The Singing by Stephanie Bishop

Author:Stephanie Bishop
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Brandl & Schlesinger
Published: 2014-02-19T00:00:00+00:00

in my hotel room my bed is beside a window that looks out over a brick wall and across to a church. When I wake late into the night I can gaze into the wall as though it were the darkness of the night because there is never real night darkness here.

Last night I dreamed that I was talking to him and telling him of these dreams I had been having about him. I told him as though it were a strange thing that I should have had these dreams, as though he were absent, when here he was. And the dreams that I told him were presented exactly as they happened, perfectly reproduced by my recounting, and it did not occur to me while I was telling him and remembering them that I was myself still dreaming. It was a first-hand dream and a second-hand dream at the same time, moving both backwards and forwards, for nothing happened in it except for his presence, the whole thing was about his presence, and how strange it was that I should have ever dreamed that he was gone.

Things remained as they were, we could do nothing to alter them. The seasons passed, it was summer and the Agapanthus opened by halves in the dark. We had been waiting for them, the flowers. My mother called them pregnant. We watched them let go of their green leaves, then their petals. I have an aunt who is fond of these. The same one who wears her heart on her sleeve. She ties the flowers by their long necks with string and hangs them upside down in a dark closet to dry. She says they are lovely at weddings.

Inside each flower there is a well. Once I knew the names for all the inside parts: the organs and the liquids, the gold dust, like an old word – illness, it is like a flower – thin and yellow, flattened in a book and forgotten. The others say the word sick, and I look out the window into the valley, trying not to listen to them. It is like a well, the valley, this illness, something that lies itself down inside a shadow.

But I can hear them talking about me. They are in the kitchen. They use the word sick because it is less insidious, shorter, a nauseating but brief discomfort. And then it passes. While illness is a flower. I am a thin-stemmed floral-headed thing. Like the African violets clambering in scraps of dirt now that the sun has come.

No one said what the sickness was. Nothing can be proven and a name lasts. A word for something comes to live in you, you own each other, your name, the name of the thing you’re sharing. Words become you. It is raggedness that sits on my tongue amongst the bird calls now. For there are too many pieces of my mouth to make it speak, while I watch water shadow, how it comes, moves across the wall.

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