Rick White
The Sow
The hospital is on the outskirts of town, where the buildings start to thin out and the sky feels lower, heavier. It’s a fifteen minute drive if you’re lucky, or, if you’re me, it’s a morale-sapping death march up a very steep hill from the bus stop. The road twists through the housing estate with its nineteen-sixties brown-brick semis: once cheerful but now cracked and crooked — giving the impression of families just barely holding it together. Then past the park, featuring a haunted slide and a swing set where someone’s lovingly etched a cock and balls onto one of the seats with white marker, complete with veiny details. It’s cordoned off with police tape, probably for the best.
By the time I reach the hospital carpark — a freezing gravel pit which crunches under my trainers like broken teeth — I’m on the cusp of being late, or I’m late already, it doesn’t really matter. I had beautiful, pure intentions of an early start, fresh and ready to tackle the day. But the version of me who went to bed with such grand ideas rose like a reanimated corpse this morning and spent too long staring into the bathroom mirror at my pallid and deathly complexion, my wild and uncooperative bird’s nest of hair. I hyper-fixated on a tiny, defiant blocked pore which would’ve been visible to no one but still begged me to engage. I picked it til it bled and then — like a surgeon trying to suture a nicked artery with a hammer and some duct tape — sealed over the oozing crater with tea-tree oil and a judicious glob of concealer.
Now the freshly-dug hole in my face throbs in the morning wind as I follow the path unthinkingly — a series of steps, steel railings and stone walkways which feels like it’s been laid out just for me. It beckons me on but as I walk further and further into the maze I can’t shake the feeling that it’s somehow rearranging itself behind me so that I can never find my way back. It leads upwards like a circulatory system towards the vast red-brick building looming out of the mist, too solid to ignore. I swear it seems to pulsate, like the deep breathing of some gigantic creature not wishing to be disturbed. It’s Victorian, this hospital, I presume. They usually are. Probably an old sanitarium which used to hold the mad and the infected and the dying. I think if I could quiet the noise in my head for just a second I’d be able to hear them screaming.
I reach a plateau in a small, rectangular courtyard, flanked on all sides by knee-high brick walls and a few rickety wooden benches, the space seems to serve no purpose whatsoever — a dull and unremarkable monument to nothingness.
A malevolent wind picks up — an ice-pick to my skull, and a discarded crisp packet blows towards me like a three a.m. drunk trying to start a fight at a taxi rank. A single magpie hops after it, chasing the irresistible shiny thing. It makes me think of that stupid rhyme — one for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, and of my mother, who put so much stock in old wisdom, portents of nature. How she’d stand at the kitchen sink for hours — scrubbing the same dishes over and over again until her hands were chapped and raw from detergent — looking out over the fields and the hedgerows which separated our house from the railway tracks, tutting at the crows, who she believed had murderous intent. They wanted to peck out the eyes of dogs, cows, small children, she was convinced. She fussed and fretted for days if she saw a skinny cat wandering the streets, leaving small offerings of food in empty yoghurt pots for the poor, neglected animals to find. Driven almost to the point of hysterics by the sight of a dog scratching its neck too vigorously, because surely it didn’t just have an itch. No. The wretched creature was teeming with lice and would undoubtedly claw off its own skin without intervention.
Then there were the old wive’s tales; when I fell pregnant, she insisted on commenting that my bump was “all at the front”, which of course meant the baby would be a boy. I’d told her that I, we, wanted a surprise. She must have known I’d secretly be hoping for a girl and so either way her prediction would piss me off, but the thought had entered her mind, and therefore it needed to be said.
This unsolicited reverie has depleted the last of my energy and for a moment I feel as though I’m about to fall down. I start fanning my jumper and t-shirt against the cold sweat which has now glued the coarse fabric of my garments to my easily irritated skin. I feel like fucking Frodo on his quest into Mordor or whatever, except instead of a ring I’m carrying a backpack full of fear and bad decisions and — importantly — one other thing.
A scroll (audible gasps).
