Fits and starts and dead things.
Bea sees Stan ringing out of the corner of her eye. Stanley, it says, as the phone lights up. A picture of him, about thirty years ago, smiling wide.
It is four pm. Bea lets it go to voicemail. He doesn’t leave one. She turns back to the window above the sink and watches as three boys kick a football down below, the sound of their feet scuffing the pavement, the sound of the ball hitting the wall opposite resounding upwards, making her wince and wonder where their parents are.
The world is tender at the moment. Things have not been good. Things have been so good. Things have been things.
An unmade bed. A spider squished into a laptop screen, legs splitting pixels like cracked glass. Broken snail shells and flies on their backs at the base of the kitchen windows. A fox by the side of the road, dead. A fox in the garden, playing dead. It is the beginning of the heat, and the grass is struggling. The birds are loud and congregate in the nearby field in great murders.
June has been doing too much. Too much of it all. Whatever it is you’re thinking of is probably right and probably so far from the truth that you ought to realise you hardly know her at all.
Everything she has been doing has been very out of character. It is very in character for her, in that sense, she supposes. She has always been like this. She has never known who she is. She does not know who she is right now. She has never known who she is. Only, perhaps, in fits and starts, in reflections and shadows and that great golden glow of the grains of time falling upon her head. Perhaps in some twenty years’ time, she will think back to this moment and know exactly who she had once been.
It is always spring that these things seem to come round- echoes of that thing that June refuses to talk about and can never seem to forget (though really she uses that excuse for each season: in the summer, it is the heat and the bodies- in the autumn it is the change and the memory of the autumn before- in the winter it is the chill and the dark and the celebration that doesn’t much feel like anything that you remember it feeling like once, a very very long time ago).
This is passive, attempting activity.
Today, June went and bought eggs. She spent ten minutes in the freezer aisle staring at her silhouette in the doors and wondering if they were made of plastic or glass, but not really invested enough to find out. Radiohead playing. Fake plastic trees. She looks like the real thing.
She looked like the real thing. Her reflection looked like a woman. She went to the toiletry aisle and added a pack of razors to her basket. Plastic.
She made a banana cake. The bananas were going black. The heat makes things die fast and go slow. She feels like she’s wading through it. Decomposing. It’s all delayed, a few seconds out of sync, a little lagging, a little too bright, too saturated, too loud. She got batter on her freshly washed shorts and on her tummy and all over her arms. She felt like a child. She washed her shorts with body wash and hoped the smell of synthetic flowers would cover up the rot as the denim dried.
She felt careless: like she was being careless: like any second, she might drop glass and send it everywhere. Fingers fat like dead flies in this heat. Stumbling fingers. Warm and bloated and ripe. She imagined splitting a knife through her fingers. Courses of blood streaming. They stayed swollen and worrying. Swollen and in the fear. Swollen with the fear.
See, the thing is.
The thing is.
What is the thing?
She thinks the thing is that she is struggling to think of one root thing, you know? No, probably not. Things lose meaning. The thing has lost its meaning.
It shouldn’t matter. She knows that. But it matters because she knows it shouldn’t matter, and yet it sticks around anyway.
It is so heavy, and she is growing weary of carrying it around. This thing. It is getting lighter, and she is getting weaker. It is making this awful noise as she drags it behind her on the pavement, turning its heels bloody, cutting up its feet, loose flesh tumbling downwards with gravity’s pull. She is holding a baby, and it is crying. She never wanted children. Take this thing out of her arms before she flings it across the room to stop its wailing.
This is a thing, she thinks. Her; she is some thing.
Anyways. It was the Thursday or Friday of that third week of the month. Around the time when it all starts to drag, and you’re already preparing your head for getting used to forming the shape of the next month in your mouth, and preparing your eyes to keep from rolling at the routine ‘I can’t believe this month is almost over already’ that you will be bringing up in every conversation you have for the next two weeks. Something to follow the weather and the how are yous before the silence settles and you have to think of something else acceptable to say to maintain the facade that everything is perfectly normal, just as you are, and there is not a swarm of black things at your heels and a loud growling within you, rattling at your ribs and begging for escape.
Around the time when heads start to roll, and your fingers start to get littered with burn marks, your legs with bruises. There is blood on your hands, or perhaps it is just pollen and change. There is a place in your face where you’re bleeding right through. You scratched too hard. You’re sleep-deprived. Coming down with something, from something. You know what the usual excuses are. Do other people get the same desire to burn themselves up like this?