by Polly Hall
“It’s—you must’ve seen—did you see?” I pictured you striding confidently through your creations, unconcerned by their re-animation.
“What’s wrong?” you took a step toward me as if I were a wild animal and you needed to keep your distance.
“You know what’s wrong,” I said. “All this is wrong—those bloody creatures. Are you blind? They’re trapped, Henry. You’ve trapped them in those grotesque bodies.”
As I spoke, your shoulders slumped slightly, and you rubbed your face as if to wake yourself up.
“Come back inside. It’s freezing out here.”
“They need to go!” The flashlight flickered where my hands were shaking with the cold.
“Okay, okay. Calm down.”
“They want to be free. And—and—I have to do it. Now.”
“We’ll get rid of them. I’ll sell them. Is that what you want?”
“No, Henry! They need to be destroyed.” I spat the words at you.
“That’s absurd. Do you know how many hours I spent working on them?”
“They need to burn!” My voice tipped into a scream. The words flew from me like poisoned arrows. My hands were becoming numb. It pains me to remember how I spoke to you. My thoughts, my headaches, those creatures feeding off my energy—I wanted to blame them. But ultimately it was all my fault. I admit that to you now. It was me who encouraged you to stray from the path you knew best. I made you create them. A little knowledge is always dangerous.
“Scarlett.” You held out your arms to me. “Come inside and we’ll talk.”
“There’s nothing to say,” I said through clenched jaws. My teeth were chattering from the icy wind.
A sudden strong gust shook the outhouse. I gripped the petrol can and could feel the stony cold creeping up my legs, thickening the blood in my veins. My head was thumping with rage. You moved toward me. I shuffled back, still looking for the best way to exit, but you were blocking the only way out. I shook the petrol can at you, but you still kept moving toward me. It was not a fair match. You outweighed me by over half my body weight. And even though I could out-run you, there was no way I’d get back to the house without you catching me. I pleaded with you, wanted you to understand how this was something I had to do. For both of us.
You lunged toward me as I shuffled about shivering and clutching at the petrol can. Just as you reached me, I heard a large crack like the sky had broken open. Your weight on top of me winded me as the noise escalated. The falling timbers from the rotten roof narrowly missed us. I screamed at you to let me go as you pinned me to the dirty stone floor of the outhouse. But you held me, crushing your hot body against mine. All my words were crushed too.
“Leave it, Scarlett,” you said, “You’ll destroy us both if you carry on like this.”
“I—don’t—care!” each word uttered with immense effort; my taut frame collapsed beneath you.
Then darkness.
And my words to you were like acid on my tongue—I don’t care.
But my darling, I do care. More than you can ever know. Believe me when I honor our vows and, even before that, our promise to follow one another into the afterlife and beyond.
The next day I woke with a thumping head, all glue and sawdust. My neck felt like it had been concreted to my spine. You must have left me to sleep and gone outside to inspect the storm damage. I rubbed my eyes then peered around the room. Morning must have crept up and leaned into our home like a weary traveler taking a rest. A familiar smell, toxic and metallic, lit up my senses. Petrol. I had wanted to set fire to those wretched creatures but you had stopped me.
It infuriated me how you could use your bulk to overpower me. I was helpless, and all those moments I felt protected or sheltered by your strength were crushed by the fact that you simply knew I could never be physically stronger.
I recalled you leading me back into the house, avoiding the crashing timbers of the outhouse, half carrying, half dragging me. I must’ve passed out from my exertions. None of my efforts had paid off. The image of the crabbit and cowstrich flashed in my memory, and I shot out of bed to lean over the bannister and listen for any noises that would indicate they were active. Nothing. Just the stillness of the house after the night’s storm.
“Henry?” I called but received only the echo of my voice as an answer.
Your confession came as a relief. I knew that honesty was always going to be our saving grace.
“I couldn’t keep it hidden from you any longer,” you said.
“Why didn’t you tell me when I asked you?”
“I was embarrassed.”
“Why?”
“Because I thought you’d think less of me. When I found out you’d been talking to Felix and when he found out you were my wife—it made me angry. I thought he had told you what we were doing.”
“Felix was just using me?” I asked, a sudden taste of cherries on my lips.
“He was using you to get at me.”
“But how?” My mind was racing about in circles.
“We’d set up a business arrangement way before I met you. He’d approached me to do rogue taxidermy and I kept saying no, but he kept raising the money he’d pay. In the end I gave in. It went against all my training. Taxidermy uses only the skin and outer layers of the specimen. Anything else is just molding.”
“So when I suggested for you to make them—you already were? And you didn’t think to tell me?”
“I couldn’t risk you knowing. He loved all the limelight—I made the best exhibits. He had contacts in the art world—I could carry on living my quiet life. You know I hate all that attention. We were the perfect combination, or so I thought.”
“But why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know, Scarlett. I’m sorry I didn’t, but that’s why I had to work so much. I was fulfilling our orders and all of his too. Penny was keeping them at her house so you wouldn’t find them.”
“Penny?” My intuition was right. You were keeping secrets from me, but not what I imagined.
