Mama’s hands at my mouth, fingers at my teeth, prising them apart, and the sound of my own voice protesting. I know now she was perhaps hoping to feed me. The smell of broth in my pillow. Pork bones.
Darkness. Lights in places I did not expect them. A man’s voice and the hair in his nostrils as he looked upon me. Adam’s apple held in check by a neckcloth; the sight of it made me feel as though I were being choked, as though there were pressure upon my own neck.
Heat coming from Thea’s body beside me. Sun. Fire. Exploding star.
Lamps lit and extinguished. A terrible thirst. Coarse, grinding hours of darkness that I sweated into, saw shapes emerge from. Figures. Rats running across my neck, biting my lips. Thrashing and screaming for all the rats upon me, hearing my own voice and thinking it was a stranger’s, feeling pity for the poor soul screaming.
Anna Maria kissing me on the forehead. The sound of her kissing Thea.
My mother’s voice. Her hands around spoon and vial. Words of prayer around me. Fresh cold air spilling across me, the feel of Mama’s hands sliding beneath my neck, raising the thick weight of my head, fingertip at my mouth. A spoon upon my tongue, hard edge against my teeth. Liquid. A gritty bitterness.
I swallowed it down.
This is how it happened. There was a storm, and then there wasn’t. I was well, and then I wasn’t.
There was pain, and then there wasn’t.
That I remember with clarity. The sudden absence of pain. Such sweeping relief, such blessed reprieve, I fit my lips around the name of God.
Breath upon me. A swimming light filled with faces. Damp palms of love. Paper tucked against my heart.
‘God be praised on high, she will be well. She thanks her Saviour.’
Mama’s voice. I understood that she had been weeping. Mama, who never cried.
Leaning into the curve of her hand as though healing might flow from it.
‘She thanks her Saviour.’
I remember.
Thea next to me. Eyes shining with the effort of dying. Anna Maria, howling like a wolf, face hidden in her hands. A male voice saying, ‘Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord.’
I remember looking at Thea and everything fading from us. The splintered deck and the bowls of water and the mould brushes for the bread and mothers choking on their love. It all faded. There was the ocean pressing hungry against the ship, and there was Thea, and I stared into her eyes and knew deeply, deeply, that we were for each other.
Somewhere, in the wide water below us, I could hear a whale singing.
Thea did not speak, but I knew she did not want to die.
Somehow my hand found hers.
She blinked at me then, pale lashes dipping. Peace washed through her.
The whale song grew louder. I felt the tremble of it through the water. I felt the song strike the ship, felt the wood carry the notes, felt the ripple in the beams until the song reached our bunk. The fibres of the woollen blanket carried the whale cry into my body, and then I was the song. I was the tremble. I was the cry. The whale was in me, inhabited me. My blood turned to songwater and my heart stopped to listen.
Thea’s hand in mine.
The whale passed. The music faded.
I waited for my heartbeat.
It did not come again.
THE
SECOND
DAY
AFTER
press of time
Somewhere in the press of time I was caught, and now I remain here, like a flower turned to paper, untethered to the soil.
Still, I am here.
There was nothing in my life that ever offered the possibility of what has come to pass. It was wheat or chaff. Dead wood or living fruit. I grew up believing in my father’s holy orchard and its bounty of grace. I believed in hell, mentioned many times by Pastor Flügel. Hell was a bonfire of unfruitful branches. ‘And the smoke of their torment goes up, forever and ever.’
But I am not smoke. And while I have suffered torments, they are not the usual dark stitches cast along needles of pious imagination. They are the same simple hungers of my living self. I hunger to be seen. I hunger to touch and be touched. I hunger for love.
Love. If there is any explanation to my ongoingness, it must be that. Love has pinned me to this world, and so I remain.
The sun is rising again. Fire burning back the night.
Here is another day.
albatross
The last moments of my life are remembered as absences. An absence of pain. An absent heartbeat. Relief. Confusion. A waiting for the continuation of my life and the brief and wondrous second when perhaps I knew, even then, that it was over.
Then a soft and absorbing darkness.
I have spent days trying to fit words around that deepening into nothing. Language is a cramped and narrow thing; it cannot hold phenomena. Things of the spirit reach beyond the farthest boundary of words. But the feeling of that darkness remains with me. As though everything that is to happen had already happened. The dormancy of a seed.
I sense it sometimes, in shifting hours such as this one. Even as sunlight spills over the valley below, as it touches the upper branches of these trees and warms their pale trunks to blush, I feel that darkness glimmer at the corner of my vision. It makes me think that soon I will return to its totality. Or, rather, it will come for me, and I will surrender to it. I will give in and curl into the nothing which holds the possibility of everything.
For now, I am here. Hungry and discontent and not at peace, too full of love. For now, I am here to tell this story to the wind in the hope that it might hold it in trust. Perhaps somewhere, at some time, someone will hear my voice and know that even though I am gone, what I felt remains. What we felt for each other.
There was darkness. And then.
And then. And then. And then there was not.
There was a sudden brilliance. An unbearable light. I was scalded by white-lightness, I was in the heart of a flame. I closed my eyes, yet light still came from above and below. I covered my face with my arm.
I had come from a place of calm cessation. Then light came and gave me form.
I could hear the distant slap of water. Sensed taut shadow of sail. My hands were resting on cloth. Sailcloth. I could feel a raised spine of stitches down its centre.
The light subsided and I opened my eyes and saw blue. Saw the ocean, a perfect mirror.
A shadow passed above. Feathers against the sun.
An angel, I thought.
The wings grew larger and memory stirred in me. The powder and the pain and the whale. And Thea.
Where was Thea?
Wings, feathers burning with light.
The cloth beneath my hands. I noticed a crowd, bent-headed. Was she there? Was she there with me?
The wings drew closer, beating against the sky. Rippling it. Cut the light with feathered knives.
Thea?
There was the whisper of turning pages against the sound of wind.
The light paled then and I saw that the angel was an albatross. Wings spread to the wind, crucified to the sun. Holy host of sky.