From the Wreck by Jane Rawson

Author:Jane Rawson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780995359499
Publisher: Transit Lounge

CURED

1

There is another.

There is another half a planet away and I live on a little boy who has never been further than the edge of the ocean. How to propel him foot by small foot over half a planet of city, road, ocean, deep river and mountain and desert and lake? I take him to the ocean edge and we watch the boats and I tell him to just put one foot down then another, walk your way onto that ship and we will be on there and gone but he will not.

We rattle about in our house, school, street, we laugh and run and curl for sleep, but I will not let him be. One night he takes a stick and beats me with it to silence me and gives himself so much pain his sheet is bloody and his mother frets.

Take me to the ocean edge, I tell him. Take yourself, he tells me, but his face is grimy-smeared from tears.

I could take myself – I could swim, stumble, fly. I could. But I have been almost a whole lifetime with him, my Henry, my boy. On my own planet I grew to adulthood. Here I have slid down into old age. One whole life, there in my waterworld: a life of every day the same. Then one whole other life, feeling this boy grow under me, learning language tucked here beneath his ear, learning where to put words, thoughts, hands, feet. One safe place smashed by their dirty boots. A new one found – flimsy, see-through, dry and desolate, but still. Still.

Take yourself, he tells me again, and this time his eyes stay dry.

I cling a little harder, bury myself safe inside his shirt, his mind. But I know I did not come all this way to hide among the clothes of humans.

I unwrap myself from him and remember myself back into fleet-footed fur. I am stiff and creaky from long years of stillness. He laughs as he watches and I see his face is not altogether dry. A tentacle unwinds from my grey-furred back and he strokes it back into a vanishing place. He picks me up and holds us nose against nose, my small heart bumping against his thumbs, my life in his hands. He laughs again. ‘Kitty.’ My claws cling sharp in his shirt and a part of me tears away as cat-shaped I wriggle in his hands until my feet are back on ground. When he calls after me I close my ears and run for the ships.

My scampering feet and swift teeth are welcome here. My hardened feline heart. I slaughter rats in the barrels, in the beds. I perch lofty and wind-blown and I clean rough between my claws. I wait and wait and wait and then – finally – we creak and shift, thrown out into the open water.

We are one day and not even one night ocean-going when a rolling tussle with a big fellow, stripy haunches and torn in the ear, tosses me over the edge and into the waves.

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