Actually it’s a letter, the one I left unopened on my kitchen table for three weeks, wrestling with both its inexorable pull and my mortal fear of what it contained, like an unexploded hand grenade I simply couldn’t bear to part with.
I pull the letter from my bag and even though I’ve read it hundreds of times and know it word for word, I believe it will give me the impetus I need to make a decision and move forward, a bit like one of those choose your own adventure books, do you a) carry on and attend your 10.30 appointment with Dr. Frobisher b) go home c) sit down on one of these benches and find some way to self-immolate and end this fucking nightmare once and for all.
I’m most inclined towards c) so I sit down on the cold, mossy bench. The letter in my hands stares up at me — taunting, rude.
Cognitve. Behavioural. Therapy, it sneers at me.
A disgusting melange of horrible words which should only apply to disobedient dogs and their feckless middle-class owners.
I imagine Doctor Frobisher taking a fistful of my hair, forcing me down onto my knees and shoving my face into a puddle of my own piss, as he hits me on the back of the head with a rolled up newspaper shouting Bad Girl! Bad Girl! Cognitive! Behavioural! Therapy!
“Do you know what a lady hedgehog is called?”
WHAT THE ABSOLUTE FUCK!?
I look up from the cursed letter and there, standing right in-front of me is some kid, probably about six years old, snot streaming out of his nose onto his upper lip in the icy wind. I have an overwhelming urge to clean him.
I scan my immediate surroundings, desperately searching for some sign of a parent or guardian to claim this child but, seeing no one, I decide I’d better answer him, it’s only polite.
“Erm…no?”
“A sow,” he replies, without looking up from the floor.
He’s got two fingers stuck in his mouth, the way babies do, as if it’s a reflex he can’t control. Rivulets of drool glisten as they snake their way down his hands and wrists from his bluish lips. He shifts continually from side to side, bobbing alternately on his heels and the balls of his feet in an awkward rhythm — a weird, creepy square-dance which he is definitely not leading. His head seems slightly too big for his body, lolling back and forth like a broken Jack-in-the-box.
“That makes sense,” I say. “She is a hog after all.”
“A prickly hog.” He snorts a kind of quick, sharp snuffly sound from his nose and twitches like he’s just received a very mild electric shock. I realise this is his laugh.
Then I laugh. A bit. Just a small sound. It’s definitely a laugh though, and it’s the first one I can remember doing in a long time.
“The male is called the boar,” He adds, looking up from the floor, quite pleased with himself now, although still not meeting my eye. “Do you know what a lady jellyfish is called?”
“No.”
“A sow. The male is called…”
“The boar?”
“The boar.”
“Do another one.”
“Do you know what a lady gerbil is called?”
“A sow?”
“A doe. The male is called the buck.”
“Got it.”
“Do you know what a lady mouse is called?”
“A doe?”
“The male is called the buck.”
I never want this conversation to end. Fuck therapy, fuck Dr. Frobisher, fuck everyone. Everyone except this ghostly little urchin child. I just want to sit here and listen to him reciting critter genders until we’re both cured of whatever is wrong with us or we freeze to death. Unfortunately my exaltation is short-lived as an adult man comes stomping across the little windy courtyard — his presence immediately jarring — spasmodic limbs pistoling in every direction, like the top part of him isn’t really communicating with the bottom. Like he’s two people who’ve been sawn in half and stuck back together incorrectly and now the wrong halves of both are trying to escape one another.
“Troy! Troy!” He calls, shouting off somewhere into the middle-distance even though the kid (Troy?) is basically right in front of him.
“Troy, I told you to stay on the chair.” He’s still shouting into the wind, without really looking at Troy. He gallops up to the kid who looks like he’s about to dive out the way and then he slows, almost alarmingly into a smooth and measured approach—holding out a cautious but steady hand as if Troy is a lost foal he does not wish to startle. Then he looks up at me, apparently noticing me for the first time. He’s handsome, in a slightly wonky kind of way. A thin face with a jutting chin but a solid jawline, a slender, crooked nose. Small dark eyes, not without kindess. Just a bit weary. Like an old mouse who’s seen some things he’d really rather forget.
