CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
Each advertised expression that roamed the hospital had craved eyes. Each word was punctuated by a heavy and exhausted breath. So…huh…how…..huh….are….huh….you…..huh…today…..huh….? It was a frustrating dance for anyone that entered the place or simply wanted information. For the staff however it quickly turned into a game to see how long they could hold a sentence without motivating the victim to ditch the conversation in a flurry of annoyed dust. It provided a substitute for the lack of entertainment in the hospital.
Everything that proceeded was within the middle of the night. The doors exploded to their sides, pushing and forcing against one another with a lack of sound. Susan came marching through with arms heavy and locked to attack. Her hair dashed from shoulder to shoulder trying to find something to rest on. Her rain coat ruffled and creased with each leap she took through the hall. Eyes sharpened themselves, desperately trying to wipe away any liquefied fear that collected under her lashes. Her boots were angry at the fact that their leathery skin was wet. She held her car keys in her left hand as she broke through the halls and any door that posed to be an obstacle.
Susan’s skin folded over itself, creasing over every previous crease. She saw the door number that they told her to go to. Within that room lay all the worries about Kevin that she had built up over her night of broken sleep. A few feet away from the room the door opened with the doctor walking out. His chin was buried in his chest, not from a bundle of sympathetic sorrow, but from solid concentration on his clipboard. She hurried up to him and lay herself upon his verdict, his proof of words and his strong eye line.
As he spoke his face melted into the curves of his skull, as if acid dripped from his scalp and peeled his skin down to his lips. Susan washed her eyes to wipe away the exhaustion that she saw crawl all over his face. She knew that everything he said was vital. But for the most part all the technical jargon ended on the butt of the floor like a raw and wasted organ. The more she looked at him the more his eye sockets seemed to engulf what was left of his pupils. Pulling herself away from his face she grabbed onto the bottom edge of her jacket to try and concentrate. It was a fierce grip born from worry.
“…recovering…” and “will live….” Were the few words said that Susan picked up on. They were conveniently positive which made her feel guilty about not being able to ingest whatever else he had to say. He left her with a quiet smile and a subtle touch of her shoulder and walked off with his job between his arms. It took her a moment to realise she was left by herself outside the room.
Everything that happened next, came along the curved spine of a very long breath. It was warm and painted the inside of her cheeks with a cool orange. A hard grip around the door handle followed by a breezed push to the inside of the room. She was immediately greeted by a window and the cramped nature of the boxed room. The corners were tight and dank as if straight from an architect’s catalogue of cardboard cut outs. A beautiful image of branched trees and the bare belly button of a car park peered through the frames of the window. A sharp light from the ceiling dove down into head level smacking everything on offer with its brightly yellow syringe. Instead of the light providing some essence of visibility all it produced were shadows.
Then that one stretched breath ended on the tip of Susan’s tongue. Without a thought the next gulp of hard boiled air stormed through her throat punching every inch of her oesophagus. Kevin lay along the edge of his bed with one leg sticking out towards the window as if trying to escape onto the tree branch. He was awake and held his view in his lap with squinted eyes.
Susan wanted his attention, wanted him to rise up and hug her, but she knew it was her responsibility. Each heaved lung that she punched was accompanied by a few steps forward. His eyes were frozen like carefully crafted balls of snow afraid to melt. With a slow creak of his neck he turned to see Susan inching her way to the scene of the crime. Without hesitation he reached out his hand to hold her. Backs bent as Susan curved herself over a nearby chair to hug him. Their arms suffocated every feared thought.
His snowballed eyes began to heat up, with wet slowly separating itself from his pupils. He refused his cheeks to give home to streams, desperately trying to freeze every emotion that attempted to slide from his snowy look. Susan couldn’t feel the gap between them anymore and pressed herself up against the burnt meat of his chest.
