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Freefall 2009, day 1Sandra said May 25, 9:05 PM: |
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The bones of this piece was written at Deena Metzger's retreat. I didn't change anything but I opened it out a lot here, freefalling into areas that pulled me. I hope it reflects some of her approach and guidance. I don't need comments, as I have these here at Freefall - not that I don't want any, but it's long and a difficult read. (and unedited). If you should be so inclined, I am of course, always interested in what 'doesn't work' for you as a story ( contrary to commenting guidelines!). In particular the beginning. And a title.. ———- I prepare her body. Her pale skin shining in the darkness. Flickering candles licking shadows like little tounges, across the surface of the cave, across the surface of her body. Her skin folding and lined, tiny mountain crevices. She is lying on a black marble altar. I stand ten feet from her, the soles of my feet soaking up the cold dampness of the cave floor. I am a fish out of water, gulping for air. Her body is starved, her bones pressing through the white skin as if trying to get out. The body is a kind of horror. Flashes of images fill my mind. Memories? Imaginings? Things I have seen on Television? A child's staring eyes at Bergen Belsen. An emaciated baby suckling on her mother's wrinkled and empty breast in Darfur. The cavernous face of an IRA man in an Irish prison. She looks like an anorectic, a growth of delicate, downy hair covering her body, hair that forms on the skin of fetuses and on the skin of prematurely born babies. It is found on children and adults, a sign of starvation, the body attempting to protect itself from fat loss. It is found on the leaves of plants, those fine small hairs shining in the dark. I cannot move for looking. I don't know how to do this. I don't want to touch the still warm flesh. I stand there, breathing in the cool air, in, out. Smell of damp, smell of small moulds and metal water. The smell of beeswax and seaweed and wet straw and bird feathers. My legs are lead weights. I want to lie down. I want to sleep at the bottom of the ocean, my hands buried in the sand. There is a copper bowl beside the marble altar, filled with water. The surface of the water is a mirror, reflecting the moon, her face watching me as she slides across the opening in the roof of the cave. A white eye, unblinking. I peel my feet from the floor, one by one. One step at a time, my mother's body calling me, pulling me, repulsing me. I feel like I'm pushing against the negative force of a magnet. I'll pop through, I tell myself, but I don't, I'm held in this no-man's land, leaning into the wind. The water ripples, tiny waves rising up, a single drop falling on my foot, so cold it's hot. I am beside her now. I dip my hand into the copper bowl, scooping up a handful of water. I sprinkle it over the body. I think this is all I need to do, I don't need to touch her. The water runs little rivers off of her stomach, pooling onto the marble. Small shining pearls settling on the black. I look around for something to wash her with. Something between my hand and her flesh. The floor of the cave is littered with feathers and I find the largest one, grey-white like her skin. I dip the feather into the water and with it I wipe her body, her parchment thin skin, the bones, the veins the lines the scars writing her story. I find the scar above her pubic bone, half hidden by the grey hair on her balding mound. This is the doorway through which I entered this world. I cannot imagine being inside this body, this body that is not mine, that is mine. I cannot imagine being safe inside there. Another womb maybe, not hers. Get inside, I tell myself and I want to vomit. My mother's neighbour, a good friend, a woman who saw her every day, did not know my mother was pregnant with me until the day I was born. I grew inside my mother's body to the sound of hammering, to the smell of oxyacetylene, the smell of buried despair, to the sound of my father's grunts as he fucked his secretary on the office floor, my mother thinking he was compiling data on the psychological health of black workers in the gold mines. I can feel the short stiff carpet bristles pressing into the bones of my spine. I can feel the thrill of infidelity shiver under my diaphragm, the taste of the secretary's lipsticked mouth. I can feel the invisible teeth of the secret as it bites, I can feel the brick by brick wall building me into the labyrinth. When I was born I weighed four and a half pounds. It was rather more than I planned on growing but sometimes the body has a will of its own. The feather is wilting, it's not up to the job. I have to touch her, there isn't another way. I dip my hand into the water and I press it gently against my mother's sunken belly. It rises a little, pushing me away, letting me in as it falls. A canyon drops from her floating rib to the floor of her stomach. It's not so bad, my hand against her. Slowly I wash her, making small circles with my palm. I stroke her, I caress and clean her, belly to pubis, pubis to hip, hip to thigh, thigh to knee, knee to calf, calf to ankle, and her feet, each toe, one by one. Her big toe is exactly my own, like my uncle's, brother's, a stumpy, big headed digit passed from generation to generation. Her smaller toes are one half the length of my own. We measured them. Perhaps they are my father's, these long