Arterial Bloom, page 20
Eboni drifted inches away, reached out, and behind her I saw her flowers still rising, and just as a puckered palm caressed my cheek, I stumbled to the wooden gallery floor with a clatter. A few conversations stopped; a man came forward to help me up. I saw Melody quickly turn back to the other room. Shit.
On the wall, Eboni dreamed.
I kept making small advances towards Melody and her group of friends. There were enough people to cloak my movements somewhat but every few steps I would become self-conscious, stop and look about to see if a friend was nearby. The likelihood of this was, of course, zero. I had no friends here.
This staggered approach had not gone unnoticed. Melody would glance around occasionally then back to her circle. Closer, I could see Melody was crying, her shoulders shuddering. It was now or never. I walked towards her with purpose. A very tall red-haired woman I dimly recognized—her name might have been Karen—broke from the group and stepped in front of me. She told me it’d be better if I left.
Melody was completely turned away from me now. One girl put a hand on her and I felt a wave of jealousy. There were more people standing behind the tall girl now, their eyes alert and wary. Around the museum people were beginning to notice. It was time to go.
When I’d gotten onto the street, I texted Melody. Did I mention she gave me her number? Well, I have it.
Had to leave early, sorry. Your art is beautiful. Hope you feel better.
She read the message about eight minutes later, but no reply came.
The dream, when I remembered it, was always the same. A female form, someone I felt like I’d known from before the hospital, always slipping beneath the surface of inky seawater. While I sat close enough to help but unwilling to move.
Recently it’s been different. The woman is Melody. The water is still dark and oily, but I know we are in the swimming pool. The roles are reversed and it’s me trying to keep my head above water. Melody, sits a few feet away, observing my struggle. She can reach me but won’t try. I keep thinking, how could you let this happen?
Taking one last gulp of air, I go under. I’m not like the other woman though. I belong down here. I see Melody’s legs treading water. I grab hold of her ankle and pull. Together we descend and in the place where no light can find us, I let her go. Her pupils are dark swirling holes blindly probing the depths, her hands and legs searching for anything to touch.
When she’s resigned to the emptiness, I swim towards her.
“We can’t give out personal information of our clients.” The receptionist picked up the clipboard with the sign-in sheet I’d been eyeing and held it to her chest. It had the names and phone numbers of everyone currently enrolled in the class. I didn’t need Melody’s number but I wanted to know if she was still coming here. She hadn’t been to a class in nearly three weeks.
“She’s a friend,” I said, smiling. “I just want to know she’s all right,”
“If she’s your friend maybe you could try calling her?” said the woman. Her name tag said Kate.
Things became heated. When Kate’s coworker came out from the back room because of the shrieking I was behind the counter and Kate was curled on the floor clutching her face. He seemed familiar.
“Hey! I know you!” the coworker said. I scrambled back over the reception counter and his shouts followed me as far as the automatic doors.
The museum was closed. I cupped my eyes against the window and could see Melody’s work was gone. I rapped on the glass-paneled doors, but it was deserted.
I called the number Melody gave me. No answer. I tried again from a payphone. Nothing. No answering machine, just an abrupt end.
I sent a text.
Everything okay?
It stayed unread.
I didn’t go back to the apartment that night. I walked to the quay instead. The police would know about the swimming pool and by now have contacted Aidan. He’d be calling and I’d feel compelled to answer or unplug the phone and then he’d just come over. He might already be at my apartment. He had spare keys.
I used to spend a lot of time down here. Like a lot of places I hadn’t been for years, there was a sweet nostalgia, memories of a person framed blankness.
The tide was in. Boats in need of fresh paint bobbed in the water. I remembered we’d unmoored one, taken it into the night. There was a small island we wanted to visit. It looked like a patchwork of yellow grass from the pier. We never made it.
The water was always peaceful during the day. Deceptive. Only a few feet below the surface lay a quicksand of sludge and shit. I preferred the open water but never swam here. It could swallow you before anyone threw you a lifeline. If they threw you a lifeline. Not everyone knew that.
Ripples mesmerised me for a long time. It used to be so inviting.
Sounds of fishermen woke me. It was still dark. I’d fallen asleep against a metal shipping container, my joints painful and cold in the morning grey. I got up and walked in the direction of my apartment.
Everything seemed fuzzier along the way. I’d just taken my keys out of my pocket when I heard my name.
Aidan. He looked paler than me, eyes puffy from lack of sleep. His car was across the road. He wasn’t meant to come here, except in emergencies. It was almost nauseating seeing him outside. I wanted to get away, but he grabbed my hand that held the key before I could do anything.
“Let go of me,” I said, unable to break his grip.
“Where were you?” he said, clamping on to my other arm, turning me around. I could knee him between the legs, but he didn’t deserve that.
“Nowhere,” I said, trying to think of the answer myself. Everything that had come before suddenly slipping away.
“You were at the swimming pool last night,” he said.
I’d completely forgotten about that.
“They called the police, Darina. You could have taken that girl’s eye out.” He was looking at the nails on my right hand. One of them was broken and there was something dried and brown beneath the others.
