Notes

¹  Shortlisted for the Lucent Dreaming Prize 2023.

²  First published by SANS. Press in their 2023 paperback anothology ‘Another Name for Darkness’.

Short Story: Coming to Terms

“I’m sorry, you’ve lost me.”

She is young, little more than nineteen, with a head of dark hair that, though twisted up at the back, strains to break free of the clasp that holds it. One dark curl has escaped near the back of her ear and hangs suspended, drifting lightly in the breeze from the fan on the shop counter.

I want to reach out to that dark ringlet, take it between my fingers and twist it gently, like the cord of an old-fashioned telephone. For a moment, I allow myself to imagine that you might be waiting at the other end.

I repeat my request, but the shop assistant only looks back blankly. She says something else I struggle to hear and so I simply point, smile encouragingly, and put a pound down in front of me.

I walk the slanted path through the park, watch the pigeons clutter together under the ash tree, become bored and find a café to sit in instead.

I open my book to read but the words there swim, so I sketch in the margins. My thin ink-threads twirl the letters at the end of each sentence together, knitting them like the dark sprawl of some fungal network. As I deface the page, I am elsewhere — I am motion and blankness and ink bleed on paper. But too soon I am interrupted; mist of what looks like small, brown snowflakes — which are really rough curls of wood spiralling on the breeze — float down and rest across my page.

I look up. There is a man at the open window next to me, except the window isn’t open, it is gone. There is no glass there to reflect the sun opposite, only an opening into the dark inside of the café. The man is bent down fixing, filing, shaving, and buffing the wooden window-frame, readying it for the new sheet of glass which rests precariously against the terrace’s railings.

I watch him for a long-moment, eyes locked on his regular movement. Wood flakes accumulate across my lap. How had I not noticed?

The other customers seem unbothered and busy themselves with talk. I wonder if there is some event or gathering nearby that is drawing in so many foreigners because everyone seems to speak something which sounds like German, but a German that is barren of any words I know, any words you taught me. I meet the eyes of a grave little blonde girl who scowls at me before putting her face into her mother’s jumper.

I stare down into my lap and look again at the words on the page. Though obscured as they are by the wood-flakes, I can see the black shapes of the typeface clearly. But they are just that: shapes.

Inky scratches without sense.

Ugly spiders swarming on the page, spilling out into the margins.

Senseless, awful scrawls.

I am all hot flush, cold skin; very, very far away from myself and yet horribly close.

I think briefly of shouting out, of calling for an ambulance, for help, for someone. Something in my brain has obviously gone fundamentally wrong, been damaged, is glitching, spasming, haemorrhaging. I imagine a rising tide of blood flooding the soft labyrinth of my mind, drowning the dendrites, bursting each nexus of fragile neural tissue which had, up until now, kept me in place.

—

I stagger home in a fraught, stumbling near-run. Every street sign, slogan t-shirt, bus title, all read as senseless. Form without content. Shape without meaning.

But worse, far worse, is the sound of talk; snippets of conversation, overheard phone-calls and idle mumblings all push my panic deeper. The noises people make are no longer simply foreign. They are animalistic, bestial. Growls and howls, guttural shrieks, cooing and cawing to one another. My front door is barely open before I collapse into the hallway.



Damage.



All I can think of.



Damage.



I am ill. Mad. Broken.

I should go to the hospital, seek help, seek  — something. But I can’t think of there, can’t think what ‘help’ could consist of because more than anything losing language feels like losing you again.

All the words you loved so much, loved so fiercely that it had once made me shamefully jealous, ebb away from me, replaced instead by a steady formless feeling that brings me straight back to those last days on your ward. Reality curdling around us, around me. The blue-toned strip lights and the kind, tired nurses. The papery night-gown you wore and the ever-present sleep around your eyes. The quiet, reedy way you told me to ‘sleep, please’ over and over while I sat with you, as I tried to suppress the untameable pointless urgency of it all.

I fell asleep about twenty minutes before you finally went, so, though I don’t know for sure, they were probably your last words.

Sleep, please.

I lie on the hallway floor, head on the carpet, eyeline low enough to see filaments of lint, and those words hang in the air like dust, like the sound of a bell that just rings and rings and rings and doesn’t stop.

So, I sleep, like I had after the hospital.

Sleep for too long; not long enough.

And just like last time, when I wake, I forget for a moment what has happened.

—

The day is turning to afternoon when I look at my phone.