toes of mine. I dip my hand again into the bowl and move to her chest, empty breasts hanging to each side, thrown away like small crumpled plastic bags. I sprinkle and wash her, the bones across her heart, a cage without a gate. Her collarbone, hard as a knife, marked by a scar, the one she touched sometimes, as if to remind herself that if she had driven the car, perhaps none of this would ever have happened. This story I know well, too well, these lies she tells herself, these seeds of guilt she watered as they sprout and grow, twisting like poison ivy, seeding itself, finding fertile earth in my own body. I run my finger over the scar, trying to rub it out but it stays there, and I wait until it is nothing more than what it is, the mark from a shard of glass from the windscreen through which my father flew to his death. I move on, lifting a feather-light arm to wash underneath, layering my hand down and down to her own hand. I hold her hand. It is cold. I try to remember the feeling of holding hands with her and I cannot remember. Her hand is knotted like an ancient tree root. There is blackening under the skin of her forefinger. Her thumb is misshapen, a lump of flesh having dropped off because of gangrene. She had been welding closed a hole in a metal bucket and had lost concentration, less than a moment, her thumb moving into the flame. This happened when I was in India, climbing the hills of Taluk to Kodaikanal, delirious with shooting pains in my kidneys. A children's song flitting my ears, There's a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza… She told me later about her thumb. She told me later about the pneumonia. She nearly died. I didn't know. As my fingers trace the map of her body I find wounds I did not know were there. An inch-long sliver line crossing over her liver. A small round indentation on the side of her right thigh. It looks like a bullet hole. She never told me about these things. What else has she not told me? Her hand is curling in mine, hardening into a claw. I try to ease it out, to soften and calm the bones but I can't. I must go on, and I do, taking my hand from hers. I move to her face, to the crown of her head, the thin, fine hair, the skin on her skull showing through. She would hate to see this. So many things she was ashamed of. The way her ears stuck out. The way her mouth looked without her teeth. I once walked in on my mother unawares, just as she was taking out her false teeth. She shot her body around, hiding from me so I would not see, arms and hands struggling to replace her face. It was a terrible moment. How can I describe that moment? Like a bottomless pit I fell into, its walls lined with sharp rocks. I felt everything. Her shame, her embarrassment, her horror of her own body. Her absolute rejection of getting old, her struggle against herself, her fear. In front of her own daughter, who too, cannot show herself to her mother, not since she was eleven years old when she lay in bed, bleeding. I had not been warned. I had not been prepared. I thought I was dying. My mother came in and kissed me and I knew she would know what was happening and she would take care of me but she did not, she said 'goodnight darling' and then she shut my bedroom door and the next morning I woke up in a pool of blood and fright. I washed my sheets in secret. From that day on I locked the bathroom door, all the doors. She has never seen me naked as an adult. And now she lies here, naked beneath my hands, shimmering in the moonlight. I stroke my hand over her hair, brushing the strands away from her eyes. I see the face she could not bear to have photographed. I see the way the hair of her eyebrows has fallen out. She would draw over them in khol, an unnatural curve, too dark, underlining the barren skin underneath. I didn't have the heart to tell her. I didn't have the heart to say, let me do it. What would it have taken? To make her beautiful, as she once was. Now her lips are sunken, fanned out with tiny lines and the hollows of her eye-browless eyes unfathomable. I rain drops of water onto these eyes. I rain drops onto her third eye, the one I am sure she would insist was not there. She believed in nothing. Life was a dead-end. No way to turn. Turn back and you will see your nightmares. Your failures. Your should haves and should have nots. The betrayals. The mother who drank herself to death. The father who thought women should be secretaries, yes, like the one my father fucked. Instead my mother wore the black sash and hid Ellen and Samson in her bedroom wardrobe when the Black Mariah's came around looking for kaffirs to beat. The daughter who was bulimic, the son who betrayed each one of his wives, one after the other, the daughter who married a man who nearly bled to death in her arms, the son who will not hold her eyes, the daughter who is endlessly ill, bitten by a South African tick. These are the things my mother does not wish to look back upon, and in front of her there is only crumbling bones and inflammed intestines like snakes biting from the inside, and skin burning with unknowable itching and waking up in the night weeping and dying alone because there is no other way to die. She turns on the marble alter, this way and that, as if trying to find a corner to curl into, a corner where there are no memories, a corner where death does not beckon. I want to hold her down, press her into herself, into her body, into this moment, into my heart. I want to make her beautiful