“I should have told you earlier.” He said along the icy edges of his tongue. Susan sat down on the chair next to the bed and kept contact with her left hand. She held his palm tight and refused to let any distance build up between them again. Hear that sound? That pushed fight from Susan’s lungs and that heaved cry from her throat. It was another long breath for fear of saying anything. It was a strong desire to not break up Kevin’s thought, his line of words, his straight story made from very convoluted bends.
“I…should have spoken up.” His words were carried over another boat of Susan’s heavy handed breath. His wrinkled knuckles shook a series of aged releases up her arm. They tortured the faint arm hair that poked and stabbed its way up to her neck. It was like an interconnected railway of nerves, with each one collapsing and jolting in preparation for a crash.
“Im….im so sorry” Kevin said. They were the few words that came along another one of Susan’s stapled breaths. They had come so few in numbers is that they turned into a physical celebration every time she took another gulp of air in through her wounded skin. Kevin prepped and smoothed his muscles which resulted in a quick shift of his posture. Susan didn’t notice and instead ran her head through various courses of possibilities. And then her breath ended on a cold note. “Your mother.”
Kevin’s wrinkles refused to exist, his face and brows were still inflicted by naivety. He was in his early thirties marching through a memory. His eyes were sharp and cut everything that was thrown at them. A large winter jacket covered his elbows and narrowed the amount of skin on show around his neck. Woolly coated warmth and furred skin lined every inch of his body, and not only from the fur lining from his brown jacket. He didn’t carry much apart from a few pocket full of essentials. The usual, bottled water and wrapped meat. In his left hand he held a simplistic compass with red edges. It pointed in whatever direction lead to the loneliest corner. This was the only adventure of his that he had never told to Susan.
Branches covered in the remains of snow, scattered hard worries along the wet muddy ground. The forest was vast and threw its lengthy arms across the very skin of the place. Neither the forest nor Kevin saw the edges of the snowy landscape. A brisk and soft whisper of snow falling added movement to the image alongside the slow steps of Kevin. His breath solidified and broke in front of his view, which gave an extra cold filter. The trees stretched their anorexic nature towards their short height. Short enough to give him the feeling of being surrounded by stiff corpses hung.
His walk was long and forced him to make friends with crunched snow that he marched over. The subdued sound acted as the one sided partner for him to wrap a conversation around. He didn’t know for how long he was walking, but kept the time paced by hungry punches. Every slight conversation that he had with the deep snow was accompanied by a smooth rhythm, by a beat derived from his cold breath. The only thing that followed behind him was the reason he went out there.
Then came the crunched step that halted him to the grip of the grooved ground. It was loud and resonated through the fur that captivated his neck. A lump, a bag shaped bundle of something lay still in front of him. It was dark and stiff from any sound that he expected to hear. With the objective firmly scratched into his compass he set off towards it for curiosities sake.
Step built upon step that he threw in front of himself. The snow flowed over each crevasse and tree roots. Bumpy and groovy like waves of filth leading to land. It was as if the ground tried to hide its rough and steep nature by covering its skin with a clean sheen of snow. But none of that mattered to Kevin as he closed in on the strange sight.
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nbsp; Then his breath ended, leaving him with nothing but loose lungs dangling inside of him. In front of him lay a woman curled and curved spine like a shrivelled organ purple from the cold. Her arms were wrapped inwards to her lower stomach, hiding something from the voyeuristic stare of the forest. Short black hair teased her face, showing inches of her features at any one time. She wasn’t dressed to the idea of warmth, with her legs torn, leaving nothing but skin to contact the ice. Her left foot trapped and bent over a nearby root that rose from the deceptively filthy ground. With her other leg tied to her stomach she lay silently with her body frozen to death.
Kevin neared the paused scene with slow steps of warning. “Hello?” the words came from his heated lips with very little expectation. He was a considerable amount of feet away from the body, which left him to think about going further up to the woman. Another breath filled his lungs creasing his skin to move in and inspect her crashed limbs like the good boy that he was.