“Sorry is he bothering you?” He asks me, although it sounds more like an accusation than a question.
“No,” I reply.
“Sorry, is he bothering you?” He asks again, stupefyingly, as if my first answer was somehow unsatisfactory.
“It’s fine,” I say. “We were just talking about animals.”
“Ah. That’s your favourite subject isn’t it mate?” He ruffles Troy’s hair in a way that is just slightly too aggressive, less of a fatherly gesture and more like he’s trying to shake some sense into the poor kid’s skull.
The man doesn’t say anything more, just stands there looking at Troy, who in turn is looking at his own feet, fingers still exploring the inner depths of his mouth. I felt like the man is waiting for me to speak, which annoys me, like he thinks I somehow owe him a conversation just because he’s a man and he’s here, even though he ruined the perfectly pleasant one I was having with his son. Seeming to pick up on this, he perseveres--
“I told him to stay on the chair,” he repeats, almost pleadingly, like he’s before a judge. I was beginning to see why Troy was prone to wandering off. “While I spoke to Doctor Frobisher. Sorry, you didn’t need to know that. Anyway, thanks for keeping an eye on him.”
In spite of his annoying, jerky presence, I can’t help but feel sorry for this guy — young, objectively good looking(ish), well-dressed (sort of), probably well-educated with a good job like a chartered accountant or a dentist or director of HR. Probably lives in a new-build home with an all grey interior and a wife who comes from a wealthy family — pale and plain-faced and humourless, but probably, to him, the most beautiful girl who’s ever paid him any attention and laughed at his jokes. And yet somehow he’s found himself here—lost in this desolate place that no amount of family money can help navigate—with this little companion who will never be able to give him what he wants.
“Well to be honest,” I say, “I can understand wanting to run away from Doctor Frobisher.”
He seemed to brighten at this, as if I’ve just handed him a parenting medal, or settled some longstanding argument in his favour.
“I know, right? I mean what do they actually know about all this stuff anyway?”
This. Stuff. Here we go, I think. He was probably hanging back to make sure Doctor Frobisher had “cured” Troy of whatever “behaviour” it was that was making him such a disappointment to his father. Middle class couples and their dogs….
Hellishly he continues, something about how “they” are so quick to label kids these days and just because Troy can’t use a pair of scissors unsupervised and yap di yap di yap but I’ve had enough and need to wrap this up…
“Could you tell me where Dr. Frobisher’s office is please?”
“Oh, yeah, sure…” He registers that our conversation is over and looks slightly crestfallen. “It is a bit tricky to find. You have to go into the main building and then over that bridge.”
He points to the bridge. I’d seen it on my way up and somehow, deep down, I always knew that was where I was headed. I see it so clearly now — a large outbuilding adjacent to the main hospital — newer, yet somehow more dated and tired looking. It has green steel doors on the ground floor which I assume cannot be accessed from the outside so instead, one must use “the bridge”, an elevated walkway about ten-feet in the air, a ramshackle construction of concrete and red-painted steel railings. Not sleek and elegant and made of shiny glass windows like you might see in a fancy new office space, but squat and jutting and barbaric. Wrapped in grimy corrugated plastic and some sort of wire mesh. A cage, basically. Designed to separate the freaks from the norms and keep us where we belong, confined to Dr. Frobisher’s laboratory, over the bridge where nobody goes.
There. Is. Simply. No. Fucking. Way. I. Am. Going. In. There.
“OK. Thanks,” I say to Troy’s dad and then, figuring I might as well get something out of this torturous and humiliating journey I decide to ask Troy a question--
“Hey Troy, here’s one, what’s a lady wolverine called?”
“Angeline.”
“No fucking way!”
Troy’s face twitches in a way that pulls the corner of his mouth slightly nearer to his eye. It’s his smile.
His dad springs into action and leads him away.