My finger hovers between the contact icons of my sister, father, and mother. I try (and fail) not to see yours. Each has an image by the name which remains unchanged, yet the letters all look strange — eerily disconnected from their corresponding sounds.

My thumb gravitates towards my mother’s icon, but I hesitate, remembering our last conversation. How, in uncharacteristically subdued, almost awkward tones, she had called to see how I was; if I had thought about the funeral; if I was coming to terms with the situation.

I had hung up after a few brief moments.

Coming to terms…

The phrase had felt so clumsily non-specific that I had laughed.

What were the terms I was supposed to be coming to?

Why was I expected to go to them?

What if I wanted to run from terms, to retreat, or hide? Bury them in the garden under thick layers of gritty earth or launch them out into space where the gravitation of greater planetary bodies would draw them ever faster away from me.

Terms, I should have told my mother, are about endings, about the termination of something or the knowledge of its terminal boundaries or limits. I didn’t want to be reacquainted with the limits of you, didn’t want to draw the boundary solidly and impermeably between us. If coming to terms meant accepting the end of you then I didn’t want it.

I think too about our terms of agreement, or the terms I thought we had had: those conditions under which an action might be agreed to be taken. That final action — your terminal act — had certainly broken those.

But there were times too when we had been on bad terms, like when your mother had made me cry in the garden because she said those things about me, about us. How when you had asked me to explain it all I couldn’t and instead went blank and quiet.

I had tried so hard to speak, but the words just congealed on my tongue. Then your eyes had then gone that complicated grey colour — a colour I loved because it was only yours but also hated because it frightened me, because it said plainly you would never really understand me and nor I you. It said you had gone somewhere far away, and that I had no way to pull you back.

I stare into the floor.

The cool face of my phone screen rests against my cheek, and I realise that the dial tone’s cooing has finally ceased. I can hear my mother’s fumbling breath on the other end of the line. But, instead of reassurance, my panic is brought into sharper relief, its edges now serrated, catching on anything and everything in the vicinity.

What if it happens again? What if, when my mother speaks, I hear not legible speech or sensible responses but rather only a rasping animalistic something — jumbled near-words in a language I cannot speak, let alone understand.

I hang up before either of us have a chance to utter a thing. I do not want to know for sure, want instead to leave at least a small, anaemic chance of exception.

I turn my phone on aeroplane mode and retreat upstairs into the darkness of the spare room. It is here that I feel closest to you, in the curled dark of the duvet. Here, you are almost alive again, moving on my screen, moving at my will.

In the days after, I had watched you all the time; in the bath — if I had bathed, at the shops — if I had shopped, while eating — if I had eaten, at my desk, instead of sleeping.

I miss all the little moments I could have glimpsed you without you having known that I could see, when I could see you beyond me, almost beyond yourself.

I watch the same clip again and again, not a video as such but a reanimated photograph, a ‘live’ photo: three seconds of you suspended in time for me to watch and re-watch by holding down the screen. The image is all sunlight and too-small single bed; a backdrop of thin red curtains that brings out a dark warmth not usually present in your skin tone. A cream duvet is around your head, and you are all toothy grin and shining eyes as you mime a frail nun giving a blessing to my laughing torso. For as long as I can hold my finger to the screen, I can delight in this small oasis, dip back into these moments where your resourceful humour is preserved.

I remember the rest of the morning, how when we woke you trilled quietly, a plaintive mewing like a small animal slipping out of sleep. You smelled younger in the morning than you did at any other time of day; soft, pliant, curled like a fern before the dawn has yet opened out its delicate fronds to meet the sun. You are all quiet-warmth and sleep, dark and nested. Totally yourself.

Your skin — especially the chestnut-shell soft nape of your neck — has something of a hazy, buttery sort of smell: lightly sweet in a smooth, almost-ripe fruit kind of way. Later, at the kitchen table, I will put my face in your neck and you smell scrubbed, as if the hot water from your shower had ridden your skin of your youness and you now had to wait a little while before your body was fully your own again.

I watch the looping image over and over for I don’t know how long. I try to memorise it, to upload the image and its movements to my mind. But as I begin to hang tighter to it, something happens.

The morning sunlight within the scene increases to an impossible brightness, filling the room around me with a crushing pressure, and I realise it is bleaching out the details of the image entirely. With rising panic, I see the buffering symbol bloom onto the screen’s centre, the glitching tick of it evoking the name the internet christened it with — the wheel of death. The screen flickers for one last time, a pale system-error signal flashing up momentarily before it stops and goes black entirely.

