Redder Days by Sue Rainsford

Author:Sue Rainsford [Rainsford, Sue]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473572706
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2021-03-11T00:00:00+00:00

Koan

Vol. 3

#10

– What happened to you, Koan?

She caught me off guard, coming up from the stream. I go early in the morning so as to avoid the others and it has become an unlikely pleasure: stepping out into the dawn, walking into the bracing water to bathe.

– Eula. Good morning. Trouble sleeping?

– I’ve been watching you and I think I’ve just about cracked it.

– I see.

I hadn’t bothered to dry myself off. I’d planned on walking straight back to the house as usual, and putting my body in front of the stove. Even a few moments with Eula; enough to put a chill in me.

– One thing I know just by looking: a man who doesn’t like women.

– You’ve too much time on your hands.

I thought I’d taken a half-step around her, but looking down I saw I hadn’t moved.

– You’re always in a knot about what makes for a good mother.

– Everyone else spends their days cleaning, cooking—

– I think your own mother must have been quite the woman, one way or another.

I couldn’t help but laugh. Even though my cold feet were panging, now. Even though I was shivering.

– My mother was not a woman—

But here my tongue seemed to slide down my throat, just slightly and just enough to choke me. I tried to swallow around it, speak again.

– My mother was not a woman who—

And again: the sentence ended of its own accord. My cheeks turned to cotton, my breath hurting and shallow. All the more maddening: Eula’s placid gaze. She didn’t make any move to comfort or alleviate me; though my face must have been flushing she showed no concern. Just watched me and waited, waited. It seemed we stood there looking at one another for so long the light had time to change and we were no longer in the very earliest, simplest part of the morning.

But my vision had just dimmed with being dizzy.

I chose another sentence.

– She wore her wounds lightly.

– And had she many?

– Many what?

– Wounds, Koan. Had your mother many wounds?

The one time Eula wasn’t painfully, infuriatingly literal. She thought I was referring to some sort of psychological grievance, where in fact I was referring to a very real, very physical sore in the flesh of my mother’s thigh. I remember seeing it for the first time and the sound of her voice when she told me she’d been bitten, bitten by a dog named Ralph. Ralph was an impossibly large Dalmatian, and I think she meant to put some charm in the wound – to turn it into a palatable story. Everyone in the neighbourhood, after all, was well accustomed to the sight of Ralph bounding down the street. The younger children often made to grab his tail and no one stopped them, no matter he’d been known to snap.

No, my mother couldn’t have known how my child mind would twist and bend around the terror that a dog’s saliva had taken root in her leg. How I

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