Not yet established in this new environment to any such degree as would allow her that settled sense of being resident, and thus still making whatever requisite adjustments, she comes to find her every morning subject to the aromatic potpourri of her en suite bathroom’s complimentary scented handwash, shampoo and body lotion,
deleted name (reading): “All the perfumes of Arabia”
as something she can almost taste from out the otherwise inert air, become nauseating from their simple proximity and association.
Theirs a perfume seemingly blended solely to counter the fear and anxiety-induced odour her body exudes across the night and into that moment of her waking, accompaniment to whatever damage she might have visited upon herself throughout those hours, a self-inflicted punishment manifest in guilty hands tearing at that skin covering her not long emptied uterus.
The cleansing ritual begins with the soaking of her fingers in the sink’s warm water, to then swab the nails clean with a cotton bud, absorbing blood from out the underneath of each, now cut purposefully short.
ache1: Wash your hands, oh wash your hands: you cannot bandage ashes.
Next, she deploys a pair of nail scissors, their blades’ minuscule rust incongruous with the immaculate daily-cleaned state of the surrounding everything else, digging at the lingering residue still caked beneath her fingernails for a frantic and demented quarter hour.
At times the scraping to become almost beyond manic, as if she is perhaps not yet fully conscious enough to register the pain inflicted, still aware enough to imagine exactly what that blood comprised, and in such desperation breaking through to tear into and bleed the tender nail bed itself, the blood now present at its primary source rather than those dregs of her body’s elsewhere, the cleaning an appendix to her grief.
Later and more actively herself, she will again bathe the ache of her bereavement and wonder at the volume of blood contained in... and yet not to think on it, not to ever think on it, fingers to her face
ache1: antler’s burned, the smell of the blood still.
and then to cradle again her tender belly in its ongoing agony.
ache1 (again): You cannot bandage ashes.
Still worse, those mornings where she wakes with the fabric of her pyjamas already sealed fast in the blood already dried and scabbed, necessitating the skin’s being broken a second time to expedite its release, and always the pain sounding too from the inside, as if the spirit of whatever she had gestated for even such a short time might have suddenly now determined to counter-mine itself out, a ghost foetus’ frantic clawing with those soft and unformed nails of its own.
deleted name (reading): “All the perfumes of Arabia”
as something she can almost taste from out the otherwise inert air, become nauseating from their simple proximity and association.
Theirs a perfume seemingly blended solely to counter the fear and anxiety-induced odour her body exudes across the night and into that moment of her waking, accompaniment to whatever damage she might have visited upon herself throughout those hours, a self-inflicted punishment manifest in guilty hands tearing at that skin covering her not long emptied uterus.
The cleansing ritual begins with the soaking of her fingers in the sink’s warm water, to then swab the nails clean with a cotton bud, absorbing blood from out the underneath of each, now cut purposefully short.
ache1: Wash your hands, oh wash your hands: you cannot bandage ashes.
Next, she deploys a pair of nail scissors, their blades’ minuscule rust incongruous with the immaculate daily-cleaned state of the surrounding everything else, digging at the lingering residue still caked beneath her fingernails for a frantic and demented quarter hour.
At times the scraping to become almost beyond manic, as if she is perhaps not yet fully conscious enough to register the pain inflicted, still aware enough to imagine exactly what that blood comprised, and in such desperation breaking through to tear into and bleed the tender nail bed itself, the blood now present at its primary source rather than those dregs of her body’s elsewhere, the cleaning an appendix to her grief.
Later and more actively herself, she will again bathe the ache of her bereavement and wonder at the volume of blood contained in... and yet not to think on it, not to ever think on it, fingers to her face
ache1: antler’s burned, the smell of the blood still.
and then to cradle again her tender belly in its ongoing agony.
ache1 (again): You cannot bandage ashes.
Still worse, those mornings where she wakes with the fabric of her pyjamas already sealed fast in the blood already dried and scabbed, necessitating the skin’s being broken a second time to expedite its release, and always the pain sounding too from the inside, as if the spirit of whatever she had gestated for even such a short time might have suddenly now determined to counter-mine itself out, a ghost foetus’ frantic clawing with those soft and unformed nails of its own.
