Follow Me to Ground(33)

Once I started it felt like lying down to sleep, or like stepping into cool water.

While it was happening one image came into my head and stayed there: a bird with one wing, flapping, convinced it could still take flight.

Behind my hand a wound opened in his chest, and then spread. Even when I took my hand away it kept on spreading, making the sound a fire makes when the rain makes it spit but it carries on burning.

I looked inside him, inside his chest and the organs he kept there.

Saw his makeshift lungs.

His false heart.

I looked inside him and saw what he wanted for me; a half-life. A body barely stimulated, its urges only ever partially fulfilled. I looked at his face but he was looking over my head, into the garden, maybe thinking I’d drag him outside. Maybe thinking I’d bury him next to his father.

When I realised he was falling I thought, Don’t fall toward me.

And he didn’t.

He fell to his side. His face on the tiles. Looking up at me from the same spot where Lorraine had lain and trembled.

Father had been surprised when he realised I needed to sleep. Been surprised that I dreamed.

Always asked me what I’d seen.

He’d presumed to know every part of me.

–When you were a child. The birds.





Olivia Wyde


You are the only precious thing.

Whatever she says to you, whatever she tries to make you believe, you laugh and look the other way.

You know the truth now.





Yes. The Ground is moving. Is ready to smack its tongue, to belch. The Ground is done with him, at last. Has moved through him and made him ready. Will he come up standing? Will he pull himself up with his honey-tan arms? I stand on the patio and try not to run to the part that’s turning in on itself, a toothless mouth, the gums bearing down on the lips, massaging.

Such a long time to have waited and still I feel caught out. He will be the only thing to have changed. The house, the garden. The look and shape of my face.

All the same.

Such a long time.

But then: the time I’ve made.

With Father gone all these years and no Cures coming there are few habits that I keep, save tending to the sorrel leaves.

Turning over and over their slim, succulent bodies that carry their creases like much worn leather.

Coming into summer I always mutter a haze of warning to keep at bay the lustful blood-vein moth, but still most mornings I come outside and find the leaves are ravaged. The edges robbed of their svelte curves.

I speak to them, saying their name aloud, mostly for the pleasure of the first ‘r’ rippling into its twin.

Sorril,

Sorrelle,

Soreil.

Now that autumn is coming it’s garnered a reddish hue and it cheers me, to see it peering above the gurgling foliage. Once, Father melted down the leaves and fed them to a girl born too sweet. Brown-haired child with the heady centre of a sugar cane running thick in her veins. Father said only the sorrel’s broth would cleanse her.

Sorrel. Meaning sour.

Meaning heartbeat quickened.

Meaning puckering tang.

At first, I don’t understand the sound.

It might be a felled branch, the house rhythmically creaking.

I wait on the lawn, and it comes again.

It’s been so long since someone knocked on the door.

I’ve been outside all day and so the kitchen and the hallway feel almost too cool. It’s already evening, inside.

Through the screen: a youngish man, standing with his back to the house, showing me his muscled back. The vest he has on is worn thin and shows the taut flesh creasing together about the spine. Bundled together, muscles like ropes. His hair is the colour of wet sand, clinging thickly to itself. Like grit. When he shakes his head at some bug come too close and turns to me a wound inside me comes open.

It is Samson’s face.

Samson’s face, only not quite – there’s a closeness to the mouth and chin, a tightness between the eyes. Samson’s shoulders only not quite wide enough. Samson’s hair but not fair enough.

Squinting through the screen. Very tall, and so ducking his head.

–Miss Ada?

I step closer and quickly he’s confused. He’s been expecting an old woman.

–That’s right.

He’s wearing a hat that shades his eyes, but I can see his jaw. It tightens, sees some of his handsomeness undone.

–I’m Olivia Wyde’s son.

Father; his chest broad and taut as a drum.

His eyelids heavy and creasing. Speaking short bursting sentences while there was still speech inside him.

–You’re sick, Ada.

On his side, his shoulders slumping and his hips weighting themselves toward the floor. In the half-light, in my confusion, I thought they were melting.

–I won’t be without him.

–Sick is sick.

–There’ll be no one else, you know that. No other Cure would—

–It has to fetch up somewhere.

This boy looking at me like he wants to come inside.

–My mother died a few days ago.

–I see.

–She said I should visit you.

–That so.

–She said I might talk to you about my father.

His long arms and his long legs and the freckles that frame his eyes.