Her skin was crisp, raw and innocent from any explanation of a knifed nature. It was a natural thought that occurred to him. Just had to cross it from his list of possibilities. She had a small floral dress, with a loosely wrapped shirt covering the rest of her body. The closer he neared her the more her face became clear. It was soft with hilled features guided over shut eyes. Splitting the moment in his head, he heard a childish cry. A hushed squeal coming from the bundle of cloth that she held right over her womb. The idea came and planted itself firmly in Kevin the instant he heard the baby.
Kevin eased in and kneeled his heavy shoulders into the soft stomach of the snow. He gave a brisk scan of her pockets for a source of identity but was left stiff. He pulled the woman’s arm away from the hidden bundle with as much respect as he could shovel together. He lifted the wrapped jacket up and held it firmly to the exposure of his chest.
With quiet fingers he unwrapped the clothing from the unmarked skin that lay within. Between his arms, tied together by the heated lengths of her jacket was a child, no older than a couple of months. The child’s eye was torn from nothing, coloured by its own purple healthy guts. The baby cooed showing Kevin how healthy and safe the baby was kept. She had thin strands of hair escaping from her scalp. Every breath that Kevin tried to force back down his throat was halted and held by the fear of what happened. The jacket had edges of warm and thick leather.
His eyes watered to the bizarre situation that he found himself in. All in all he tore his sight from the baby and landed his attention back on the woman that lay curled midst the snow. The snow continued to fall along the planar image of the scene. Time had, as usual, fondled itself to a very calm pause. He fed the child with his collected and packed snacks, and Kevin was heated by whatever she gave in return. A moment, just a very simple moment for him to think about her mother again. Holding the child to the warmth of himself he looked at the mother. Frozen stabs crawled up the inside of his nose as he shifted his attention to her. She was curled and curved in the same position as if she was still holding her child. It was not a sight that he wished to accept. Among everything that he had ever waded through, seeing her huddled to protect something that she no longer had, tortured him the most. She would be forever frozen in the snow protecting a child that she no longer had. Each glimpse at what he saw would always be sponsored by a quick shank of guilt in his fleshy fatty side.
Between the snow, cornered by a lack of food and strength he made the decision to bring the child back home to safety. The trek back was spotted with captivated ideas of how he would treat the situation. But every time he went over his options they would pin themselves to the impulsive snow that fleeted before his view. The more it snowed the more he was blinded by the ethical decisions that should have been considered.
It left him with a clear pinpointed desire, and a pending goal to go back for the mother. She would always come back into the situation eventually. So he scraped her location into the form of notes and slotted it tightly into his pocket.
Kevin fastened the baby to his chest. His head slowly and gradually spun from his neck. Nothing danced for him. The trees refused to play the part they were given in the play. Everything halted in frustration at the expectation that Kevin held up to nature. What did he expect? Dirt to rise up and clean him from all consequences. The child was the only one with a wiped mind.
Susan sat in her chair subdued by the silence of the hospital. Each and every aspect of her face was suspended in a tight grip of her skin. It held itself as if the hands she had crafted and worn over her entire life had pulled the skin from her face, leaving her with nothing but bloody flesh to warm her nose. Her boots had stretched their very leathery nature up around her legs. She felt them crawl and try to grasp all the way up to her crotch, but they were left short with a lack of material to pull all the way. With that she could no longer feel the difference between her boots and legs anymore. The daily process and notion of tying her laces had become a myth, a fantasy reserved to the very privileged.
Naturally, her eyes were frozen over, locked to a very specific groove in Kevin’s blanket. The only contact they had between each other was the fact that they still held each other’s hands. Other than that, eye contact had entirely snapped in half and the conversation had turned into a one sided story. The light from inside the room had painted the walls with a rough coat of black, as if the brush had been made from scrapes of metal.
