The end
of Christmas term, and her car pulls its weight in parallel into the bland and
level depth of the day’s now-frozen snow covering her driveway.
There
follows a minor struggle with the garage door; she kicks at drifts frozen tight
along the bottom, dislodges ingots of white as the door breaks free its frost,
and again moments later on its closing.
Facing
into the street, she breathes the cold inhaled air hard from out her nose and
then reaches for her handkerchief when mucus balloons and breaks loose, her
nose already chapped and sore from days of same.
The
tyre-tracked drive is spotted black with oil, random fractals of waste.
When she
places a steadying glove against the basketball pole she is aware of the fluids
that move within her tilted skull, their sound akin to petrol dropping into
petrol, and her weight makes drop the frozen hoop of snow above her head; she
hears it damply hiss itself into the snow around her feet, the frost she
understands to be still more liquid than anything else.
She wants
to know Christmas as something she can hold, as something that will bear her
weight if she should fall. Instead, she kneels to the ground where the pole
descends into the earth, and with quick movements brushes free the concrete,
throws off her gloves and clears the handprints of all five family members,
picking and scratching especial at those of her youngest daughter, missing
almost two years, and the pawprints of her dog, dead a little longer; all the
while nodding to herself, nodding and nodding.
The
petrol fluid shifts again behind her face and her hand comes up on impulse, the
fingers to feel only themselves and nothing more. Her body is host to something
transient that leaves her as these words, which perish upon their having
breath, and are gone:
Mother
(singing): “Oh Peggy Gordon, you are my darling. Come sit you down upon my
knee, and tell to me the very reason, I am slighted so by thee. So deep in love
that I can’t deny it, my heart lies smothered”
taking
breath, and her teeth sing back with cold. Snow returns.
Mother
(singing): “I wish I was far away in Scotland, far across the briny sea,
sailing o’er the deepest waters, where love nor care never bothered me. I wish
I was in some lonesome valley, where womankind could not be”
Dislocated
from its habitual centre of gravity, her full bodyweight moves into the
discoloured palm covering the imprint of her daughter’s, and her pelvis begins
to ache; squatting there beneath the pole she is certain tonight’s dreams will
hold them both, that on her subsequent waking their perpetual absence will be
renascent and belaboured.
And
that is tomorrow.