“OK mate I think we’d better get going, Mum will be wondering, wait, where’s your jacket? Come on….lovely to met you…”
And with that he leads my sweet Troy away. BACK to the bridge by the looks of it, in search of the jacket from which Troy had erstwhile managed to free himself.
I sit down on one of the cold, mouldy benches, it’s surface damp against my jeans even though it should be dry. I instinctively reach for a packet of cigarettes in my bag, a vestigial reflex from a time before everything that happened. I feel the tug in my stomach, like a tiny hand pulling at my guts from the inside. The selfish disappointment at not being able to indulge (a cigarette would make this situation so much better) and the sharp stab of self-admonishment for not being able to control myself. For not being able to overcome such a basic urge.
Instead of having a cigarette, I pinch the skin on my inner thigh through my jeans six times, digging my thumbnail into the pale flesh as hard as I can to make six perfect little half-moon shapes, one for each month. Then I pull out six of my eyelashes and lay them gently on top of the fabric—tiny black sigils marking the sites of the wounds. When I was a kid, I used a black biro for all my schoolwork, and I developed this habit of taking a red pen and going back over everything I wrote in my exercise book. I don’t know why, or what purpose it served, it was just something I had to do.
I wait for the cold wind to pick up the eyelashes from my thigh and whip them away in some cinematic moment of completion but it doesn’t happen. They’re covered in the clumpy mascara I overzealously applied this morning and they’re fairly well stuck, so I just brush them off.
I look up to the bridge and see Troy, being route-marched by his father back to Dr. Frobisher’s office. I wish I could save him. The magpie is back again, hopping along with the shiny crisp packet in its beak, happy with its prize. Again I think of my mother doing the dishes, staring out the window. I remember a slate-grey afternoon sky, the black wings of birds, the bright red water in the sink. She’d been stood there for hours, and had flayed her fingers down to the bones with a serrated knife. When the paramedics took her away they wrapped her in one of those shiny foil blankets, like the inside of a crisp packet.
The magpie flies away, and the stupid rhyme is in my head again--one for sorrow, two for joy
three for a girl, four for a boy
something, something, whatever-the-fuck
seven for a secret never to be told
By the time I reach the hospital carpark — a freezing gravel pit which crunches under my trainers like broken teeth — I’m on the cusp of being late, or I’m late already, it doesn’t really matter. I had beautiful, pure intentions of an early start, fresh and ready to tackle the day. But the version of me who went to bed with such grand ideas rose like a reanimated corpse this morning and spent too long staring into the bathroom mirror at my pallid and deathly complexion, my wild and uncooperative bird’s nest of hair. I hyper-fixated on a tiny, defiant blocked pore which would’ve been visible to no one but still begged me to engage. I picked it til it bled and then — like a surgeon trying to suture a nicked artery with a hammer and some duct tape — sealed over the oozing crater with tea-tree oil and a judicious glob of concealer.
Now the freshly-dug hole in my face throbs in the morning wind as I follow the path unthinkingly — a series of steps, steel railings and stone walkways which feels like it’s been laid out just for me. It beckons me on but as I walk further and further into the maze I can’t shake the feeling that it’s somehow rearranging itself behind me so that I can never find my way back. It leads upwards like a circulatory system towards the vast red-brick building looming out of the mist, too solid to ignore. I swear it seems to pulsate, like the deep breathing of some gigantic creature not wishing to be disturbed. It’s Victorian, this hospital, I presume. They usually are. Probably an old sanitarium which used to hold the mad and the infected and the dying. I think if I could quiet the noise in my head for just a second I’d be able to hear them screaming.
I reach a plateau in a small, rectangular courtyard, flanked on all sides by knee-high brick walls and a few rickety wooden benches, the space seems to serve no purpose whatsoever — a dull and unremarkable monument to nothingness.