“I didn’t do anything.” I shrugged from his grip, and my phone fell out of my jacket pocket. Aidan picked it up.
“When did you get this?” he asked.
I thought it was better if I just didn’t say anything. He sighed, handed it to me.
“Have you been in contact with Melody,” He nodded at the phone I was now shamefully putting back into my pocket. “I told you it was better to keep your distance.”
“When?” I said.
Aidan looked at me, wrestling with something in his head.
“During our session last week,” he said.
Down below the surface Melody didn’t scream. Or struggle. Her eyes just probed the darkness expectantly. It felt good to be down there with someone, someone to help fear the dark a little less. When her breath ran out she didn’t panic. Where others showed despair I saw resolution. She couldn’t see me but I smiled. I brought my mouth to hers and gave her more life to breathe.
Her pupils contracted and a beam broke across her face. Something behind me. I turned just as a hand rested on my shoulder. And then I was smiling, too.
The papers said that the body was a woman. That was about the only thing they said. Not how long she’d been in the water, for example. Her hair colour. The police were keeping as many details as they could from leaking out. No cause of death given though assumptions could be made. Aidan called me in for an appointment. Since the swimming pool incident, I was under review but I knew what this meeting was really about.
There were newspapers and magazines in a pile in the waiting room. The girl on reception was new and told me to help myself. She smiled for too long across the desk. A bowl of fresh potpourri sat in front of her. I tried holding my breath but it was pointless. It made me think of the museum, Melody’s exhibition. I didn’t need to check my phone anymore to see she wouldn’t be calling. Not now.
The door opened and Dr. Higgins stuck his head out.
“Come on in,” he said.
He’d moved his practice to his home a few years beforehand and it was a lot more casual than his old one at the hospital. His exercise bike stood proudly in the corner where his wife told him to put it because there was no room left in the house. A towel hung unevenly from the handlebars.
A national newspaper lay on his desk, the front page dedicated to some scandal but I knew there was an article in there about the girl they’d found. Pictures of police in high vis jackets down by the quays.
He saw me looking and sighed.
“Well I guess I might as well skip right to that,” Dr. Higgins said. There was an inevitability to this conversation that I wanted to run away from. My body tensed and all the breath seemed trapped inside. Was it possible to forget how to breathe?
“Honestly, they can’t say anything for certain yet. Water tends to slow decomposition somewhat. Though there’s no stopping sea life.” His Da Da voice again. Christ, the inevitability. I wanted to scream at him to just say it already. “But they don’t believe it’s Eboni.”
My breath came pouring out.
The quay opened again a week later. The water splashed against the walls of the pier and I remembered a day when my friend dared me to jump in. I would have, but that day felt different. Eventually she jumped and didn’t return. There was another day, too, when we’d both sat with our feet dangling in the water. I’d only meant to push her softly but she disappeared beneath the waves and I walked home alone. Or that time we’d dared each other to race to the yellow grass island and back, only she never climbed back up the slippery, metal ladder.
She once told me a story about a town beneath the breakers. She asked me to go with her. She told me not to follow her. I forgot my promise and dived in. Or I didn’t. Or that other time. Or when she. Or the day that.
These are my memories. Such as they are.
All I’m left with is the absence.
That feels true.
She might still be out there. If she’d ever been there at all. I might still catch her. Years have passed but maybe. I take off my clothes. A phone vibrates against the ground. My skin tingles in the wind. It looks so peaceful down there. Dirty white petals bob along here and there, I get ready to run.
ROTTEN
- Carina Bissett -
An apple a day keeps the doctor away. – English Proverb
The fluted bowl shimmers like an oil slick in the dim light of the rainy afternoon. I am not allowed to touch it, but I touch it anyway. I trace the ridges of the design, delighting in the ripples of metallic pink bleeding into an acid green. Purchased in the years before the Great Depression, this piece of carnival glass has retained its place of honor on tables set by the women in my family for generations. It has only one function for my mother. She uses it to display her apples. When it becomes mine, I plan on filling it with polished stones.
Each and every day, my mother eats an apple. During her morning ritual, she sorts through the lot, seeking the one that speaks the loudest. My mother prefers the glossy finish of Red Delicious with their flavorless white flesh and saccharine blandness.
If I had it my way, I would spend more time in the forest, munching on the little green globes growing on the gnarled tree in front of my grandmother’s house. I delight in their sour bite and crisp texture. My grandmother presses the crop, bottling it to ferment into hard cider. In the last days of autumn, the remaining fruit falls to the ground in rotting piles. My grandmother says apples are like men. She tells me fresh fruit is boring; it’s always better after it has been torn apart and transformed into something else. I wouldn’t know.
I’m not allowed to eat my mother’s apples. They are hers and hers alone. She polishes them into miniature mirrors reflecting her face. She says those cultivated spheres keep her beautiful. It works too. Men adore her. I watch them watching her. They never see me. I’m too young, too plain to compete with her. She reminds me of this often.
