wake by Gillian Allnutt

Author:Gillian Allnutt [Gillian Allnutt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780374079
Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Published: 2018-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

Where the moon was, exactly.

Now there are only the printed instructions on packets to make out, patiently.

Let us be quiet, once more, like the sea.

The accumulated incidental knowledge of the sea.

Let there be marriage-lines too small to know of nakedly.

Let the law be kept within its one and only.

Let there be, about us, with us, always.

Something we didn’t quite manage to say.

Didn’t say.

Elias

I am always Elias, though I am a woman and not a prophet. I am always thin, always dry, and so I was as a child. When I was a girl of 12 and my body was an awkward wrist, one that had been broken too badly ever to grow back other than wrily, awry, I was walking according to my wont in the wild barley grass at the edge of my father’s field and, though I was tall, at that time of late summer the grass came up to my shoulders. I walked sideways, looking. And I found grandmother’s foot. I call it that. My father insisted it was a last. His brother, estranged, had cobbled. It was in another village and I never knew him. But the foot with its wooden limp belonged to my grandmother, invented, who sprang up out of the grass into being at once. She limped along home behind me and I had to slow down, though I was hungry and I knew she must be too. There was nettle soup I had made in the early morning and some of Bessarabia’s old black bread in the bin. That would do. With water out of the jug, straight out of the jug. I could see where grandmother’s foot joined her leg, it hurt. But I asked her where she was born and she only said on the road between the one hill and the other. And there was never a van and never a cart and now and then a donkey or a frame on a wheel but mostly bundles on backs and shoulders, bundles in tweed, and I saw she was bent as she limped along. She wore a dull blue blouse and a long grey skirt of some poor stuff, a foreign cloth. I asked if she came in a boat and she said of course she did, everyone comes in a boat to be born, and I said I didn’t and anyway what about the hills you were born between? The sea was between the hills, she said and closed her eyes and her wooden foot crushed the small flowers in the way.

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