness there, around the carmine muscle and bone.
My eyes and throat were hurting, but no wet came.
Maybe I’m crying.
Could be I was crying in that dry, soundless way I’d seen take over certain Cures – their mouths wide open but with little sound, their eyes shining but only giving up the thinnest tears.
In bed that night I kept the lamp on beside me.
Chill after chill ran through me. If I closed my eyes I saw Lorraine standing over me, stealing Samson’s words and gleaning something of his tongue.
Had I channelled some of my want into her aged, damp body?
Was my need of him so warm and alive it took up space in the nearest Cure?
A pain behind my eyes. The soreness of needful sleep. And the ache in me still pounding, still raw from having been so stirred. The bruised longing there telling me what I knew but couldn’t fathom; that what was happening to Lorraine was not my doing at all.
Quick haze of a dream.
Of lying down on the lawn.
Of a magpie circling.
Lorraine was due and I met her on the porch. Father was working in the garden, down at the far end near the trees. She’d driven herself, for a change.
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