“Went back… I couldn’t find her…….I should have told you about your mother.” I should have was the sponsored phrase of the night from Kevin, decorated by flashing and stinging lights straight from the bucket of knockoff fireworks. Then came a sentence from Susan’s heaving lungs. With everything exhaled, it came in the form of a stretched out breath, teasing the tip of her tongue as it seeped out. She prepped her nostrils to flare as she said… something, but was left chilled by a lack of vocabulary on offer. Her language had tossed itself into a box, tearing every limb that it possessed. It left her with a chopped up internal language derived from chunks of thrashed and conflicting emotions.
Among all of the turmoil, her focus hovered and circled on one very particular feeling. Surprisingly, it came in the shape of a square. Not sure why to be honest, but that’s what she saw. Between each edge of the square were singular stabs that she felt, born from the feelings of relief, fear and anger.
Susan lifted her head up from the spotted curve in his blanket and rested her ripped eyes on Kevin. He was pulled and sour as if every single one of his features had been individually chopped off. Yet he still maintained a level of dignity about his escaping weakness. He dragged his features back into the strength of his face, as if his nose was in denial over how its nostrils opened up.
One might assume that a need for a worded discussion was desperately required to round off the situation that they had opened up between each other. But words lacked the ability to colour in anything. Susan shook a slight, a slight shaken inch shedding all the collected rain water from the plastic grooves of her jacket. It dripped into her lap and created a small perfectly round puddle on the inside of her thigh. Strangely, or maybe perfectly, but Susan suddenly felt the need to sing to herself. Sing straight to the grasp of her lonely ear, and curve her lobe with notes direct from her bucket of personals. Her own quiet and silent song. It would be the voice that she had kept over her entire life, and just then she wanted to hear it swing past the cusp of her foggy head.
Light from the room flashed separating her experience into edible sections and before she knew it she was swimming in the epicentre of the night.
Kevin had fallen asleep under the frozen blanket of his bed. He was silent and still like a corpse that had just released every inch of its purpose in own crippling go. Just like a child. Susan still held onto him with her left hand and rested her shocked spine on her chair. She directed herself to stare out into the rest of the room. With the door closed to her right, it gave the room a sense of solitary and helpless loneliness. She was engulfed in what she had just hear
d, just learnt, what she had just ate. Big fucking meal to digest no?
People acted as people do and shifted one by one past the door outside with shuffled and squeaked shoes. The sun was fondling itself awake with morning wood.
When Susan looked around she spotted things that didn’t belong. She knew they were just pretending to reside within the hospital to spy on her. She felt uncomfortable with them watching. The leader of the anti-privacy group was the sink who edged its eyesight from the open bathroom in front of Susan. It watched her and had the audacity to stand its ground even when Susan stared back. Unnerved she dragged the tips of her fingers over her eye to wipe away a few sneaky tears.
She was tired, exhausted to the point where she was stuck on the process of spelling out the word “exhaustion”. She was stuck on what came after the letter “s”. Her eyes carved a new home for themselves in the bed of her cheek bones. But somehow they weren’t able to actually succumb to sleep. It was a torturous dance between the need for sleep and need to process things, whereby both of them wore shoes two sizes too big. Awkward shuffle amongst angsty knees was the craze.
Susan looked at Kevin for the first time in a while. She still held his hand, refusing to let go of his skin. It was a mixed oil that creased and spread over his skin that stopped her from letting go. But sleep depravity blocked her from chewing any further on the bones of how she felt. It was an entire mess of culminated and hidden feelings, which resulted in them all tripping over one another in a magnificent straight line. Legs flew and flesh was exposed but nothing was said or heard.
Then her grip of Kevin tightened with sudden force. With her other hand fitted between her thighs she sat silently as the door to the room opened. The concept of sound had killed itself and strewed its collage of guts across the plastic floor. She turned her head to catch whoever walked in and ended up giving it to them. In walked a woman, tiptoeing the line of youth and experience. Short black hair torn down her head lining up with her cheek bones. Her legs were bare, with a short floral skirt frolicking about her waist covered in snow. She wore a plane top wrinkled and folded by wear and tear. Her face was soft, and each feature of hers stayed calm and steady as if helping each other to hold in whatever locked muscles twitched beneath. With hands rested next to her sides she tiptoed in with grace and glory. The kind of graciousness that Susan would have licked up from the floor.
