from when I could hear her coming

Summer is thick and heavy against my tongue. Evening arrives lapping at my feet - licking, biting, then stretching out, ready to gulp me down. On my back I hear foreign streets beneath the bedroom window. Laughing with evening life and coherent tongues. Sharing, teeth on full display.

The day begins to squeeze. Midday slips beneath the sheets and I become stifled in heat. Sticky legs burn against benches, water tastes of sun-warmed metal.

Nights are somehow worse. They unravel, smelling of orange peel and rot, thick with isolation. In this room the world shrinks to a dark nothing. It could be interpreted as night but the night has stars and owls and the comfort of knowing dawn is approaching. Here I am preserved in an ice age — dormant and kept. I should be out there in the streets, but inside the air is thick and sweet and nobody speaks.

*
I could do with a hand to squeeze my shoulder. A firm, familial one. One that can hold me in place, keep the flesh from flaking off my bones. I’m met with fingertips coated in frostbite and a voice that rings so sharp, I can’t hear the words being spoken. It needs to be dulled, followed quickly by pain killers to stop the throbbing. My head smacks against a pillow, my ears ring - then I’m out cold.

* She comes bare footed with a red pedicure. It’s different from the heels which are deliberately impractical, but mean I can always hear her coming. She has corporate wrapped around her finger but not much else. Her world is sterile, scraped back. So is mine. She’s home by eleven - a long day of slicing through umbilical cords. A life supply cut short by someone who doesn’t understand why babies need to be spoken to, yet possesses licence to practice medicine. I’m at the chopping board now, preparing dinner. I tell her that’s how children learn to speak. She hums slightly, absently listening, not really.

She tends to stand back while ketamine becomes exponential for a human, negligible for a horse. I say profits don’t equal necessity; she’s quiet behind the wheel. It’s as if I don’t understand a language, her language. The one that justifies things, then decides them.

Tarmac soaks up the heat and spits it back. She burns her foot on the side of the road. We should have gone to the pool, she says, closing the car door. But I was craving the smell of kelp and algae, not chlorine.

I lift a shell to her ear. It’s a corny and predictable move. She’ll tell me that later but right now she loves it. The shell falls. She says it all sounds the same now. Voices, waves, white noise - ICU.

I say the landscape swallows me whole.“That’s primeval fear. You’re worried about being picked off the face of the earth.” I’m distracted by the sand in her teeth and salt in her hair. She’s grit and brittle all over but also something sweet when she speaks.

Cotton brushes against bare skin. A piece of cliff erodes, plunging into the sea. She turns to look, hair whipping close to my face. Trousers rolled up, feet in salt water. It laps at our ankles, darkness between our toes. I wonder if it’s polluted. I wonder if the people who pollute the sea speak her language.

I want to ask if bacteria are already crawling toward my lungs, if I am contaminated and going to be alright. But she doesn’t quite get it, or care, or both.