A malevolent wind picks up — an ice-pick to my skull, and a discarded crisp packet blows towards me like a three a.m. drunk trying to start a fight at a taxi rank. A single magpie hops after it, chasing the irresistible shiny thing. It makes me think of that stupid rhyme — one for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, and of my mother, who put so much stock in old wisdom, portents of nature. How she’d stand at the kitchen sink for hours — scrubbing the same dishes over and over again until her hands were chapped and raw from detergent — looking out over the fields and the hedgerows which separated our house from the railway tracks, tutting at the crows, who she believed had murderous intent. They wanted to peck out the eyes of dogs, cows, small children, she was convinced. She fussed and fretted for days if she saw a skinny cat wandering the streets, leaving small offerings of food in empty yoghurt pots for the poor, neglected animals to find. Driven almost to the point of hysterics by the sight of a dog scratching its neck too vigorously, because surely it didn’t just have an itch. No. The wretched creature was teeming with lice and would undoubtedly claw off its own skin without intervention.
Then there were the old wive’s tales; when I fell pregnant, she insisted on commenting that my bump was “all at the front”, which of course meant the baby would be a boy. I’d told her that I, we, wanted a surprise. She must have known I’d secretly be hoping for a girl and so either way her prediction would piss me off, but the thought had entered her mind, and therefore it needed to be said.
This unsolicited reverie has depleted the last of my energy and for a moment I feel as though I’m about to fall down. I start fanning my jumper and t-shirt against the cold sweat which has now glued the coarse fabric of my garments to my easily irritated skin. I feel like fucking Frodo on his quest into Mordor or whatever, except instead of a ring I’m carrying a backpack full of fear and bad decisions and — importantly — one other thing.
A scroll (audible gasps).
Actually it’s a letter, the one I left unopened on my kitchen table for three weeks, wrestling with both its inexorable pull and my mortal fear of what it contained, like an unexploded hand grenade I simply couldn’t bear to part with.
I pull the letter from my bag and even though I’ve read it hundreds of times and know it word for word, I believe it will give me the impetus I need to make a decision and move forward, a bit like one of those choose your own adventure books, do you a) carry on and attend your 10.30 appointment with Dr. Frobisher b) go home c) sit down on one of these benches and find some way to self-immolate and end this fucking nightmare once and for all.
I’m most inclined towards c) so I sit down on the cold, mossy bench. The letter in my hands stares up at me — taunting, rude.
Cognitve. Behavioural. Therapy, it sneers at me.
A disgusting melange of horrible words which should only apply to disobedient dogs and their feckless middle-class owners.
I imagine Doctor Frobisher taking a fistful of my hair, forcing me down onto my knees and shoving my face into a puddle of my own piss, as he hits me on the back of the head with a rolled up newspaper shouting Bad Girl! Bad Girl! Cognitive! Behavioural! Therapy!
“Do you know what a lady hedgehog is called?”
WHAT THE ABSOLUTE FUCK!?
I look up from the cursed letter and there, standing right in-front of me is some kid, probably about six years old, snot streaming out of his nose onto his upper lip in the icy wind. I have an overwhelming urge to clean him.
I scan my immediate surroundings, desperately searching for some sign of a parent or guardian to claim this child but, seeing no one, I decide I’d better answer him, it’s only polite.
“Erm…no?”
“A sow,” he replies, without looking up from the floor.
He’s got two fingers stuck in his mouth, the way babies do, as if it’s a reflex he can’t control. Rivulets of drool glisten as they snake their way down his hands and wrists from his bluish lips. He shifts continually from side to side, bobbing alternately on his heels and the balls of his feet in an awkward rhythm — a weird, creepy square-dance which he is definitely not leading. His head seems slightly too big for his body, lolling back and forth like a broken Jack-in-the-box.
“That makes sense,” I say. “She is a hog after all.”
“A prickly hog.” He snorts a kind of quick, sharp snuffly sound from his nose and twitches like he’s just received a very mild electric shock. I realise this is his laugh.
Then I laugh. A bit. Just a small sound. It’s definitely a laugh though, and it’s the first one I can remember doing in a long time.