Susan was naturally still and timid with her movements. Every inch of her impulsive skin desperately tried to move, but was left with nothing but small seizures cascading up her arms. Tiny slits of snow cornered themselves in the many creases of the older woman’s clothing. Whatever didn’t have a strong enough grip fell to the floor with slow glory. It resulted in a trail of wet white on top of the already dull grey floor. She played in the puddles that she created. Splash splash all the way pushing the water further and further to Susan’s boots.
It was this moment that Susan took to pause and attempt to bring some life back into her forehead. The problem was; she was awake. So what in the gosh darn world was she supposed to do? Play along like a good girl was pretty much her only option. Looking at the woman she knew exactly who she was. Strangely enough it wasn’t through top level thought, rather she knew the woman through the quick punches she received in her light blue cheeks. Instinctively sore.
Light within the room took a very deep back seat in the play. Susan just sat, watching and scanning the new found skin that the woman presented to her. Then she moved in a few feet closer dragging her friendly icy puddle with her. Just enough for both of them to see each other’s faces with confidence. The woman’s eyes were worn and drawn out by the torture of cold. Susan was locked to her chair, afraid to shift her thighs out into the open world of the room. Vast world and all that frilly bollocks you know.
One stood with a straight back and the other sat curved on the chair. This was the most unnerving twitch for Susan. Then the play started itself back up again with the frozen woman singing her role into a coma. She raised her right hand slowly and gradually from her side and held it firmly at shoulder level in front of Susan. Water dripped and slipped down her arm hitting the floor with silly slaps. Susan without halted thought let go of Kevin with her left hand. With gradual lift she brought it up to mirror the woman. With a slight shake they waved at each other. Each of Susan’s fingers were tied to the reflected fingers from the woman.
The image was composed of each of them waving to each other with dashes of melted snow trailing around the room. Then the frozen woman stopped and pulled her hand back down to her waist. With a brisk smile she left Susan by herself with her hand raised to fluffy clouds. The woman inched her way back out of the room maintaining eye contact throughout. The instant Susan dropped her hand the woman had fully left the room. All that remained was the trail of wet snow that followed her out of the hospital. The room gave nothing to Susan anymore. A one sided relationship that ate away at her health.
Susan got up from her chair and steadied her body back up to a reasonable straight. Back sharp and knees unknown to bending was an unusual feeling for Susan that night. But it was very welcome. She slipped through the puddles of melted snow and tore them apart with the very hard bottom of her black boots. Grabbing hold of the doorframe she swung herself to peak outside of the room into the halls of the hospital. The place had coloured itself by the epileptic hand of a child. Crayoned blue swatted the corners and ripped red to a scream across all the empty counter tops. No one entered or exited the place. It was as if it was specifically built for Susan and the woman to play in. A sandbox decorated and filled by the curious hands of a child.
The woman taunted her heels and skipped down the hall of the hospital. Susan followed with her knees hooked into the oblivious joy that the woman sold. It was surprisingly easy for her to follow. As she tripped along she found herself fitting her walked steps into the same location where the woman had walked. She wanted her boots, her steps to be exactly the same as the ones the woman left behind. It was a strong desire, carving and etching its need to exist with every step that Susan put forward. Progress among the plastic landscape of the clinical floors.
The woman turned on her legs and proceeded to walk backwards as she caressed the colour from all of the nearby clear glass windows. She looked directly at Susan and pulled her towards her with demanding flicking index fingers. It was a playful look almost as if she was longing to play with a new found friend.
Every dash forward from Susan was followed by a loss of sight of the cold woman. She would hide behind the corners of halls and pop back out with a flurry of shocked snow to frighten the new play mate that she had found. Susan was torn through thought, with coherence hiding itself from the fear of the late night. What did that leave Susan with? Well an innate feeling to play hide and seek with a frozen woman that pranced around the conveniently empty disco hospital. She had never felt so much fun in her entire life.
