Persona Medusa: A Tale of Selective Mutism & Social Anxiety by D.J. Sharry

Author:D.J. Sharry [Sharry, D.J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: D.J. Sharry
Published: 2015-07-26T04:00:00+00:00

T12: Wetlands

I have a summer job, manually cultivating the peat sod. I pray that I will talk here away from the familiar and expecting faces of school. I pray that there are no witnesses from school here.

I approach an old farmhouse. An unfriendly to stranger’s dog darts at me with menacing mouth open yelping and drooling and shaking his dirty shaggy body. I try not to look afraid as there are the people I will be working with over there by the steps over the wall which leads to the railway line and the bog stretch. A rope tied to the dog’s collar stops him in his tracks. I think I’m okay. That was real danger for the length of his leash. I walk over to the crew. There are four people there of my own age. None of them know me. This is a clean break from school. I will speak I re-tell myself. ‘Hi’. I congratulate myself. My sugar geyser subsides. ‘Hi’. We clamber over the dripping with dew timber steps and onto the sunlight glinting railway tracks. I spoke I spoke I’m part of this group now Speak, Speak, More, Please. I can see them moving away from me. Our breaths are held suspended in the cold morning air. Coming into view is a bridge across a lazily flowing river slicing through the morning mist. Slow, calm, graceful, it doesn’t care what we think or do. It does its own thing. What will we do if a train comes oh sure we would have seen or heard it before we started crossing the bridge. The track runs across the bridge and there are stones underneath the track and built up on the edges. A half a mile the other side of the bridge and the bog comes into view. It is a vast flat expanse of peat turf.

I meet the boss who shows me to the starting point. I stand at the start of a long row of stacked wet turf about six sods high. It stretches further than I can see. All these sods have to be turned and stacked again in a new row to dry in the summer sun.

There is only one thing to do. I get down on bended knees and begin. I rip and peel the one wet slushy mud stuck sod from another and lift and move and place on to the dry ground beside me for it to dry and be harvested. Within the working movement I think I need things to change. I imagine each sod I pull up is a bad memory that I drag out of my head and leave under the sunlight to be lighted, warmed and burned.

The first break is coming up. It’s a short break. I should go over to where my work mates are. I look over. They don’t seem to be moving towards each other. Too far away maybe it’s only a short break I’ll just sit where I am and eat my sandwich.

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