Losing Spring

I was in my garden amongst upturned earth, pressing purple buds of lavender between my hands to smell the scent on my fingers when the phone rang.

His voice crackled down the line catching in his throat, releasing in my stomach a burst of translucent butterflies.

I pressed the receiver hard against my ear, straining to soak the sound of his voice into my mind the way I used to do as a girl when I listened for the ocean in a shell. I wiped a streak of dark earth across my cheek. I tucked a piece of hair behind my ear. My mouth filled with the scarlet tang of blood, the taste of damming my words.

He said my name a lot.

He asked of me.

I nodded silently. My eyes squeezed shut so tightly that silver stars shot across the black curtain of my eyelids. I listened to his voice flowing over me, soothing something jagged inside my chest like water wearing a river stone smooth. Water was all around me rushing through my ears, falling down my cheeks, filling up my lungs.

I listened to him, remembering. The smell of oil colours and turpentine. The indigo flavour of blueberry pancakes. Dust motes swirling and falling on a shaft of sunlight to disappear on the surface of skin.

I finally spoke, in one great torrent as though I was talking in tongues reciting the address of my after to the person in my before; marking X on the map of my new world order contained behind a wall of overgrown lavender and a rusty fence with a broken gate.

I hung up the phone. Time seeped thickly past me like molasses running through my fingers. My limbs filled with mercury. I slowly slumped against the wall and slid to the floor.

In the distance outside, a dog howled a low tortured tune.

The summer wind blew through the kitchen windows feeling as though it had blown straight across embers.

She was everywhere. In the soft white cotton dress I was supposed to bring her home in that I had wrapped in gossamer paper and kept in a cardboard box slowly rotting in the dark shadows of my closet. In the uncracked spines and crisp pages of books in boxes stacked behind the closed door of the spare room, that were meant to bear her fingerprints sticky with honey or dirt or melted chocolate, each an individual universe she was supposed to dip her toes in. In her only photograph that was sealed in cling wrap and folded into a bunnykins rug, hidden under a loose floorboard in my bedroom; a grainy glimpse of a tiny bud in winter that would never come into bloom.

I choked on my own spit, realising the low howling in the distance was my own.

An age passed.

I showered.

I washed my hair and combed out the tangles and knots.

I sat naked on the edge of my bed, running my index finger across the mottled angry scar over my womb that stubbornly would not heal. I slipped a finger inside myself, feeling the soft folds of flesh, wondering of the warmth, wondering how the world felt inside, wondering how it felt to leave.

I sunk my nails into my thighs and breathed through the dizziness.

I stood suddenly and lunged for the box nearest to me. I ripped it open and rifled through outfits from a previous life, versions of myself falling around my feet. I thought of an Irish fairytale my grandmother told me, of selkies who shed their seal skins to become human for the love of a man, but who could only love the man for a certain period of time before they put their skins back on and returned to the sea where they belonged.

I glimpsed a patch of lemon in the box and pulled out the yellow dress I was wearing on The Special Day. I went to another smaller box and opened it carefully, lifting my grandmother’s jewellery box from a swatch of bubble wrap. I took out the pair of turquoise earrings he sent me from somewhere in southeast Asia, a location I could not discern from the postage stamp, and re-pierced my ears with the earring hooks. People here say turquoise is for healing, his card had said.

I strummed my fingers against the kitchen table, watching ballerinas of sunlight dance across the wall. I listened to the wind rustle the leaves on the eucalypts lining the driveway.

I smoothed my dress.

I arranged the tea cups on the table again. I picked at the plate of oat and sultana biscuits I had baked only yesterday, thinking as I pulled them out of the oven that I would either have to freeze them or feed them to the birds.

I bit my nails tasting the remnants of earth from the garden, laced with the bitter sweetness of possible growth and new beginnings.

I smoothed my dress.

At first I thought I was imagining the plume of dust spiralling behind the old ute rumbling along the dirt road. My heart threatening to explode from its cradle in my chest, I leapt from my chair and stood at the screen door, palms pressed against the mesh.

The ute turned down my driveway.

Suddenly, he was delivered to me as though a thousand nights of dreams had solidified in front of my eyes.

He stood at the rusty gate, his sky-coloured eyes searching my face obscured by the screen door.

He was barefoot, wearing a worn and faded brown three piece suit, his tie hanging loosely off centre. He carried a suitcase in one hand and in the other held the dripping stems of countless white lily blooms. They winked at me in the sunlight, clusters of platinum stars.

“I’ve made tea,” I said, my voice feeling as rusty as the gate when he swung it open on its one functional hinge. He slowly walked the path to my front door.

“The Special Day dress,” he said, standing before me. I could feel the warmth of his breath through the screen door. His hair was longer, curling over the edge of his collar that was gray with grime and sweat.

“I made biscuits too.” My scar ached.

“Tea and biscuits are good,” he said. “Tea and biscuits are good.”

I slowly pushed the screen door open.

He took a step back, and walked forward into my parallel universe.

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copyright © 2008, Holly Ringland.

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sea, water, white, winter, flower, summer, dirt, broken, wind, skin, rotting, embers, spring, photograph, bloom, earth, breathe, universe, honey, bud, cradle, lillies, scar, sunlight, beginning, loss, lavender, healing, growth, turquoise, scarlet, selkie, platinum, remember, scent and clusters