Notes
¹ Written for submission to AMBIT Magazine’s autumn competition.

² Subsequently, a shortened version was published in t’ART Magazine.

Short Story: Broken Open

We are in bed when you ask me – bodies heaped over one another like heavy cloth, eyes closed, too tired to undress just yet, your neat fingers mindlessly tracing the pale underside of my forearm. You ask me, just as our breaths are unifying into one slow rhythm of exhaustion, if I had ever broken a bone before.

I shift beside you, reluctantly rising up through the deep well of sleep and, hardly breaking the surface, reply blearily, no. But I pause, my eyelids slowly opening to unveil the scene on the wall opposite. The notch in the curtains behind me lets out a solid shaft of dusty sunlight onto the wall in front, illuminating the postcard you have taped there–black and white, hands, head, birch bark, all exposed to nothing in the fierce slash of brightness.

I recall when I first saw it; how you had brought it home from a gallery and how, after gently scraping at the small roll of green tape to find the loose edge, you had attached it neatly to your wall in a place where you could always see it.

The postcard is a reproduction of a photograph, black and white, the muted grain of the original negative only-just visible, settling in the grey spaces like a thin sediment of dust – the texture of time made tactile like the rippling woodgrain rings in a cross-section of an old oak. Light, held in the shape of tiny out-of-focus pentagons, bleeds through the thin limbed tree cover of the image’s background and a woman, head bent, face just out of shot, raises her arms to the sky. Her wrists are clumsily bandaged or cuffed or bound in pale curls of birch bark, rolled cylinders that remind me of scrolls of spiced cinnamon.

I know it is a woman only by instinct and perhaps by mythic association; Daphnes and dryads, women becoming trees, skin as bark and branch as limb. She, like Daphne, looks caught in the mid-stage of a transformation, a becoming which is both an engulfing and an appropriation, a surrender and supplication, a metamorphosis that enriches and devours her equally.

It is a cold winter morning when you tell me who she is and how the shape of her life had wilted so quickly. I search her name on the internet and see that she was born in the same year as my father, only where he would have the forward reaching dash after his birth year, hers is followed abruptly by a closing date, a mere 22 years after her birth. (–)

The picture is titled Untitled (1980) and, I read, was taken during a short residency in New Hampshire. During the three weeks in which she was there, she wrote repeatedly about how she was eager to return indoors, how the wild woodland landscape, all that dappled light embalming the trees, apparently baffled her.

‘What am I supposed to do with nature?’.

Less than a year later she was dead, having thrown herself from the roof of a public building in bustling Manhattan.

In bed, I turn away from the photograph, and remember your question. Have you ever broken anything? I blink and realise that my admission was an inadvertent lie because I have broken something, and so say No. Yes. I mean yes, I have. Once. When I was little, maybe eight or nine.

Which bone, you ask, eyes closed, your face upturned to the ceiling as if you were a lizard on a stone basking in the orange rays of the overhead light.

Collarbone, my clavicle.

I tap it lazily; the hollow fleshy sound vibrates through layers of cartilage – pthub-pthub-pthub.

Ah, you said, your hand migrating from its position on my forearm to rest in the dip of my breastbone, the one that holds everything together.

I guide your forefinger to smooth over the site where the bone had knitted itself imperfectly back together, a slight bump like a burr formed on a tree trunk where some old damage was once sustained. You try drumming your fingers upon it, my skin a taught pale drum. Pthub-pthub-pthub.

Cla-vi-cle, you say.

            Cla–pthub.

                                Vi–pthub.

                                                   Cle–pthub.

It is like you are tasting the words, the syllables, breaking them up and holding them in your mouth to see where each of their weight lies, where you might find resistance and where there is give.

Latin, you say, plucking gently at the bow of bone. From clavicula, meaning something like small or, no, little, yes, little key.

You exhale sharply, the edges of your mouth twitching upwards: Does a broken clavicle make it harder to push people away?

I roll my eyes and pinch your side.

Ouch, you say, but you are still smiling, and we drift off into easy silence again.

Beside you, I lie, beside myself.


         Directly above the clavicle there is an empty space, a scooping indentation where flesh intersects with bone. A concave dip in the undulating alabaster plane of my skin which, in the shower, I can contort in just a way so that I am able to hold water in it like a cupped hand, cradling only a few drops for the time I can keep my body prone and hollowed, my shoulder blades uprising as if I might be trying to unfurl wings. 