“I love you Scarlett and only you. If that idiot hadn’t messed up . . . If he hadn’t got greedy. He used others who didn’t stick to the rules. I had to burn all those papers that connected me to him. He’s in big trouble. Luckily Penny had got rid of all the exhibits before she left.”
“But what about all yours?”
“Mine are fine. Not as sought after but I don’t care anymore. All that matters is us.”
“I love you, Henry. Only you.”
You stopped me with your finger to my lips. “You sweet thing. We’ll never have any more secrets.”
I wanted to confess to you then about Wensley’s book but the words wouldn’t come. You still believed they were inanimate objects. I knew they weren’t.
Christmas Day—Today
Early Evening
I want to taste your skin
Midway between my thoughts
And your touch, your skin untouched
My thoughts unsaid, unsunk midway
Between the distance of your skin
And my lips unkissed, unexplored
Midway between us, your skin
On my skin merging magnificent
The colors blessed by mist
Between my thoughts and your touch
Midway. I want to taste your skin.
I hear swans with salted feet
Stuck dead midway between feed and flight
You have an island in your thoughts
Midway between the here and now.
Your touch. My thoughts. My skin.
You have removed my heart, dear love of mine. Can I now claim yours? Will you know my arms when they are wrapped around you as if wishing with all my might that they can? Did I wish for wings? Did I wish for a tail? Be careful what you wish for.
You mumble as you sit beside me. You drift in and out of wakefulness, sleep tipping you closer to me as I wait patiently. Dive with me, my love, into the rusty waters. Roll my transparent song
about your body.
I’ll sing to you in riddles ’til you wake. Drown out those human voices, drown out the fear of the unknown. I am here, waiting for you. Arching and stretching through feathered strands, leaping and laughing as we used to. After the fire there comes only ash and air.
I’m sure I can catch the smell of chemicals as you lay beside me. Perhaps it is the memory of your work smell that greets me so vividly. You tell me you love me a million times a day. Today, Christmas Day, you tell me you love me more than any other day.
The memory of you inside me is a recurrent one, like a pomegranate seed in my teeth, gritty and persistently stubborn. It sticks even though I know it is moveable. Then, once loosened, it tries to slip down my throat, grating a little.
I can dance over seconds, minutes, hours, then knit them back together with hands and feet and lips that no longer move. I am a feathered trap. Beware my scorched feathers; they may cut.
December
I must’ve drifted off because there was a stillness that encompassed me. You notice how loud it has been when the silence falls, the absence emphasizing the memory of a vibration. For a moment I felt calm and free. Then I recalled the night before; that incessant wailing of troubled souls clamoring at my consciousness. I couldn’t remember how I’d got there, but I was perched on a high-backed chair in your workshop, flopped over to one side, among the wood wool and wire. I know this because I could see myself—not by reflection but as if I were another person looking back at me. It was a peculiar feeling. Much like the accounts Wensley recorded in his book. A passage from the book flashed across my psyche as if I had tattooed each word in indelible ink onto the inside of my eyelids:
. . . at first there may be disorientation as the soul tries to readjust to the disturbance caused by lack of physical function. There may be gaps in consciousness. But these will soon pass to give way to greater clarity. The soul will return to its true nature unless . . .
Unless what? The soul will return to its true nature unless . . . I tried to patch together what I could remember: We had eaten a light supper. The storm had started. We shut windows. I needed to find petrol. No, that was way back in November. There was no storm outside. The storm I felt was inside me.
You did something with the generator and came up to bed soon after. We were both tired, but I couldn’t sleep because of the noises and thoughts of Christmas Day worming their eager tendrils into my brain. You told me not to worry and that we’d be prepared, and it would be our best Christmas ever regardless of the weather.
My head had been thumping as if a dam of blood were trying to burst free from my temples. Then there was no more pain, more a sensation of tethering. Then, I awoke in your workshop. But the hours after I had gone to bed, and the awakening in the chair, were hard to stitch together. I would get a sense of longing to inhabit my body then a deep repulsion, like I wanted to tear myself away in blind panic at its uselessness. You were weeping and moving my heavy limbs, then laying still beside me on our bed. Once, I recall your face pressed against mine. Then you were gone. Or I was gone. But your love held me in that space with you. I could sense you there with me at an unspeakable level. You had kept your promise and so I had to keep mine.
I met each soul of the departed creatures head on as if they were waiting for me in their limbo world. They recognized me instantly as one of them; they knew I had passed on to their side. The crabbit came hopping and flapping, and the cowstrich inquisitively peered at me and shook its feathers. Even the more cautious creatures acknowledged that my soul was in their world and not just on the periphery.
You sat for hours looking at my motionless body. Sometimes you would touch me or tip my torso, repositioning me. Other times you would place your head on my chest, as if listening for the workings of my heart, or lift my static eyelids with your thumbs. At first, I was with you in our bed, draped over you, reanimated only by the racks of your sobs lifting your chest in a motion like a boat on the open sea. You kissed my shoulder, my forearms, my hands, wiped the tears from your face and stood. Then you sat again, as if you couldn’t bear to leave me on my own. Your face collapsed and reformed, collapsed and strengthened, then twisted in recognition as you woke and saw my body still where you had left it. I could do nothing but wait. I’m waiting for you now. Please come to me. I know you can hear me as I sit like a specimen in this chair.