I stare into the screen’s blackness, into your absence, into the nothing that has replaced you.

I need to be nowhere.

Away. Outside. Remote. Gone. I want there to be a storm going on, a fierce buffeting of wind and rain which I can run out into, be obliterated by.

But there is no storm, only stillness.

I leave the house.

I drive.

—

The old ruins are set on heathland, amongst marsh grasses, fenland, mudflats, seawall, salt water, damp soil, damp wood.

I have been there many times before, with you and without.

These are the only times that seem to mean anything anymore.

Last time, we walked the dirt path that wound through the water meadow and up over the spine of the sea wall. I had caught my jacket on the brambles as I jumped the gap between the lull of the dyke and the spit where the ruins sat, and you had fallen to pieces in the bog of the meadow, laughing.

Under the front seat of the car, I find a near-full litre of vodka, a relic of a past-self whose methods of travelling elsewhere were, more often than not, contained within a bottle.

I return to that self, curl up by the ruins’ opening and cradle the bottle close to me.

I drink.







I am gone.







 
But after a while



of being gone,





I start to see and hear things differently.







I lie down —



feel the cool of the earth,



the weight of it below my head pressing up into me.



A marsh bird chirps somewhere



and its trill is like water bubbling.



The rhythm of it shocks me.



Its pattern is linguistic, has intonations.



Their bird-statements, though not senseful, are ambient.




The wind too speaks in sentences that, though unintelligible, possess a very palpable breathwork which solicits a feeling words are too small for.



My back grows cold against the dampness of the salt-mud ground.



A thin spear of marsh-grass grazes my eyebrow.



Even though it is near-dark now, there is a faint glow outlining the land’s silhouette to the west. An ancient burial ground lies that way; bodies packed in below the mud, in line, almost, with my own.

I press my palms flat into cool grit and imagine myself inverted.



Palm to palm.





Dust to dust.







Why hide the dead in the land?



In the dirt?

In the dark?



Why do we have to put you in a hole?


I think of your grave — where it will lie and what will be inscribed on the stone.

What words could possibly do you justice?

As if your loss had not been injustice enough.

I didn’t want to hear what they said about you at the funeral.

Didn’t want to hear what they didn’t say about you, about us.

Funeral eulogies are terminal narratives. They eat up a life. Chew it up and spew it back out. They make things simple. Neat. Make things look like they fit and can be tidied away. Their words could only ever be a timid and pale elegy to you, allegorical and bland at best.

I’d rather they just say nothing.

I hate language.

Hate the smallness of it.

Hate the thought of your name on a piece of stone, some phrase plucked from a bible or a www.classicquotes.com webpage and stuck there under it, solid and done — a final reminder of their lack of understanding.

But I don’t want to understand anymore either.

Definitions have become eulogies, hollow imitations of the unspeakable delight and pain you brought me.

You opened a door in me. A door between life and death that I am equipped neither to cross nor close — I can only stand on its threshold, wavering between different densities of air.

The breeze on the bank has turned sharp.

A cool salted hush of wind caresses the tops of my shoulders: places where you had once put your mouth to me and left a spray of gooseflesh like a kiss’s shadow.

I wander waveringly to the bank, stumbling near the edge of the jetty.

I look out at the water, the fading light and the softly bending reeds. I breath slow, deep, feel the salt air make its way into me.

I hear the sloshing at the lip of the bank and suddenly I am back with you on that Friday night in May which is really a Saturday morning; drunk and laughing, clumsily peeling off our clothes as the running of hot water steams the bathroom mirror into indiscernibility. Bodies borderless, dissolving and reforming together in the hot water.

To speak would have been perverse then, just as to name that something between us now felt impossible, even sacrilegious.                                            (I laugh because you had hated God.)



The wind throws ripples across the river and, as it does so, brings the cries of far-off marsh birds to me.

Their coos lament the loss of the light as if the sun might never rise again for them.


But I can hear the night-birds are out too.


Their calls are ripples in and of themselves, mixing seamlessly water, fading in and out of sense.


I have no desire to set down in words what we were, what, despite your leaving, we are still.


Maybe we had never fully understood each other  — but we had, at least, never stopped trying to.


Because maybe sometimes senselessness can be pleasurable,

like recognising an emotion but having no name for it,

    or finding surprises in a familiar landscape,

    or thinking about how much there is still left to know and how much will never be finished.


The evening fades through from dusk’s thinness to ink black, and, somewhere in the water below me, a light starts.