In English, the secondary definition of cradle as a verb is “to hold gently and protectively”.


It was early summer the day I broke my clavicle, snapped my little key in two. The air was just bordering into that balmy, imperceptible temperature that makes it hard to know where you begin and the outside ends. Equilibrium, and eucalyptus; the scent from the large tree, its glaucous-dusted leaf spears nodding gently in the barely-there breeze.

My mother had found me quickly – badly winded, lying sprawled under the old ash tree near the opening in the hedge that led into next door’s garden. I lay rigid, jaggedly breathing out stuttering gusts and twitching uncontrollably, my pale skin greying as it hummed with shock.

The punched terror of being properly winded for the first time was total, and I remember seeing there was an odd sort of mound or barrow forming on the left side of my chest which became more and more pronounced, like a tiny tent was being raised, my papery skin ascending into a soft peak as the broken bone within called upon the swelling powers of my body to protect it, and who which dutifully came together to meet it at the site of breakage.

It took only moments for the short breaths to slow and the pain to arrive in full force. My head lolled with doll-like laxity as the paramedics lifted my stretcher from the earth and I saw, through the gap in the hedge, that my whines had summoned an audience–my neighbours’ concerned faces, neatly framed by dark needles of yew, bloomed into my vision, shining oddly white and blurred as if seen through steamed glass.

The doctor in A&E had told my parents that it was a common injury, one she’d seen a hundred times before and a likely break from such a fall. So common in fact that the medical staff had nicknamed it a ‘just-out-of-reach’ break, one that usually happens when the patient falls from a height onto their shoulder and outstretched hand. My mother had waited until we were alone to ask me what it was that I had been reaching for, why I had climbed the ash tree without telling her.

Prior to its breaking, I hadn’t really given that particular bow of bone much thought; I had however given most of the other components of my thin limbed body a lot of thought, obsessively so. I can date the obsession’s arrival almost exactly to the week after my grandfather died.

I remember him as a quiet man, gentle and willow-like. Without question he would always permit me to cast him as the distressed damsel in my childish make-believe knights errant, while I naturally took the part of the valiant squire who would come to save him from my treehouse tower. Life and limb were easy things then, incorruptible, resilient. But of course, he died, as people do, and with him went the world I had known before.

The spring he died was bright, warm early, the sun fell in flippant glisks across the daffodils which up-lit the crematorium’s memorial garden like leering yellow footlights. I was disturbed to find I couldn’t cry at his funeral and so became angry, at myself and at the situation of having to be sat next to and in front of and behind so many people when all I really wanted was to be alone with all the nothing. I couldn’t stop thinking about the alien-closeness of all the bodies that were around me, the bodies that, like my grandfathers, would be burnt, or else left to rot slowly, the red in their veins congealing to a thin brown, the lively glint of their eyes turning gluey and opaque.

My body too, something which was already a site of confusion and abjection, was changing without my knowledge or consent. I would awake to dead limbs, rashes, suffer the blinding static of head-rushes, pins and needles, tinnitus, or phantom tastes. Panic overwhelmed me when I first encountered the hard disks budding under my nipples where breast tissue was just beginning to grow. Nothing felt controllable and it was as if I had suddenly been made aware that everything had the possibility to go wrong, and that therefore it inevitably all would. I became permanently fearful, plagued by a hyper-awareness that seemed to gain energy from itself, running on ruminating, like a wind-up torch I could not put down for fear of being unable to see what was coming from out of the dark.

The fear’s first locus had been heart attacks – the cause of my grandfather’s death – but had quickly proliferated to encompass choking, strokes, aneurysms, drowning, car crashes, drowning in car crashes, gas leaks, fits, and housefires. By summer, when a series of government adverts began to circulate on the television, the unease had bloomed into a fully matured anxiety-disorder.

The public information films were released by the NHS in the late 2000s and were designed to raise awareness about recognising stroke and cardiac arrest, but for me they raised more than awareness. My dreams were haunted by image-films of an uncontrollable hidden fire which could, at any moment, ravage through the brain of someone close to me, short-fusing them into a glitching automaton of themselves, an uncanny puppet whose strings had irrevocably tangled. The image – a circular burning welt like a match held to a polaroid – seemed to exist fully as a latent possibility within everyone’s bodies, including my own. Quite besides the images, the films were also all ominously sound-tracked by the phrase ‘the quicker you act, the more of the person we can save’ which looped and replayed in my mind until it became a whispered refrain that I convinced myself I could hear in the wind. It was the thought that, in not recognising danger quickly enough, my inaction could somehow directly lead to the near-total disintegration of someone I loved, and it consumed me entirely to the point of catatonia.

