ache1
before she became ache1 had been sucking comfort from off her thumb
for some deal of time before realising this was a habit with which she was
supposedly finished, of which throughout she had been unable to realistically
imagine herself ever being broken and yet here she was acknowledging its
absence from her routine only by its very reocurrence, her weaning so gradual
to have gone utterly unremarked.
Kneeling
at her bed, she had for the first time this year completed her homework in the
day’s own lengthening light, without recourse to illumination from the overhead
bulb.
She
yawned hard, pushed the books aside to rest her chin upon her crossed forearms,
and in such a state of genuflection spoke not to God but rather subjected her
E.T. doll to protracted worst-case soliloquies in each of which she detailed
again her sense of despair at his betrayal, and those drastic everythings
consequent to that microscopic assemblage she increasingly felt herself certain
to embody, waiting as she had through the accumulation of empty days up to and
then beyond that during which should have occurred the month’s passive and
expected purge of welcome blood.
From
below her room she could hear Judas’ agitated and breathless bark as her father
collected the dog’s lead to walk him out into the early evening.
Behind
her all the time elapsed between that first spring surge of herself, including
the three month remission after Easter, had collapsed back into itself to leave
her returned to the same dread state of excitement and trepidation, each day
providing her with only the briefest grace into which she might wake before
remembering would sour out the hours ahead. Her time in school she passed
frustrated by an inability to focus and concentrate on the requisite classwork,
and this frustration too quickening her temper so that each inconvenience
however lacking in dimension she exaggerated to proportion of insurmountable
crisis.
Taking
now each of E.T.’s weird flat little hands into her own, she was struck by the
sudden realisation that the doll’s head offered no discernible ears, and
rendered thus essentially deaf could not possibly have heard a single word of
hers spoken to him this evening, or ever else.
After
long seconds spent biting repeatedly upon its knuckle, she took her thumb back
again into her mouth, in silence.
