I dream that my mother is recently dead. I am in a strange, many-roomed, richly-carpeted house, and my mother is dead. I sit at a gilded table and light streams through the window and still my mother is dead. I am perfectly aware that it was a dream and yet I know that I have given into some faint flickers of my mind, for when I wake up I am drowning in relief at the sound of my mother’s voice.
The heat outside does not shimmer: it settles into the elbows of trees like dust. No one moves except insects, who rub their wings together in the still grass. Sometimes a car roars past, or an airplane hums high above. But most of the time it is the silence of insects.
I drink endless cups of hot black coffee. I lie in sunlight and perspire. I take cold baths. I read. I listen to the news and only remember the murders. I get lost between Wikipedia’s warp and weft. I watch the neighbours’ dogs bound in their gardens. I think of Actaeon, killed by his dogs. I think of a story I heard once, about a girl who tore open her dog with her teeth—she got there first.
I was going to tell you what I was wearing. But then you might see me, and I do not want you to see me. I want you to become me.
I dream volcanoes and lightning purpling rainless skies. I dream garden fires and hedge-flames. I dream trees scorched beyond bloom.
The oceans are full of sharks. I do not swim. Seals hide between motorboats in the harbour. The great whites have found a whale carcass. They devour it. It has bought the seals a few days. Still I assume they will die this summer.
My grandmother cannot swim. Her fear of water is more potent than mine. She tells us about a girl she saw drown at the beach. The girl and her two brothers have just arrived with their mother. Her children go down to join their friends in the water. Their mother is still setting up the beach chairs and the girl is gone. She is gone with the riptide before her mother knows what’s happening. My grandmother could not save her. My grandmother cannot swim.
I dream I give birth to a shiny fish-child with fins on its back. It has scales instead of skin and gills along its sides. When I hold my fish-child in my arms it cannot breathe. How should a mother cope? But I wake up: I do not know if I found a big glass fish tank to keep my child beside me; I do not know if I managed to send it off to sea.
Originally published in HT2020 print issue.