You must’ve carried me to your workshop at some point. I was wrapped in the bed sheet, naked and unwashed, but sitting upright in the old chair. I knew it was cold but it did not affect me anymore. There were other things to occupy me in this state.
I could spend what seemed like a lifetime watching a droplet of water hang from a branch. Then, after the paws of a thousand tigers padded over my bare skin, I would sprout wings from the creases of my shoulder blades and unfurl them like a papery concertina. It was like switching channels on a television, except I was the screen and the viewer at the same time. I would dip and dive with the swallows, hover like a kestrel, glide over endless oceans like an albatross. But each time I found myself in motion, there was a lingering ache that I needed to return to the shell of my body that I had left behind. And it was you, my darling, who beckoned me home with your tender fingers.
I witnessed you all those days and nights that followed as the deserted village swam in its own effluent mixed with the downfall and spill-water, overflowing drains and detritus. We were cut off on our makeshift island. Then the deep freeze solidified all the movement around us. You hardly noticed, as you were so focused on treating my body with care and precision. You knew I always wanted wings and a tail.
I couldn’t leave. The longing was too deep. A dark ache weighed upon me like the untouched sides of a forgotten well. Your tools slipped beneath my skin, gently turning me to extract the parts that no longer served me. You had told me once that there was no mystery in skinning a primate, and I suppose humans were a less hairy version. Your tools were employed to master a hybrid no man had ever attempted. Those mummified remains of ancient Egypt were wrapped and preserved by dry air in tombs. You were more skilled.
The careful extraction and disposal of redundant parts became your mantra; the slow scraping of viscera so my body’s outer layer became a shell ready to be reborn. You were so careful not to stretch my skin as you divided it left to right, putting cotton and paper on my body, sprinkling powder to absorb the fluids that leaked from me like the land we inhabited.
There may have been a witness soaring above us like a buzzard gaining height on the thermal air currents, a circling wide-winged motion, as you fed those parts of me back to earth. The parts consigned to rot, that spirit has no need for.
You looked exhausted. The damp from the surrounding landscape had infiltrated everything in our home, creeping up our walls like guilt. The floods had not escalated since the rains had ceased in their relentlessness. But the damage was done, both outside our home and within. We were cursed by our naivety to think that we had power over death. It does not play by the same rules as life. Once a spirit has been carved off, dissected, there are few opportunities for healing. The soul will return to its true nature unless . . .
You will know what I mean when I say you drowned me and saved me all at once. This was just as well in this peaty paradise we chose to live upon, the wetlands shifting beneath us then constrained by freezing temperatures. We were the only remaining residents after the burst rivers had spread and stopped short of our door, forcing all but us to flee. The temperature had plummeted to create this wintery wilderness. The Big Freeze, as predicted, held us captive in this place.
Just three weeks before Christmas, the final deluge of icy rain had forced the few remaining homeowners from the far end of the village to evacuate on motorboats and amphibious vehicles supplied by the army, creating great crackling waves as they crashed through half-formed ice to reach higher, dryer ground. The cattle had been saved and the pets shipped off to catteries and kennels. It was ironic that the so called North an
d South Drain did not live up to their names, with water saturating the fields and lying like a dark skin over the Levels. There was nothing draining here—wet, dank, bog, sludge, silt, effluent. This biblical flood was a sluggish stew of hopelessness.
Did you wish you had built an ark, measured cubit upon cubit, committed long-term to a redeeming project such as Noah’s? Your moat had been infiltrated by some flood water, but thankfully our house sat proud on the mound. We were surrounded by miles of patchy ice but we had faith that we would overcome these difficulties together.
I remember how you sighed and nearly wept as I read my vows to you at our wedding all those months ago. There was never any man I wanted to be joined with more than you. And I can say I knew that from the first time we met.
After we’d met on the beach, it only took two more dates and I was in your bed. We would have self-combusted in our own lust otherwise. Yes—I worried it was a momentary fascination. Why do people fluff about at the periphery of passion, dancing in choreographed coyness? Honesty was the only way to save time, and we were not a couple to pussyfoot about where displays of affection were concerned. If we removed the social constraints of this time we live in, you would have had me there and then on the beach. I can picture you there sniffing the sea air, puffing out your chest to mark your stake on me (believe me, you didn’t need to do this—you had my attention). I was crouching, metaphorically and literally, like a ferret on heat. Perhaps as a species we had gone too far into the subtle realm of pheromones; those tasteless, silent signals that are blamed for animal attraction. Who knows what it was? We were prisoners to one another. I believe you saw the riot in me—raw and ready like a split, ripe fig.
There were a whole string of reasons and not always connected by knots tied by our own hands, but tangled like twine or fishing line or those strands of cotton that twist themselves to infinite union without any intervention when laid together over time. We were faced with endless possibilities angled toward their own truth. Which is why, once, I chose to explore your workshop when you were out. And what I found changed me forever.