But in the end the tension of avoidance only amplified my later commitment to hypervigilance. I instead became jumpy, rigid, my adolescent body held in a static state of anticipation. I would watch family members at dinner, eyes locked, body frozen solid, fixated and alert to the slightest twitch of their face, the tiniest change in skin tone or expression that might signal some mortal internal disaster.

My family were perplexed by the suddenness and sheer intensity of my neuroticism. I was brittle, with all the plasticity of a dried twig, all its lively green dulled to pale taupe. The fear grew, matured, morphed into a tall wall of hostility and defensiveness. But though the magnitude of my anxiety was mature, existential even, the mind that managed those feelings was still very much a child’s and as such it was with childish solutions that I tried to devise my own unorthodox methods of protection, in the form of vague and disconnected attempts at a kind of magic.

So, when I told my mother what I had been doing in the Ash tree, she had laughed. Laughed¾not unkindly, but because my answer was so sincere that it took her by surprise. She laughed too because, she said, at least it was apt, as Ash was my birth tree on the Celtic Tree Calendar.

         I asked what ‘apt’ meant and she said it meant ‘fitting’ or ‘suited’. In this case, she said she used it because my choice of the Ash tree was a coincidence that seemed oddly appropriate. I did not, at that stage, ask her what ‘coincidence’ meant, nor would I ever fully understand its meaning.

         Years later, I had asked about the word-origin of ‘apt’ and you, ever the etymologist, had said it had probably originated from the Latin aptus, the adjectival use of apere to ‘attach’ or ‘join’, itself coming from the Proto-Indo European root *ap meaning to ‘grasp’, ‘take’ or ‘reach’. 

How apt.

In any case, she said, it’s a good tree to fall from. It’s always been considered magical, with one half of its roots in our world and the other seeping across the threshold of the next.

Her family – which was (is) also my family – were (are) Welsh on her mother’s side, and she took great patriotic pride in disinheriting her half-English side in favour of her more ideologically Celtic leanings.

So, when I told her, words underlined lightly with embarrassment, that I had climbed the tree to try and help keep everyone safe, to use the tree to protect us all from harm, she had understood. For a moment, yes, she had looked perplexed but, rallying quickly, had nodded her head. She knew enough of apotropaic magic–that is, a type of magic intended to turn away harm or evil influences – that my childish logic made sense.

But, she said, given what I was trying to do, I’d have been better off with Hawthorn, and certainly better off than I was now seeing as how Hawthorns rarely grew tall enough to fall from.

Isn’t Hawthorn just hedges? I asked.

Yes, she said hesitantly, it is often used for hedges, now¾but Hawthorn isn’t just a plant to make borders with.

She rose from my bedside and turned to trace the wood grain on the table surface.

Hawthorn was used to help protect things, things that were important to people, like stone circles and burial chambers, or wells and springs.

I had said that if people really wanted to keep their wells and things safe they should have just built a very tall wall, and that would have done a better job of keeping all the bad things out than a single tree.

She said, true, I mean, if you really wanted to keep something out, totally out, you could just use a wall. But that’s not quite what they wanted to do.

I shrugged, or shrugged as much as I could with a broken clavicle.

Well, walls don’t let anything through at all, do they? Which is all very well for keeping out unwanted things, but what about the things you might want to come in, like sunlight, or birds, or breezes, or visitors?

I looked at her blankly, rigid on the bed.

Why bother then, I asked flatly, if it doesn’t keep things out, how is it even going to protect anything?

She looked down at me, her eyebrows knitting softly.

Well, she paused, I would guess that it protects in other ways. Like with the wells, people would tie rags onto the hawthorn tree that stood over it, colourful rags like mayday ribbons, because they thought that the healing powers of the well would be absorbed by the cloth, so that the cloth might become an extension of themselves, so that they would be protected too.

I closed my eyes and said I didn’t know why a stone or well would need guarding just as much as a person. Water was just water and stones were made of stone–people were infinitely more damageable. And anyway, I said, I didn’t understand how giving something away, like tying something to a tree, could protect you and that surely you had to take something; a shield protected you because it was something you could hold on to, cling to, something to put between yourself and the danger – you didn’t give a shield away to feel safer.