The front door to the hospital was insight, along with a slight worry of entering into the city at night. Automatic doors opened and both of them shifted out of the building with their eye sight hooked on to each other. Most of the melting snow from the woman’s clothes had slipped from the grooves of her floral attire. She wasn’t perfectly dry, but she had walked long enough to shake whatever prominent wet had collected among the creases. Every attempt to spit words out from her drooping lips were abrupted by a sharp intake of air.
The outside of the city was faint and lacked the fear of hostilities. A few seconds out of the hospital were shown through a flash void of colour. But the more Susan eased herself into the pavements that she hovered over, the more the colours came back into her focus. The woman’s dress flushed and danced its loose limbs through the soft breeze of the night. She decorated her walk with randomly drawn shifts of dance and loosely carved smiles.
Along the march, both women twisted and curved their walking path through dark shady streets and damp roads. Susan spent most of her attention trying to kee
p up with and copy the movements of the frozen tour guide that dashed ambiguous joints. Across their trek the woman occasionally dropped expressions of joy mixed with a tint of icy purple. Impossible for Susan to consciously know what she was implying through her twitching nose. But it didn’t matter to her, for the coloured and silent conversation between them was more interesting than anything.
In turn every face that the woman showed was subsequently hoovered up by Susan’s flaring nostrils and lifelong intent. Within her sleep depraved and shell shocked state she couldn’t tell if it was a desperate need or curiosity that drove her to follow the woman. Every thought was commandeered by the taught strings of Susan’s jizzing emotions. All over the place, feckin messy.
The city drove itself to a slow sleep alongside the track that both women created for themselves. The snowed woman lay the ground work with simple shafts of metal and wood, just like a train track. Susan fitted her boots into everything that the woman left behind, she found herself reconstructing the track as they went along. The dirt covered wood used originally was replaced by finely sliced planks. The function remained, yet after Susan walked over her section of the continuous track she would find it in a new clean shade, a new more streamlined version.
Then suddenly Susan looked down at the track she thought she was re-digging into the ground and realised she was tripping herself confidently across the footpath. There was no metal, no wood to recut, to realign. Everything was just a flat grey, which in turn slapped a harsh red raw slap across her cheek. She jolted with heated skin underneath her drowning eye.
Looking up from the ground she held her right hand to her cheek and caressed it as if her fingers were made from plasters and soothing kisses. The horizon was selective, with very few people roaming the land of night lights. The few that did were dressed to the attire of pillows and rested their moody necks along the edge of the streets trying to make their beds. Few turned their heads to see the isolated girl making her way so late. Their eyes stabbed very aggressive apathy to whomever they looked at. Susan let go of her cheek and nailed her arms to her sides. The street came to a close with all of the homeless people left to deal with their own entertainment.
Susan moved forward now left by herself in the middle of the city without any clear and direct line of sight to the frozen woman. Fear slowly began to replace every impulsive feeling and the desire that had dragged her out there in the first place. It left her cold and shivering from all of the corrosive scenarios that she concocted. Thankfully the rain had stopped a few hours back or else her rain jacket would have turned into a one man marching band.
The end of the road came with an anti-climax and left Susan with false hopes in the middle of the dark city. She turned her neck with large gaps of movement trying to find the woman, trying to find something that might provide a slither of comfort. Her neck ached, taking in every scary corner of the city that she was stranded in. Unknown and bizarre were the names of the streets that she found herself wedged between. Grabbing onto her rain coat she shook her ankles and wrists to the same rhythm of a collapsing lung.
Then exactly when she completed her full scoped circle, Susan ended up face to face with the woman once more. Less of a distance between them now. She saw her face clearly, and with crisp chills. The woman no longer looked wet, yet she still held onto the whole frozen floral dress that she had dragged with her all night. Her skin appeared paler than when Susan had seen her first. The woman presented a smile to her with hands reached out decorated in cutesy piles of snow.
