Tale #17: The Woman Who Lived Alone In The Woods

There was a woman who lived alone in the woods. She walked through the trees and built herself creatures out of metal scavenged from old coke cans, discarded shopping trolleys, lost penknives, dropped coins, abandoned motorbikes, burnt-out cars, bits of barbed wire, tent poles, gas canisters, hubcaps, forgotten farming machinery, the remnants of barbecues, bicycles fished from the river, sawblades, nails, screws, copper wiring of unknown provenance found splayed out like veins just beneath the surface of the earth.

She poured into them her blood and, when she could, her love, and she watched with delight and no small measure of love as they made their first tentative moves in the palms of her hand, in the cradle of her lap – a flutter of wings, a flexing of claws, the opening and closing of tiny beaks as if speaking unheard words.

But her blood would clot in their valves, scab up their biscuit-tin hearts, and there against her skin, as quickly and as slowly as they had started, they stopped.

__________

Notes:

1. From August 2014

An earlier world

There was a time – there is always a time – when you were happy. You can see it now. And you see it clearer with every passing day, this moment, this time, this place, while everything around you now that drifts away. It takes on the form, the mythic scope, of a utopia.

You would give anything to get back there, to get back to a life, that life, that vibrant fucking life you had.

But you can’t go back there

because it never existed.

__________

Notes:

1. Written on September 27th, 2018

The Things I Found Beneath My Skin

The left side of my body was dead to me. I never used it anyway. I stopped the bloodflow to my left arm and rested it on the table in front of me. As I pushed the razor’s blade into the vein at the wrist, my hand shuddered instinctively, a residue of feeling in the nerves that caused the flesh to respond but sent no signal to my brain.

Dead blood welled up at the point of incision, no longer being pumped in but still as eager as ever to escape. I pulled the knife along the course of the vein, opening up the forearm from wrist to elbow. I peeled the skin apart, pinning it down to the tabletop on each side. I wiped the blood away from the bones with a tea-towel that was still damp from dinner.

The etchings on the ulna were more beautiful than I had hoped. I started to remove it, sawing through the bone; first, just before the wrist, then just below the elbow. The breadknife was barely up to the job but I struggled through. Once I had finished I put the knife aside and then pulled the bone free from its pit.

I wiped it clean. I rotated it before me, a movement surprisingly awkward with a only a single hand available for the task. The picture carved into it extended all the way round. It was more than a picture really. A story told in delicate lines, circular and unending round the cylinder of bone, no beginning or end, a constant loop of unsettling depravity. Consumption and expulsion, death and re-death, all that the universe holds reduced to so little. And in its brevity, implications beyond measure.

It was hard to let it go, but I forced myself to set it aside. Underneath where the bone had lain, at the bottom of the valley of my hollowed out arm, in the clotted blood and the seeping marrow, unfurling now in the light that had been let it, my children were beginning to stir. Their translucent skin and formless faces turned towards the heat of the lamp. I picked them out as delicately as I could, my fingertips twice the size of their brittle skulls. One of them cracked between my fingers, but the other two survived. I placed them together on a saucer, and baptised them with my milk.

I took the blackbird from its cage. It froze in my hand, shock and fear stilling its wings, yet its heart beating so hard against my palm it felt like it might burst forth from its chest. I laid it down in the tomb of my arm, and began to seal it in, pulling the pins from the desk and folding the skin back together. I sealed the wound with masking tape, one piece along the line of the cut, then several looped around my arm. I loosened the tourniquets and let the flood flow back in.

As I rolled my sleeve back down I could feel the beat of her wings inside.

_________

Notes:

1. Written on April 14th, 2010