And the feeling of meconium, pushing through, the filling of my fragile wings until they’re strong.
Until they carry me up and out and over and away, watching the flowers beneath me, the breeze, lifting me. Sunlight turning up my colours till they sing.
And on the leaves below, the photons warm through the residue of who I used to be.
And if you look up, you can see me, can hear the soft beating of my wings.
See me, hear me.
There is no shame.
Her thoughts moved to hands. She saw them cutting stems and tying, and tying turned into fingertips around the silk of cravats and fiddling with tie pins and buttons.
But she couldn’t stay there long, lying, looking at her nails, gloss mirroring the sky. She observed her nails, now ruby, resonating with the velvet from her day.
And more hands came, tousled up and pinned her hair while at her feet, fingers fiddled with long laces and ivory silk caught the morning sun.
Hands on a steering wheel, taking the corner she knows well, while another hand took hers and later helped her from the car. Taffeta cascaded, pooling over the old stone path, flooding around the smallness of her feet.
Footsteps clicked in unison till the hands eased hers to others, to the ones waiting in the hush with dust particles held in light.
And later her hands gripped the bouquet and thrust it up into the sky, small hands, fingers glinting like they always would and she held it up, triumphant, high.
Hands tweaking dials on a box of light, freezing moments by the trees, marking time and pressing pause.
{Time Passes.}
And her thoughts stayed with hands, moving hands that held hers for a while, through the years and hours and today, hands around the clock.
Hands ticking time in trigonometric waves around a circle. And the once-upon-a-time hands, new hands now that ease the way.
Her nails shimmering, then and now, her fingers still small like they were. She made a fist, tiny, strong and punched the air. Her hands knew just what to do.
It doesn’t matter that the sun has slipped behind my view for a while or that the amber hyacinth glass has lost its bright light. And then returns, irrepressible as though it never went away.
How could it, how could the life force that keeps me here, have disappeared? The taste of my fingernails, just for a second and the bole of my May tree is hidden by the cacophony of daffs, just look at them. They don’t care. They know how to do this, singing out wild and abandoned, accepting the wilt to come. I suppose I do the same.
I pack boxes, I run fingers over ornaments, I caress the dust and breathe it in, greet it, welcome in its stories.
Sometimes just for a second, it’s as though I understand. I feel the ecstasy and terror simultaneously, as though looking at the sun bringing gold to my amber glass, as though, in this moment I am everyone.
I want to hold them. All of them and tell each of them it will be ok. It will get better. I know it will and my daffs dance on the windowsill and my hyacinth reaches up to the light.
Everything is golden. like honey. And a hive for the honeybees.
Now there’s a tree watching over the bed, birds scrabbling for food, people darting in and out the Costas just off to the right and if they looked up from their latte they’d see me in the window looking out.
I didn’t like yesterday’s room though, felt too far tucked away, almost a sense of punishment, of neglect. Broken thinking on my part, of course. Tiredness doesn’t help.
Of course the care was on point and Senior Sister Gemma enfolded me with her reassuring London tones, her voice and her words and her ways. She called me darlin’ and we joked about the room upgrade. She should have been pulling pints but she was pushing beds instead and I was grateful .
And when the upgrade came, when trees were administered, when the relief of natural light came into view, I relaxed (a little.)
A ward with a window over green and the bole of the tree stands guard, steady, constant, dependable bark that’s been there a hundred years watching people change.
I feel like I’ve been there a hundred years but it’s only day seven or is it eight?
Maybe that’s why the previous room took me down, floored me with an echo of late pregnancy, of no privacy, of people poking and me hanging on. Propped up, out of time with a job to do, concerned faces, waiting, willing. Praying.
I think that’s it, the silent magnolia walls, the speckled ceiling, just a little too high for my liking and a view, (if you can call it that,) over the scrag end of the buildings.
Still, that’s not now.
I’d better get up, I’ve got a job to do. I hope Gemma’s on today. I like her long black pony tail. When she walks, it swings like a metronome on her back, keeping me steady with her rhythm.
And just like that, her head scattered across the fields. Wings battered into wings and feathers drifted down to nestle in the hedgerows underneath.
It was as though no decibels came before her, or after her, as though she, herself, created all disturbance on the air, that her thoughts created sound waves through the universe.
The fields shook under the force of her birds in flight. The sky heaved. She waited.
Lilies grew out of the scar on my tummy, daring, irreverent and girlish. They flung their arms wide; they didn’t care. Lisianthus burst up and out, willowy, confident, pretty and they knew it. They waved at the lilies who nodded in respect. Painted ladies and red admirals fluttered from the same places where the flesh had bled, their damp tissue paper wings felt cool against the air. Meconium pumped out, squirted across the scar as if to say, I love you, I remember. As if to say, all the pain, the hours of spasms, the empty walls I looked at, waiting hoping, are all tucked away and understood.
