BEYOND THE WATER LINE

Have you ever looked down on yourself in a swimming pool? Or even the bath? It looks like you’ve been split in two. The water carves you in half where it meets your flesh, displacing you slightly. Leaving you out of whack. That’s how your face looked that day when I looked at you. When you said those words, I felt like you had been broken somehow. Like everything I had ever known about you was suddenly cleaved in two, leaving me looking from fractured piece to fractured piece desperately seeking out the truth between.

Now I can’t picture you without seeing you dismembered.

Maybe that’s a reflection on the white hot anger I feel when I think of you. Or maybe it’s just because that’s how you looked. Maybe that’s always how you looked, but I had been submerged in your watery lies. To me, you always looked whole. 

MUTE

VisDare challenge word was 'Pensive'

MUTE

‘For oft when on my couch I lie in vacant or in pensive mood’.

Vacant or pensive, vacant or pensive. Her head was full of words how could that be vacant? But she thought of nothing in particular, how could that be pensive?

She was full of language and phrases by other people who could put them together. She read them. Devoured them. Took them in as water, assimilated into her flesh.

She longed for the ability to tell her own story. But stuck in mute silence she would never be the next Wordsworth, this she knew.

She flicked her eyes sideways. Left for yes. Right for no, the nurse turned the page, 

‘Pegasus, by Patrick Kavanagh’ she liked this one.

It was about flights of the soul, and being outside yourself.

How cruel to have the heart of poet, trapped inside a broken body with these great immovable hands.

VisDare word is Obscured

SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES.

He blew smoke right at my face through his teeth. Jaundiced, blood shot eyes stayed fixed on mine. ‘That’s the price of it sweetheart, eventually your soul weighs out and before you know it you’ve got thick yellow leather where your skin used to be.’

He handed me the small, clear plastic bag, his gaze never faltering.

My hands were slick with sweat, so much so that I thought the bag was going to slide right though my fingers. Sometimes now I wish it had, sometimes I catch a glimpse of what’s left of me in a mirror, and I really truly wish it had.

‘Well, you gonna open it doll?’ As I opened the  baggy, he blew more smoke from between those thick liver  lips of his, obscuring my view of the substance held within.  I wish it had stayed that way forever, out of focus, just like me.   

Vis Dare challenge. Word this week was Bruised

MUNCHAUSEN

She stared blankly ahead as doctors shone torches into her eyes and poked and prodded at her bruised skin. She hated this part, too many questions.

She had no explanation for it, but she felt too big for the life that she had chosen.

Handling her emotions, all of them (there were so many) had never been her strong suit, so she began wearing them on her flesh, like badges of honour, or shame, she wasn’t sure which.

She knew what they thought ‘battered wife’, but they were wrong. ‘Just battered’ she laughed to herself while she tried to hide the marks on her knuckles.

What would they do if they knew? If they ever suspected that her elusive abuser didn’t exist. At least, not in any form that they ever imagined.

She sat on her hands, winced from the pain, and smiled. 

This weeks VisDare challenge was engraved. Heres my entry.

ARE YE DANCIN’?

With the first beat of the song he was transported back 60 years. To the first moment he met her. He had asked her to dance to this very song. He whirled her around the dance floor joyously, then he kissed her. Full on the lips in front of everyone. A bold  move in 1950’s Ireland.

‘God I miss ye Mary’ he thought, tears began to streak the deep set wrinkles on his face. He cried silently on his bar stool, while the other patrons threw sideways glances at him and moved slowly away.

‘Ah’, he thought, ‘they don’t know, they can’t, too young, I was young once too, she made me young.’ He grabbed a young man by the arm, and shouted ‘she’s etched on my skin, engraved into my heart!’

He turned around, settled back down and sipped his Guinness. ‘God I miss ye Mary’ he thought. 

DECLINE

Everything she used to be is threaded through the lines in her face. Good thing too because her eyes have nothing left in them. A woman of such character, how colourful she was. How heavily the mighty fall.

Do you know how hard it is to watch one of your heroes disintegrate? I’ll tell you, it’s damn hard. To see the sparks of intelligence and humour, all glints of mischievousness and recognition held in her eyes be replaced by fear and confusion? It takes a part of you.

Feeling someone else’s end approach engulfs you slightly. Panic rises in your cheeks as you feel tears swelling and bubbling up and it’s all you can do to push them back down because you know, you know, one wrong move from you means a series of cataclysmic events for her and you only have 40 minutes left with her. Hospital visiting hours are remorseless.

Once upon a time she was a whole universe unto herself. At the heart of it stood her heart, with the rest of us orbiting and spinning around her. I guess we still do, it’s just that now her light has burnt out. I miss her light. I miss her stories. I miss her songs. I miss the fact that she insisted on putting on a full face of makeup even just to go to the local shop, leaving 7 year old me dangling and swinging my legs impatiently off the side of her bed as I watched her don her war paint. I miss the way her skin smelled when she hugged me and the way her brushed linen bed sheets felt at night.

It’s strange to wait for the end of something that you never saw the beginning of, and only knew less than half of. Especially when that fraction of knowledge takes up an entire chunk of your own world.

Now a whole person is missing. How can that happen?

The only thing I have to take solace in now is that everything she was to me, all her songs and stories and love and care is etched onto my heart and laced through my blood.

Write4ten, Word inspiration was 'Yes'

THE HAPPY HOUSEWIFE

Yes. She said yes a lot. ‘Mam’ they would scream. ‘Yes’ she would answer. ‘Can we…?, will you…?, can you find…?, will you make…?can I have…?’ . Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Yes to everything. Sometimes she wanted to stand on top of the kitchen table banging pots together and scream ‘NO’ at the top of her voice. Sometimes just picturing their shocked little faces should she ever build up the courage to actually do that got her through the tougher parts of her day. Parts where she was wrist deep in greenish yellow baby poop, with a kicking infant peeing on her while ‘In The Night Garden’ blasted from the sitting room at deafening decibels as her other two little angles punched, kicked and bit their way through the morning.

This was not what she signed up for. She just would never have imagined that seven years on from their magical first date, they would have a brood of children, (her first thought there had been horrible little monsters), he would be losing all the hair on his head only to find it again on his shoulders, back, neck and stomach, and she would be leaving unholy amounts of dandruff on her pillow every morning and be suffering from mild, yet highly embarrassing and inconvenient bladder problems as a result of giving birth to twins with abnormally large heads.

No, this really isn’t what she signed up for.

But all the same she loves them. At least she supposes she loves them although she is not quite sure if it’s out of a sense of duty or if she really truly from the heart loves them. Either way she’s stuck with them now.

‘oh you’re so lucky!’ her single friends bleat at her with their perfectly coiffured hair, flawless make up (actual make up, not the marker her five year old found in her handbag and decided to put on her as lipstick), size ten jeans, and highly impractical nails. Yea, sure.

But no she knew she had everything that most women her age desired, craved even. The problem was that she had never desired or craved this sort of life. In fact she used to loathe it. She  used to think that women who settled for this sort of life were beneath her somehow, that she would never fall into the trap of mainstream misogynistic patriarchy by settling down and having children while the man of the house went out to work and the wee wife stayed at home to keep house. Yet here she was. She resented herself for giving in to societal norms. Where was the fire in her belly gone? Where was her passion gone? Where was she gone?

A clattering sound from the kitchen broke her reverie, ‘MAAAAAAAM!!!’ hellish screeching met her ears and a red squinted face, tear streaked and sniffling peeked round the door at her.

‘Yes love, mammy’s coming.’