“The male is called the boar,” He adds, looking up from the floor, quite pleased with himself now, although still not meeting my eye. “Do you know what a lady jellyfish is called?”
“No.”
“A sow. The male is called…”
“The boar?”
“The boar.”
“Do another one.”
“Do you know what a lady gerbil is called?”
“A sow?”
“A doe. The male is called the buck.”
“Got it.”
“Do you know what a lady mouse is called?”
“A doe?”
“The male is called the buck.”
I never want this conversation to end. Fuck therapy, fuck Dr. Frobisher, fuck everyone. Everyone except this ghostly little urchin child. I just want to sit here and listen to him reciting critter genders until we’re both cured of whatever is wrong with us or we freeze to death. Unfortunately my exaltation is short-lived as an adult man comes stomping across the little windy courtyard — his presence immediately jarring — spasmodic limbs pistoling in every direction, like the top part of him isn’t really communicating with the bottom. Like he’s two people who’ve been sawn in half and stuck back together incorrectly and now the wrong halves of both are trying to escape one another.
“Troy! Troy!” He calls, shouting off somewhere into the middle-distance even though the kid (Troy?) is basically right in front of him.
“Troy, I told you to stay on the chair.” He’s still shouting into the wind, without really looking at Troy. He gallops up to the kid who looks like he’s about to dive out the way and then he slows, almost alarmingly into a smooth and measured approach—holding out a cautious but steady hand as if Troy is a lost foal he does not wish to startle. Then he looks up at me, apparently noticing me for the first time. He’s handsome, in a slightly wonky kind of way. A thin face with a jutting chin but a solid jawline, a slender, crooked nose. Small dark eyes, not without kindess. Just a bit weary. Like an old mouse who’s seen some things he’d really rather forget.
“Sorry is he bothering you?” He asks me, although it sounds more like an accusation than a question.
“No,” I reply.
“Sorry, is he bothering you?” He asks again, stupefyingly, as if my first answer was somehow unsatisfactory.
“It’s fine,” I say. “We were just talking about animals.”
“Ah. That’s your favourite subject isn’t it mate?” He ruffles Troy’s hair in a way that is just slightly too aggressive, less of a fatherly gesture and more like he’s trying to shake some sense into the poor kid’s skull.
The man doesn’t say anything more, just stands there looking at Troy, who in turn is looking at his own feet, fingers still exploring the inner depths of his mouth. I felt like the man is waiting for me to speak, which annoys me, like he thinks I somehow owe him a conversation just because he’s a man and he’s here, even though he ruined the perfectly pleasant one I was having with his son. Seeming to pick up on this, he perseveres--
“I told him to stay on the chair,” he repeats, almost pleadingly, like he’s before a judge. I was beginning to see why Troy was prone to wandering off. “While I spoke to Doctor Frobisher. Sorry, you didn’t need to know that. Anyway, thanks for keeping an eye on him.”
In spite of his annoying, jerky presence, I can’t help but feel sorry for this guy — young, objectively good looking(ish), well-dressed (sort of), probably well-educated with a good job like a chartered accountant or a dentist or director of HR. Probably lives in a new-build home with an all grey interior and a wife who comes from a wealthy family — pale and plain-faced and humourless, but probably, to him, the most beautiful girl who’s ever paid him any attention and laughed at his jokes. And yet somehow he’s found himself here—lost in this desolate place that no amount of family money can help navigate—with this little companion who will never be able to give him what he wants.
“Well to be honest,” I say, “I can understand wanting to run away from Doctor Frobisher.”
He seemed to brighten at this, as if I’ve just handed him a parenting medal, or settled some longstanding argument in his favour.
“I know, right? I mean what do they actually know about all this stuff anyway?”
This. Stuff. Here we go, I think. He was probably hanging back to make sure Doctor Frobisher had “cured” Troy of whatever “behaviour” it was that was making him such a disappointment to his father. Middle class couples and their dogs….