The nights spaced out, the ceilings passing over me, all locked away with care and when my language broke, when halos caressed each word that left my mouth, when every breath was forged from armour, when the weight of the shields tore my muscles to shreds, I kept on holding. When every cell pulsed with one cause, when no one could help me but the tiger claws that grew, claws of steel against the battle that consumed me.
Then.
Then my scar erupted, then it exploded out in trees, oaks towering from my tiny form, their roots soaked in my blood, fed from my placenta and willows softened out the gash, they wept over the chasm where my abdomen had been, they wrapped their tendrils around the scalpels and the knives, they paved the way, they saved me. They dropped leaves into my hollow and from the mulch, from the deep rich earth inside me, petrichor filled the theatre, soil sodden with my tears and surgeons took a step back, as I expanded, I roared life into the room.
Eagles flew out of me, feathers caked in green and red, they soared around the room, under their spotlights, singing loud. I remember the golden flash of their beaks, they winked at me with eyes that saw more than I could and, in the crater, where my abdomen used to be, a forest thrived, birds cheered, creatures danced, insects giggled in the sunshine.
I watched the ceiling smile down on me as I stroked the wound, hand bloodied and joyous. We Made This the corpuscles seemed to say. And my body rejoiced. My body was perfect, my scar came to show me the way.
I wonder if the tree is still there in the churchyard where I took the pine needles in my hand while we walked? I wonder about the soft threads in my velvet leggings and whether they’re still on the planet somewhere or if they’ve biodegraded by now. And 7 Seconds played on the car radio, in a car that by now will have turned to nuts and bolts.
I think about the bench in Bruton Park and if it still exists or has it been chopped up and turned to firewood and the metal smelted down. I wonder what happened to the the cages in the nature reserve where we wandered, how even now I can taste the still air and hear the leaves under our feet, in the strangeness, in the almost stagnant places from where the birds had flown.
And what happened to the white ceramic bowl with the first of the chicken salads, did it break years ago, is it fragmented in soil, mixed with mulch, feeding roses somewhere I’ll never know? And what about the settee with its soft green Fleur De Lys pattern, with the nap I felt under my hands when my eyes closed, have those fibres disintegrated by now?
I still hear the reliable tick of my parent’s mantle piece clock, marking time, stroking the moments as though they never ended and though that mechanism has long since been deconstructed, the echo of it fills my ears now.
Of course, I wore red socks and my silk waistcoat was shimmering black. I wonder if its small buttons are sewn onto something else now or if they sit in someone’s sewing box, someone unaware of the role that they played in my life.
I wonder about the birds that had flown, whether they had chicks, and whether generations of them later, they fly over me in a different town, dropping feathers onto the new pathways that I make now.
I look out for them. It’s March 26th, I’m not bothered, it’s only time.
First the pitiful candle,
the book not quite open.
Leaves they fell silent.
I made a pie.
Little whisps of hair-like steam
freed themselves
up through the ceramic beak of my blackbird.
With all the clean cells in-between us.
The steam spiralled up,
muted,
like the words we didn’t say.
I shuffled where my feet cleaned the floor,
the pitiful stone
where I danced for someone else,
who resonated,
who paid more attention.
Find her by the canal in her black and white skirt with bells. Find her navigating it all as she jingled, as she smiled.
And there under the August sky, find her leaning up the old Orion, in her black Mary Jane’s and her silk waistcoat.
Later, after chicken salad, no doubt, find her by her candlewick bedspread, chartreuse and tattered but perfect. The only way to end the day.
And in the morning, in the same skirt, find her smile at the bedroom door and make plans to carry her home.
Just find her. Over and over and over again. Always in August, to keep her safe.
I wanted to be that little girl, right there. That girl, and she was four or maybe five. I passed her by on the roadside, in the sunlight, in the delerious white-out of a spring afternoon.
And look at that girl, I thought. Just look at her and I held her in my mind for three seconds or maybe four.
She shimmered on the roadside, on the pavements grey, in her sparkling silver padded jacket which fired back photons to anyone who dared to look.
She lit up the streets, defying smudged reflections of rushing people, of chaotic traffic on grimed windows. And passing by upturned hot wasps on peeling windowsills, she jumped the cracks in the pavement because it kept her safe.
Her baby pink flared jeans flashed candyfloss at anyone who noticed as she hopscotched herself along. Armoured bears growled behind her, goblins sneered up through drains but she didn’t care.
Because it was a springtime afternoon and the blossom frittered away the hours all around her and city sparrows sang joyous, despite the fumes.
Just for a moment if I could be that little girl, casting halos around the litter, that pulsing, beaming dance of limbs, I would be free.
And I passed by the little girl and held her in my mind, like a retina stain on my memories of what it felt like to sparkle under blossom. What it felt like to be magnificent in the spring.
And I passed by with her shimmering in a review mirror, with the candy pink jeans just a flutterering on my shoulder, like the falling petals in my pinned up hair.
And for a second or two, or maybe three, I remembered how I used to feel.
Janey L Foster 