It was then and there when she read every inch of the woman’s face that she thought about where she was actually going. Where this woman was leading her. Well she could have either made the pavement her friend for the night, or she could have indulged the situation. Her history and tendencies decided for her.
A collection of light accounted their marvellous journeys along the fantastical city. The city for some strange reason hid every inch of filth just so Susan’s private play could finish. With Susan’s exhausted mind, the city had compressed itself within her memory. It made the place, the roads and buildings all seem smaller and peculiarly closer to one another. Before she could stretch out her map she was on the outskirts of the city with the fridge woman acting as her guide. Grass was visible as a prominent cast member of the play that shifted its wrecked legs further out into the wilderness. Filthy fields made Susan’s view as she walked with small stretched roads along a defined path.
The hairline of the city receded with distinct depression. Her boots composed themselves holding their laces above ground afraid to mingle with the dirt of the roads. Naturally they found it difficult to enjoy a single step along the web of rural roads. Susan on the other hand found herself locked behind the constant shifting gaze of the woman. She flung from side to side on the road with waving wrists and broken fingers, straight from the performance of a ballerina with Parkinson’s. It was cold.
The more she walked the less predominant Mr Black was. He stretched himself along his own daily corpse and flung his guts into the sky. It resulted in dripped reds and explosive oranges, all from the acidic innards of Mr Black himself. Grey found a way into the play of all the colours herself. With his demise marching forward she created the opportunity to outline his sprawled guts.
The day started up to an eruptive clap, leaving Susan and the woman to drift through the roads. It was the morning. She turned on her heels in the dirt and shook her view back to the city that she had left behind. It no longer frightened her to follow, to move forward. With that they climbed and proceeded through a series of fields and heaped blocking walls. The more Susan heaved herself over the strewn mossy stones, the less she cared about the city or anything that didn’t occupy itself in the palms of the woman.
The field thinned itself to a flat and destroyed grooves so her boots wouldn’t get lost along the muddy grass. The woman dragged herself up a hill that seemed to shake the sound of harsh water through its long grass. In a moment of exhaustion Susan looked down at the grass. Touching their heads with her right hand she found them moist and loose, yet tight lipped about where they were leading her.
The woman circled her own attractive knees and looked back to Susan. With a whip of her wrist she leashed Susan towards her embrace. A sudden force was felt through Susan’s indulgent arms, shaking harsh bangs up to her chest. As uncomfortable as it was, it felt like it came from her jacket, a third party source. Maybe even her own elbows, but she liked the idea that the woman had cool powers.
The sound of the sea thrashed and slaughtered its genitals in constant flows of pain as it hit up against the hard wall of the cliff. Susan saw the water spread its flabby skin across the horizon of the sea. Standing atop a cliff she held onto her rain coat, held onto whatever plastic reminded her of the city. The frozen woman stood tall with her back knifed upwards at the very tip of the cliff, teasing her heels with danger. Her smile animated her limbs, with every twitch that she tried to hide shaking her wrists to a silly dance.
No rain and not a single rupture of clouds covered whatever was happening on that cliff. Everything was clear and crisp, gracefully stepping away so Susan could see her situation with newly obtained eyes.
The cliff was sharp and cut itself off from the sea with an abrupt slice. The bottom of the cliff naturally gave company to all the foreign water. It was as if the sea was desperately trying to merge and become part of the land. It no longer enjoyed the bowl that it had spent its entire life thrashing and spilling around in.
Both women stood atop the cliff sharing each frozen features that they held with their worn and tired eyes. Staring directly at each other with empty expectations. Maybe I should say something? It was the kind of silence that motivated thoughts to flood. But nothing was said for Susan to listen to. The sound of the sea hushed every attempt that she gave to say something. The grass flew along the soft spitting of the wind, shaking their tiny and insignificant bodies to sea sickness.