Hellishly he continues, something about how “they” are so quick to label kids these days and just because Troy can’t use a pair of scissors unsupervised and yap di yap di yap but I’ve had enough and need to wrap this up…
“Could you tell me where Dr. Frobisher’s office is please?”
“Oh, yeah, sure…” He registers that our conversation is over and looks slightly crestfallen. “It is a bit tricky to find. You have to go into the main building and then over that bridge.”
He points to the bridge. I’d seen it on my way up and somehow, deep down, I always knew that was where I was headed. I see it so clearly now — a large outbuilding adjacent to the main hospital — newer, yet somehow more dated and tired looking. It has green steel doors on the ground floor which I assume cannot be accessed from the outside so instead, one must use “the bridge”, an elevated walkway about ten-feet in the air, a ramshackle construction of concrete and red-painted steel railings. Not sleek and elegant and made of shiny glass windows like you might see in a fancy new office space, but squat and jutting and barbaric. Wrapped in grimy corrugated plastic and some sort of wire mesh. A cage, basically. Designed to separate the freaks from the norms and keep us where we belong, confined to Dr. Frobisher’s laboratory, over the bridge where nobody goes.
There. Is. Simply. No. Fucking. Way. I. Am. Going. In. There.
“OK. Thanks,” I say to Troy’s dad and then, figuring I might as well get something out of this torturous and humiliating journey I decide to ask Troy a question--
“Hey Troy, here’s one, what’s a lady wolverine called?”
“Angeline.”
“No fucking way!”
Troy’s face twitches in a way that pulls the corner of his mouth slightly nearer to his eye. It’s his smile.
His dad springs into action and leads him away.
“OK mate I think we’d better get going, Mum will be wondering, wait, where’s your jacket? Come on….lovely to met you…”
And with that he leads my sweet Troy away. BACK to the bridge by the looks of it, in search of the jacket from which Troy had erstwhile managed to free himself.
I sit down on one of the cold, mouldy benches, it’s surface damp against my jeans even though it should be dry. I instinctively reach for a packet of cigarettes in my bag, a vestigial reflex from a time before everything that happened. I feel the tug in my stomach, like a tiny hand pulling at my guts from the inside. The selfish disappointment at not being able to indulge (a cigarette would make this situation so much better) and the sharp stab of self-admonishment for not being able to control myself. For not being able to overcome such a basic urge.
Instead of having a cigarette, I pinch the skin on my inner thigh through my jeans six times, digging my thumbnail into the pale flesh as hard as I can to make six perfect little half-moon shapes, one for each month. Then I pull out six of my eyelashes and lay them gently on top of the fabric—tiny black sigils marking the sites of the wounds. When I was a kid, I used a black biro for all my schoolwork, and I developed this habit of taking a red pen and going back over everything I wrote in my exercise book. I don’t know why, or what purpose it served, it was just something I had to do.
I wait for the cold wind to pick up the eyelashes from my thigh and whip them away in some cinematic moment of completion but it doesn’t happen. They’re covered in the clumpy mascara I overzealously applied this morning and they’re fairly well stuck, so I just brush them off.
I look up to the bridge and see Troy, being route-marched by his father back to Dr. Frobisher’s office. I wish I could save him. The magpie is back again, hopping along with the shiny crisp packet in its beak, happy with its prize. Again I think of my mother doing the dishes, staring out the window. I remember a slate-grey afternoon sky, the black wings of birds, the bright red water in the sink. She’d been stood there for hours, and had flayed her fingers down to the bones with a serrated knife. When the paramedics took her away they wrapped her in one of those shiny foil blankets, like the inside of a crisp packet.
The magpie flies away, and the stupid rhyme is in my head again--one for sorrow, two for joy
three for a girl, four for a boy
something, something, whatever-the-fuck
seven for a secret never to be told
--
Rick White is a fiction writer from Manchester, UK whose work features in Milk Candy Review, trampset and Maudlin House among others.
Rick White is a fiction writer from Manchester, UK whose work features in Milk Candy Review, trampset and Maudlin House among others.