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There was an air of difference fermenting throughout the complex. As much as she would have liked, she couldn’t remove the morning’s confusion from her mind. She kept visualising the complete abandon of the city centre, something she had never witnessed or even thought probable. For even in the absence of movement, all things seemed to gravitate towards the centre. It is where they were, it is where everything that clung to the last threads of civilised humanity; or at least some primal learned understanding of what it meant, gathered and waited for normality to return; for ‘they’ to fix everything and make it all better.
For The Woman, to see this City structure so hollow, vacant and erased was haunting for her. All the necessary parts were there for a living breathing City. It looked alive and functional but there was no blood pumping through its veins, there was no pulse and there was no energy; regardless of how tenuous it might have appeared in the better sight of contrast like an aged body that had never been lived or had never had a soul; that had never been occupied but of whom looked just as tired as everyone else, or like a suit that had never been worn; affected by time but curtailed beyond its yearning.
As she sat in her class midmorning; watching The Children draw images of fear and disillusion she thought of many things. She thought of the empty streets. She thought of being woken to the sight of war at the foot of her bed. She thought of their ushering through The City amidst a circle of black; seeing only shards of The City’s vacuity through the gaps where the men’s bulky frames curved to and away from each other letting light and peculiarity sneak into their sight. She thought about the difference in her lover’s eyes; how the milky white seemed to invite her into drowning; their gravity, heavier than a thousand suns. And she thought of her own reflection; how in the mornings and in the eves just been, how she, for what seemed like the first time in her life, had found recognition in the face looking back. She had seen the repugnant scars on her belly and her face; the ones that centred on her alienation from her lover and from which drew the stellar part of his grievance, darken to the colour of her skin and her cheeks flush and pinken like a spring flower until her beauty and symmetry had returned. And she thought of how the sickness that curdled in her stomach, made her feel homelier than the learned, practiced, fabricated and fictitious plastic smiles that drew wide upon her every passing of Mother, Child and Father inside this philosophical circus of the bizarre.
The Children all had their eyes tied to their pencils, leaning their faces onto their resting outstretched arms; drawing in one hand and losing feeling in the other. They all stayed in the same artless posture scratching away in absent intention at the paper while The Woman sat emotionally; looking at, but also through, each and every one; caring not for what they did, but unto them, what might be done.
She thought about the violence they endured. First the passive violence of being born into this pathetic forgotten city and then being ‘saved’ by these self-proclaimed philosophical thinkers who treated these Children’s minds like scraps of paper, etching away at the depths of their subconscious influence and thinking that when they made a mistake; regardless of how deep the impression, that they could just erase it all with some ‘Telling’ or ‘Loving’ or some inane rhyme that if they repeated over and over would; like a fracture on an arm, make them stronger and more resistant to the stresses of their sick mind experiments.
Then secondly of the direct administered violence by the hands of those loving them, thrusting them head first into a well of dizzying trepidation that should they fail to surface, would; without a moment of indecision or supposed care, count them off as an objectionable number, a transposable statistic for a fraudulent mathematical agenda attempting to trick mother nature into giving back something that they in the first place had willingly given away.
A sense of compassion washed over her. It flooded first from her belly to her toes and as she squeezed, the warmth rushed through her veins and filled her face bringing tears to her eyes. She started to really love The Children and in that loving she thought about setting them free; free from the reach of these maniacal scientists; free from the grace of her lover’s heart.
But what did it mean to be free?
She thought of drowning The Children. She remembered how the screaming in her mind would vanish when she submersed herself in water, holding her breath until she burst upwards choking for air like a new born baby.
When she remembered being under the water, a sensation of calm washed over her, just like it had at that moment; one of tranquillity as if returning to a natural universal state; immersed in essence.
She returned her thought to drowning The Children and a smile swam upon her face. There could be nothing closer to freedom than returning them from whence they came; back into the waters of nature’s womb where every particle and atom wrapped itself around their trembling bodies and carried them away from this unjust existence.
When The Woman pulled herself from her magnification, she clapped her hands and signalled The Children to put down their pencils and be At Peace out in the courtyard. The Children all left in single file, passing by her table and stacking their pictures on top of each other on her desk.
When they were gone, she sorted through the papers taking each one and looking at the extent of their fear. They drew so marvellously, but it was so wrong that they should have such a grip and connection to absolute fear. Neither Child attached this much clarity and definition to love.
All of the pictures were the same except for one; where a Child had drawn their fear and the image although scratchy and weak was very clear. In the picture sat The Child’s mother, staring listlessly into a void with a tear running down her face while behind her stood The Collector, with his slicing weapon drawn, held high above The Mother’s head with only an air of chance standing between her bare white neck and the glistening blade.
A Rising Fall Page 28
