She Never Told Me About the Ocean by Elisabeth Sharp McKetta

Author:Elisabeth Sharp McKetta
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Paul Dry Books

15

Charon

Time moves backward and forward, swaying despite my best efforts to anchor it: yet two points in time are fixed. Each point a gift. Each gift made from the body of a woman. The first gift came from a dead woman’s dead baby. Each day women land among the dead like surprised tourists, clutching newborns like passports. When there are the babies squirming on the riverbank alone, the women pick them up. A pairing. The day was at first ordinary: the waiting souls were nearly all men. This happens when there is a war above. It seems this war has been going on a long time—or perhaps it just started and is stretching into the future. No matter. When the men forget coins, they shake and shake and shake the tree branches until silver coins fall. The women do not shake; they wait and barter. At the end of a line of a thousand men, I saw the woman and her baby, the baby’s eyes wrinkled shut. This is not so surprising. Always some will die before they are born.

The surprising thing was a bluing thin film, like a water bubble, floating around the baby’s head. A thing the color, nearly, of my world’s dirt. A thing that does not belong here. Woman says, I have no money. May I give you this instead? I ask what this thing is. It is a caul, Woman says. A sac to hold the baby before it is born, and usually it breaks in birth. But my baby was born dead and the caul stayed. A caul is good luck. Sailors keep them close. You can’t drown if you have one. Do you want it? She peels it off before I say yes and water splashes out, and then she gets on my boat. I put the thing away, in a secret place beneath my mattress, because you never know.

The second gift came from a living woman, a young mother with a living baby. She had come through to my world and needed my help. In return, she gave me milk. The existence of both gifts startled me. Here, bodies make nothing. Two gifts, two points in unbroken time, awakened in me an idea. Perhaps I could get to the above-world as somebody’s baby. I could escape if only I could borrow a mother.

I waited. If nothing else, I am patient. I waited for a third point in time, another day that would be different. A day like a gift. One day—it could have been the next day, or a thousand boat trips later—no matter—there was a woman hiding in the tree shadows. I believe I had been waiting for her. She had long black hair glowing blue in the light and searching animal eyes. She hid in the trees so that I could not quite see her outline or the blue of her fingernails, to determine if she belonged here. On this day, a dead child waited in line. This boy could walk.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.