Garden of Earthly Bodies by Sally Oliver

Author:Sally Oliver
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2022-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

Once she was back in her room, Marianne was so exhausted she couldn’t bear the prospect of going down to see any more new faces. A small tray had been left for her on the table in the corner of her room with a plate of hot food. It surprised her how quickly that had been served, as though there was an invisible attendant who knew exactly when she was due to enter the room. She wandered over and pulled out a chair to eat. She looked down at a plate of warm falafels with brown rice and lentils.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ she said under her breath.

She was angry that she hadn’t been given a choice. She would have ordered anything with meat if she’d had the chance to peruse a menu – a sweet chilli chicken baguette or a spicy meatball sub. Or at least something fatty, something rich. But she was hungry; it had been a long time since she’d eaten and she ate with ferocious speed. She drank the smoothie on offer too; it was purple with a thick dark cloud at the bottom. She was surprisingly gratified, though she didn’t really enjoy the flavour.

She went to the bathroom and decided to wash her face and hands. She stooped to splash the water on her face and then looked up, expecting to see herself. Instead of finding her face as usual in the surface of a mirror, she saw the blank wall. She turned around and looked to see if it was placed somewhere else. Then she looked in the bedroom, her face dripping wet. There was not a single mirror anywhere. And she hadn’t any access to one on her person. She would not even be able to see her reflection using the camera of her confiscated phone.

It didn’t matter very much, yet at the same time it mattered a great deal. She was alarmed by it, just enough to feel a little sick. Then her exhaustion entered a final phase and she was paralysed from moving where she stood. A wave of darkness flexed itself at the shore of her consciousness. Perhaps because she had spent so long talking about it earlier – and it had drained her just enough to leave her defenceless – she thought she saw the entry to death inside her brain. Luckily, she was close enough for the bed to save her fall.

Sleep ravaged her thoughts so cleanly that she was convinced she’d never have them back. And inside of that unreality, she saw flashes of what might have been real. The corners of her room contained her. But she began to transpose the two realms, believing that the door of her bedroom was part of her dream. She lay in pain, her chin squashed against the pillow. Through a strange gauze, the colour of a bruise, she saw activity in her room without being able to access it with any coherent thought. The door opened and someone entered. They were wearing a white coat.

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