The
woman quietened her elbows and rested her arms along her waist. Her face was calm, with her nose and lips scratched open to breathe whatever fresh air from the sea seeped in. All Susan looked at was the face that lay before her. She stared at it as if she was holding the woman’s expression in her hands. The woman’s visage was cold and shook with slight exhausted nerves sending fearful worries up to Susan, resulting in her own face coiling from possibilities that teased themselves atop the cliff.
The woman’s frozen fingers broke from her side and rose up to her chest level. The frozen mistress looked directly at her daughter and begged for her to join, to follow her off of the cliff. Susan’s hands shook as if cubes of ice formed between the joints. Clunky and cold she stood there eating her own expression. It was bitter and numb, not something she wanted to chew on every morning.
The woman’s fingers bent to the way of a beckoning. She kept her eyes steady and only showed confidence in what she was asking. Her clothes forfeited their control to the wind and all the slushing feelings that ran through both of them. Susan could tell from digging into the woman’s eyes that she wasn’t empty, she wasn’t advertising a flat end to their long trek.
With that, the woman halted her hand and stepped backwards off of the cliff. Every step that she took was sliced by seconds with the last one frozen. Susan jolted forward with her eyes jumping from their sockets. The woman fell from the grass and disappeared into the white ruffled blanket of the sea and rocks. No sound to signify the merge, the hard and cold loss that Susan never even knew about until that night.
She grabbed onto the hair of grass lining the edge of the cliff and held her body tight to fear. She felt the cold presence left by the woman along all the moist grass. Breath seeped and tore through her gaping mouth with oxygen made out of coarse sandpaper. She needed to breath but every time she made her lungs vulnerable she would subject her throat to a rough meal.
Nothing from her environment dared to enter the stage that Susan howled upon. Curled and laying among the bed of grass she hung onto the safe edge of the cliff, crying and demanding for it to give her mother back. The cliff refused, in turn heightening its choir of rocked and wet singers that abused themselves beneath.
Susan’s knees shrivelled within her jeans and spun their way up to her chest as if trying to knock her own teeth out fighting the hard fight of denial. But they constricted her and halted any tiny hint of air into her chest. Much of her time over the past few weeks had been framed by refrained eyes reluctant to wash themselves. They were adamant to keep the dirt that collected at their red raw edges. But no matter how tight they shut, then and there they couldn’t hold all the stale water from years of collected gutters. Susan cried, simply shed a wealth of tears, and gave herself company with all the relieved water that escaped her rotting skin. They had become her friends, the few friends that warmed her chest as they dripped down from her red raw cheeks.
Over the stretched past few hours, she had followed this woman through a torn city of mixed night lights. Susan had fitted herself into each step left behind by the woman. Every clunking and heavy lift of her boots were desperate to fit into the icy footprints left behind on the pavements. It was a dance of childish desire that dressed Susan throughout her entire life. Something that refused to die, for it was intrinsically weaved into her skin.
Raising her head she looked out towards the sea mimicking the water with her moving tears. Inching her hands passed the grass she rested them on the exact edged slice of the cliff that separated the vertical from the safety. Dragging her legs through the grass she landed her head on the edge and threw her gaze over. I can still see a few more footsteps to fill down there. Maybe she is still alive? I could try to climb down. Get help? Her boots excited themselves to the possibilities, throwing their laces into erratic hoops. The tips of her fingers taunted the idea of saying goodbye to the land. It was her nature that tempted her to follow and of course it would have fitted perfectly into the puzzle that she had been trying to build over her entire life.
With the corners of her eyes depleted of liquid Susan shook atop the cliff. In that very moment she fought the idea of following her mother off the cliff. Every bone in her chest evicted their innards making her feel hollow. She felt her guts spill from her stomach, but when she pulled up her jacket her skin was washed of anything. Every breath that she needed was replaced by a well-deserved scream, a tear of her throat, a perfect release. With that the play halted and rested its tired legs backstage. It allowed all the players to watch Susan curl her stomach and chest across the corpse of grass. “Quiet ssshhhh” they said hushing the sea, rocks and wind from undermining Susan’s performance.
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