again, I want to find the moments when she was happy, the moments when she was at peace with herself and the world. There must be some but I cannot find them. I stand there watching her writhe and jerk, her head twisting left and right. I'm afraid she'll bruise and I reach out to hold her but she has stilled, her body once again inert, a supplicant, my offering, my sacrifice. Maybe she never moved, maybe it was only my imagination. I place my hand on her forehead. She is cold. I can feel the bones of her skull as if she has no skin at all. I reach down into the bowl for more water but there is none. The bowl is empty. The moon has crossed over, the sky a lightening blue, stars winking closed, a curtsy for the sun. The candles have burnt out. I put my forehead against hers. Images flood into my mind. The slippery murk of the water hole sucking over, forgetting bilharzia, forgetting I'm seven years old and cannot swim, looking for the body, finding his tiny three year old leg, pulling it, tucking my hands underneath his delicate armpits, pulling him out, gagging, half drowning, spitting fishes. His brother smell, his life in my hands. The smell of alcohol on mother's breath as she sits knitting in the darkened drawing room, pretending Peitermaritzburg is London, knitting the front side of her daughter's sweater to the back and the words, “it's lovely mum” in my ears, pretending nothing is wrong. The smell of an African's fear impregnated into cocktail dresses hanging in the wardrobe. The hardness of a hospital bed, son and daughter hand in hand, wondering where their father is, the blinding white sheets knocking the voice out of her. The smell of vomit from another wardrobe, twelve years later, where her daughter has hidden what she cannot stomach. There's more, it tumbles into me, her life, my life, my father's life, his father's life, my brother, her brother's, all seven of them, the half ones too, and her father, the gastank smell of him, the sound of her grandmother's sizzling koeksisters frying in beef fat, the sound of an Emperor swallowtail's wings, trying to escape the net, velvet wings patterned in black and cream, tearing as they fight to get out, and her rears as she realises what she has done, her tears when she cannot save it from the pin her grandfather stuck through its back, saying, “what a fine specimen” and the beauty of the man she married, my father, making specimens out of the miner's suffering, forgetting to wipe his semen from the carpet, folding his poetry into her heart, trying to stop the bleeding; all the images and smells and sounds and feelings filling me up until I cannot hold them any longer and they pour out, a river through my eyes, washing my face, washing her face, filling the empty copper bowl at my feet until it overflows and meets the damp straw covered ground, until the water rises and white feathers float around the altar like tiny boats, and the eye of the sun has risen, a gold disk shining through the skyhole, the cave filling with light and I want to leave now, it's time to go, I'm so sorry, I whisper, I'm so sorry. I want to swim away now, with my fishtail legs into the river but the feathers have gathered around her head like a halo and she is beautiful, all of her, every crevice and mark, every scar and those tiny silver hairs, every molecule and cell, all her memories and all my memories and then the tears come again and they are my rain, the water with which to bless her. I am sorry, I repeat, hearing her voice, saying it to me, her eyes wide open, the green of them the colour of the river, waiting for me to dive in. END
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Re: Freefall 2009, day 1rudyan said May 26, 3:22 PM: |
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Hi Sandra, |
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Re: Freefall 2009, day 1Sandra said May 26, 4:20 PM: |
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Ruth. this is *exactly* the kind of commenting I'm so grateful for, thank you thank you. |
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Re: Freefall 2009, day 1rudyan said May 26, 4:58 PM: |
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There is one thing that I'm struggling with how to 'show' in the piece and not tell. Which is that the 'preparation' of this body is happening before the mother is dead, she's not even dying (well, no more than any of us are). She is old, yes. I don't know how to do this, or perhaps it doesn't really matter. |
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Re: Freefall 2009, day 1Sandra said May 26, 10:08 PM: |
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Isn't writing—this kind of writing Deena talks about anyway—in a way, isn't it about making/forming our own rituals to fit our lives into our own unique stories? |
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Re: Freefall 2009, day 1quietlaughter said May 28, 4:03 AM: |
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This is both startling and powerful Sandra. I have read this a few times now and each time I finish with a large internal ‘wow’. It is just so touching and beautiful this portrait of both the mother and daughter. I was struck immediately by that sense of ritual, which I will mention later. First, I thought the identification of the scars as telling the story of not only the mother’s life but the daughter’s as well, was brilliant: |
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