She looked at me slowly, head tilted. Did you take something from the tree then?

Glad she was finally starting to follow my logic, I had nodded and started to explain. I wasn’t intent on putting anything there, but I hadn’t climbed the tree just to be in it either. I had wanted to reach out and pluck a bunch of the Ash’s jostling winged seeds to help protect us, protect our home, because a woman on the television had called them keys and if you want to keep your home and family safe then you obviously needed keys to help secure the lock, to keep all the bad out and us safe inside. It all made perfect sense to me. With my good arm, I handed her the browning bundle of ash seeds I had stowed away in the inner fold of my bedsheets.

She took the keys, her head rising slightly as she sat down, and said yes, fair enough, she understood my thinking. But after a moment of inspecting the bundle, she had quietly pointed out that, by my own logic, locking us in also meant locking all the world out.

That’s the whole point, I said, exasperated. I stared at the ceiling while she fiddled with the seeds.

But mightn’t it be better to be open?

I stared at her mutely – she was leaning forward, reaching out across the gap between her chair and the bed, between her and me, one of the ash-keys held gently by thumb and forefinger.

At risk, yes… undefended.

She moved back into her chair, tinkered with the seed pod for another moment before laying it down on my bed.

But fully open to everything?

I looked down at the key, its reed-like shell was peeled open neatly to expose the shining untouched surface of the near-fluorescent green seed within.

Because if it stayed closed, you’d never get to see all that green. And, she said, a sadness edging into her words, the seed would never get to grow into a tree.



For weeks after my fall, I had dreams about going back to the Ash tree, finding the young branches and snapping them like they snapped me, but instead of the rigidity I expected – the lifeless crack that my own body had made – I found that I could bend and bend the young branch, and it would fold and flex with an adaptability that seemed wholly inexplicable to me, magical even. In waking life, I would hold the small branches of trees, feeling too guilty and needlessly vicious to snap them fully, but instead, as a subtler kind of retribution or just a curious testing, I would scrape away at the smooth grey-brown surface and each time be bewitched by the lurid green revealed within the branch’s limb.

Years passed and we moved out of my childhood home, away from the Ash tree and the grave of my grandfather. I became oddly jealous of trees, and of Ash trees in particular, their wood famed for its strength and flexibility. I had learnt and re-learnt many times that my own breaking point was much easier to reach.

Then, in early adulthood, I would break in a different way, a slow folding inward under a pressure so constantly fought against that finally it became too exhausting to contain. I had tried so hard to swallow the old fear down, but it shot out of me like thorns from a twig, sharp and sudden, in a repeated pattern of behaviours that, though they intended to sequester the thoughts away, only gained their own unique kind of sharpness with which to underscore the fear.

More relatives grew elderly and died, some did not grow elderly but died anyway, and my parents, themselves now edging at the precipice of old age, were more often tired, or forgot things, or rang more frequently with news of injuries or health scares.

On occasion, my mother would recall my fall, recount it to friends as an anecdotal tale, a coincidence worthy of note. But sometimes she talked of another Ash tree, one infinitely older than the one from whose arms I had fallen, but she could never remember its name. This tree was mythic, she said, ancient in a different way to the Celtic stories in which she was steeped. It was only after my ostensibly-English father – intrigued by a family myth that, given his dark hair and olive skin, he had some hidden Hispanic heritage – received the results of a spontaneous DNA Ancestry test that I would learn the older tree’s name. The results surprised us all, with the second largest section of his genealogical pie chart being given over not to the amber sliver that represented Spain, but to the icy blue of Scandinavia. His following birthday, I bought him a neatly bound abridgment of the Norse Myths and, in the bookshop, had flicked through its pages, drawn by my own self-interested association, when I came across an image of the tree my mother had spoken of – huge, sprawling, with as vast a collection of roots below ground as it had foliage atop its trunk. I would later recognise the same design on the news, simplified and darkened, tattooed on the white skin of shouting men or on signs and badges that they sported like armour, like weaponry. These people also knew the tree had power but instead of honouring it had bound its trunk tight with looping, circular logic, choking out the tree’s expansiveness and disfiguring its growth. Trees, my mother had once said, are at the centre of lots of things. She had talked about Druids, how they took their name from trees, how the word owed its lineage to ‘derwos’, which simultaneously denoted both ‘tree’ and ‘true’. Likewise, the tree she couldn’t remember the name of had been at the centre of the cosmos – the spine which connected the nine worlds of Nordic mythology. But I had not realised then that this also meant the tree could form the centre of something malignant, something rotten.