The tempo of the rain increases. The insistent drumming eases my fears of being alone in the quiet darkness. This morning, my mother said she’d be back before lunch, but the clock is ticking down the last hours of the day. I ache in strange places. My stomach rumbles, a plea for nourishment.
One by one, I polish my mother’s apples with a mist of breath and a cotton sleeve, but as hard as I try, I cannot find an apple willing to show me my face. They stay silent in their bowl, hoarding their compliments for the woman who loves them more than she loves me. Frustrated and defiant, I pluck the shiniest piece of fruit from the bowl and roll it in my hand, relishing its smoothness and weight before I take a bite.
The sweet rot hits hard. I spit it out and hold the apple up for inspection. A worm has carved a prayer in the pulp. Acid floods my mouth. The apple drops to the floor and I cover my lips, both hands cupped against the revolt.
If I’d looked closer, would I have seen the hole near the stem? If I’d listened harder, would I have heard their words of warning? She would have seen. She would have heard. The apples reflect her image and her image only. A fragment of a laugh whispers through the room. I should have known better.
My stomach cramps, tugs down. I run to the bathroom. Bile erupts, a vile stream of yellow staining the toilet and the floor. My gut throbs and I feel a gush of wet between my legs. I wipe my mouth and look down to see white shorts stained red. A wrenching pain twists low in my stomach. It takes me a moment to realize I’m not a girl anymore. I’m a woman now.
I kick off my shorts and underwear and shove them in the bathroom trash, covering them with wadded toilet paper. Under the sink, I dig through boxes and try to remember my mother’s vague comments on the trials of being a woman. I find a carton of tampons, slender sticks full of cotton plugs. I pull the crisp white covering back, revealing pink plastic prepared to flower deep within. Deep in denial, I toss the stick back in the box and clean up with a wet washcloth before heading back to my room with a roll of toilet paper in hand. Determined to hide my transition, I stuff my underwear full of tissue and get dressed in a pair of black jean shorts. Swaddled in secret, I return to the bathroom to empty the trash and clean the toilet. If I’m careful, she’ll never know.
Handsome apples are sometimes sour. – German Proverb
“Your daughter looks just like you, Layla,” says my mother’s newest friend.
I blush at the woman’s observation and pretend I didn’t hear.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” says my mother, anger flickering deep in her eyes.
The towel is all I have to cling to as I scoot into a sun-shaded chair. Chlorinated water drips down my legs and puddles at my feet.
The woman flinches at the barbs in my mother’s voice. She backpedals. “I’m going to get another drink. Would you like one?”
My mother shifts on her lounge chair and lifts a hand to wave the woman away. The frowsy blonde’s forced smile falters and she stumbles to her feet. Her skin stretches over plump thighs and her stomach folds into rippling rolls as she bends over to shuffle through the bags lumped together on the table. Her body fascinates me. The startling contrast between her pink, lumbering flesh and my mother’s firm, tanned form only makes the woman look more awkward.
I can’t remember this new friend’s name. I gave up trying to keep up with the ever-revolving door of my mother’s companions a long time ago. They never last long.
“One apple martini coming right up,” the blonde says as she holds up her wallet.
My mother closes her eyes under the shaded brim of her sunhat.
The woman’s features pinch into a scowl. My mother never frowns. She keeps her face in a smooth emotionless mask, the product of one of her poisonous secrets. Her new friend never learned that lesson. Wrinkles crease the blonde woman’s forehead and feather out from her eyes.
She glances at me. “Do you want anything, Stella?”
I want to tell her that being nice to me will only make my mother madder, but I just shake my head. Layla muzzled me long ago.
The woman sighs and walks away to place her order at the pool bar.
“Stella.” My mother’s voice is rich and warm. “Come here.”
I move slowly, a stone in the pit of my stomach weighing me down. You stupid little bitch. The silent words cut more cruelly than the ones she speaks. I want to protest, but I know better. The chair screeches as I push it back.
“Bring the lotion.”
I shuffle over, flip-flops scraping against the rough tiles. She watches me, an exclamation of disdain evident in the tilt of a raised eyebrow. Lumbering cow. My towel comes undone, slipping down to expose my bony body loosely covered in a brown bikini. She never wears earth tones. She leaves those to me. Her nail polish matches her red lips, which curve in a smile as sharp as a scimitar.
Her accusations bash around inside my head. Ugly. Bony. Awkward.
“You don’t look anything at all like me,” she says. “If I didn’t know better, I would think you belonged to someone else.”
I wish it was true.
Her French-cut swimsuit gleams white, accentuating her hourglass figure and bronzed skin. She turns over her palm and I pass her the suntan lotion. Before she can begin, a man approaches with two drinks in hand.
“You look thirsty.” He offers my mother a martini glass filled with a liquid as green as envy. A round, wafer-thin circle of apple floats on the top. I catch a glimpse of the pentagram in the center, a starburst of seeds.
Her eyes narrow as she assesses him. I know he passes her appraisal when she tilts her head and arches her back. Her attention shifts and she casts her net of seduction, a silvery shimmer spreading out to ensnare a new prey.
“Parched,” she says, waving to the empty seat at her side.
He grins and sits, placing the drinks on the side table.