Below the picture in the book snaked a branch of words which told the tale of how the Norse god Odin had looked out across the whole world and wanted to know everything. It told how he, in desperation, had carved out his eye, thrown himself on his spear, and hung himself from the world tree in a kind of symbolic, ritual suicide. Whilst hanging he had seen visions and gained secret magical wisdom which enabled him to cure the sick, calm storms, and turn weapons against attackers.

I closed the book, not understanding how breaking the body in this way could ever lead to anything enriching. But despite myself, I wanted very much for the thing that had transformed Odin to transform me, wanted my bruised and broken chest to be my key to wisdom, power, to a kind of transformative freedom. I wanted to re-imagine my fall as prophetic, totemic, imbued retroactively with a glitter of symbolism. But Odin was able to shapeshift, and I was not. He could leave his body, be elsewhere, become other; I was bound to mine, just as my mother and father were bound to theirs.

But then I remember what you had said, on our first proper date, when we had drunk orange wine in impossibly delicate glasses and traded childhood stories which we proffered to each other like metonymic introductions to the sources of our adult disfunctions. I recounted my fall, emphasised the coincidence and played up the language and after, I watched you link your forefingers together like two hooks and listened as you told me animatedly that well, actually did I know that the letter æ was originally called an æsc or ‘ash tree’ after a transliteration of the Anglo-Saxon rune ᚫ. Then you said that when two letters are fused together like this it is called a ligature, which can also mean tying something, or the state of being bound or paralysed, like by a rope or a spell. You had looked bright, hopeful and oh so pleased with yourself.

Sometime after our second glass, I asked if you knew of the Norse myth and you said you did, or rather you knew about its etymology. You asked if I knew what the tree’s name, Yggdrasill, meant in Old Norse and said it meant both ‘Odin’s horse’ but also ‘gallows’–something that had been the site of great pain but also the thing that had transported Odin to new understanding. I asked how something could translate to two such different things, how two opposite things could be true at once and you had said that almost everything meant more than one thing and that it was the fusing, the ligatures between the meanings, which made all the difference.


So, I tell you all this, or imagine I do – your head on my chest, our eyes both closed – and it is easy. I tell you a story that is truer than the truth would be to tell, like a myth about a tree and a god, something that can be both true and false, both gallows and horse, something one and many at once. 

Because some of it never happened – I did fall, did collect ash keys, but I have never broken a bone; my grandfather died, and an obsession took root in me, but you do not own that postcard and I did not see it there; you are not really you; I am not me, and neither of us were ever really here.

         But I tell myself a story and here you appear and so, for the time we can keep this empty space – this scooping indentation where flesh intersects with bone, where story intersects with life – open, prone, and hollowed, I will fill it with these words.

I imagine you can hear my heartbeat, my breaths as they help push the words from out of me and when I am finished sleep comes quickly to both of us, gently, like a leaf dropping from a tree.

Then we wake late, in a tangle of limbs – two neighbouring trees whose roots, having intertwined over time, look as if they were really always only one and the same tree, their shared mycorrhizal network blurring where one ends and the other begins.

I roll over to face you, lying on the side where my ear, despite it being a whole three years since it was pierced, still aches quietly at the unwelcome pressure of my head on your harder-than-mine pillow. I study your face, eyebrow hairs bending smoothly like marsh grasses in a low breeze, and, lightly, lovingly, poke your lower lip. Your eyes open narrowly – vitriol slipping effortlessly into mirth – and smile.

It looks bright out, you say, raising your eyes to the thin slit of shining white that, like a zip in a Barret Newman painting, breaks up the dark weight of the curtains with a narrow lambency. You move to the window and with one hand open the room out, exposing it and me to a glaring, vitrified clarity that, for a second, means everything we are exists somehow beyond detail.

But then we adjust, shapes taking on their usual forms again, and I open my eyes fully to see you at the window, your baby hairs floating softy, golden against the sun pooling in from the open window, and your ear, warm-pink and glowing, almost red, backlit by the rays of light which turn your skin into a living canvas, thin as the leaves.

            Let’s go outside.