Marble Staircase, Rotten Cellar

Marina was too little to remember the Great Patriotic War, but she retained fragmentary impressions of the village near the Ural Mountains where her family lived in evacuation. She remembered the smell of hay and manure in the stables where they sometimes slept. On a walk in the nearby woods she rode on her father’s shoulders. He lowered her to the ground near a patch of wild strawberries and placed the ripest ones directly into her mouth. Marina was only four. In stature close to the forest floor, she tripped on knotted roots and squeezed the meaty foam of giant mushrooms growing on tree trunks.

The wealthy peasants who owned the farm had a musky cellar where glass jars of pickled cucumbers stood potbellied and patient, waiting in the semi-darkness for someone to bring them upstairs. Curious, Marina once descended the staircase into the cold cellar, but at the bottom step she got scared that she’d be trapped with those rows of jars and the things imprisoned inside them watching her with unseeing eyes. She ran back up as quickly as she could, crying “mama!” up every single step, until she was swept up into the safety of her mother’s embrace.

Now that Marina was fourteen and just two years away from being a passport-carrying Soviet citizen, those early memories of the village bothered her with their repulsive tenderness, like sticky pinesap you can’t wash off your fingers.

The war ended. Marina and her parents came back to their communal apartment in Kiev, where old neighbors reluctantly returned the cooking pots and books they claimed to have been holding for them. That’s when Marina finally met her mother’s sister Raissa. There were tensions in the family because as a teenager Raissa obtained forged documents in which she claimed Ukrainian nationality and changed her last name from Eydelman to Bortko to hide that she was Jewish.

Despite her resentment, Faina, Marina’s mother, admired Raissa’s success from afar and told Marina countless stories about the beautiful ballerina who ascended to soloist at the Bolshoi ballet. Then Raissa’s fate took a bad turn. During the war she met an important man—a prominent psychologist who specialized in hypnosis. He fell so in love with her, the story went, that he spoon-fed her cod liver oil and personally wrapped her in paraffin wax to help her sweat out her fever when she fell ill with pneumonia. The rest was seldom discussed loud enough for Marina to hear clearly. The hypnotist was married and eventually threw Raissa away like “a dirty dishrag.” Plates may have been broken and someone bit someone else’s hand (or maybe it was a sleeve or a mitten; ruka, rukav, rukavichka were so hard to tell apart when adults whispered). Marred by this public scandal Raissa was dismissed from the Bolshoi. At the age of twenty-five, she was single, childless, and back in Kiev.

“Why did you stop dancing?” Marina asked her aunt when she first came to live with them.

“I just got old.” Raissa smiled. As if age could hit you instantly like a magic spell. 

“You don’t look old.”

“Dancers are like butterflies: we’re only granted a brief moment to flutter around.”

~ ~ ~

Now Marina lived with only Aunt Raissa in the same room she once shared with her parents. Almost a year ago, on February 1, 1952, Marina’s mother and father were arrested and taken to a labor camp for re-education. The night of their arrest Marina screamed herself hoarse. Her aunt had to physically restrain her by laying on top of Marina so she’d stop throwing herself against the walls. Even after Marina stopped screaming and agreed to sit on the bed, every once in a while she’d punch herself in the chest as hard as she could. But Raissa would trap Marina’s fists in her hands, holding them as if they were tiny feral animals, and kept talking and talking in her soothing voice until her niece fell asleep.

The next morning Marina woke up renewed. She realized there had been no reason to cry; their great and wise leader, Comrade Stalin, would take good care of her parents. She couldn’t wait to see their imminent transformation! When they returned, their backs would be straight as aspens. Gone would be her mother’s embarrassing stoop and that fearful droopy-eyed expression she always had whenever she spoke to anyone official, gone would be her father’s old-fashioned beard and his bad “shtetl jokes,” as aunt Raissa called them. It was one of those jokes, probably overheard by a neighbor that prompted their arrest.

Aunt Raissa reminded Marina how much fun she had at the Young Pioneer camp. The camp leaders were strict but fair. Marina got up at five in the morning to the sound of the bugle, made her bed, pulling the white sheets tight, and marched with the morning sun before breakfast. “It’s like Pioneer camp for adults,” Raissa reassured her.

It was still cold, maybe a bit too cold to march outside, but her mom and dad would be issued thick coats stuffed with cotton and served hot tea. Marina imagined her parents rosy-cheeked, laughing over steaming mugs in the chill air, invigorated by their morning work of chopping wood while singing folk songs in a merry chorus.

~ ~ ~

Marina had always known that she was special. It was bourgeois to think so, but she couldn’t help it. Her mother had nicknamed her tsaritsa—spitting three times as she praised her daughter’s regal beauty, trying not to let Yiddish words slip into her babbling brew of gratitude and the warding off of the evil eye. Raissa noticed her niece’s unusual grace right away.

“Look how she prances around when you play the gramophone! She reminds me so much of myself when I was that age! Remember Fanya, when papa brought us to the photo studio and the photographer asked if I starred in films?” When she didn't receive a response, Raissa nudged her sister with an elbow.

“Whose Papa? I don’t think I’ve even met Comrade Bortko.” Faina’s small brown eyes momentarily flashed with malice. Raissa ignored her, pretending to readjust her pinned up curls.

When Marina turned ten, Raissa used her remaining influence to enroll her into the Kiev Choreographic School under the tutelage of Comrade Camilla LeFleur. A new life for Marina began. Before Raissa, Marina endured endlessly boring evenings of sitting around drinking tea, the mumbling of adult conversation blending with the kerosene stench of the primus stove. They loved to recall all the things they’d eaten before the war. “Remember when we fried up shvarki and how those chicken skins sizzled? Remember baked potatoes under a bonfire? Remember the plum cakes, the napoleons, the puddings, the rice porridge?”

Marina blushed for her parents’ philistine concerns. Couldn’t they discuss something more elevated than stuffing their bellies? Raissa introduced her to real culture, to Pushkin and Fokine, and taught her how to drink hot water with lemon to stave off hunger. 

~ ~ ~

The novice ballerinas cowered under Comrade LeFleur’s watchful gaze. She had been known to strike the girls’ backs and arms with birch twigs to correct sloppy postures and rude behavior. She also didn’t like it when her dancers ate big breakfasts. Comrade LeFleur said it made their movements lumpy. So when Ninel’s leg buckled during a plié, Comrade LeFleur instinctively growled “bread rolls!” and even grabbed her switch from its place on the wall. But Ninel wasn’t “overstuffed.” This was something else. She remained on the floor, her knees bright red blots under her white tights, bruises visible on her back. Self-conscious of the commotion she had caused, Ninel slowly got to her feet.

“I can dance, Comrade LeFleur. It’s nothing.” She grabbed the barre to steady herself.

“The demons have been riding her at night,” Luba whispered to Marina. Marina didn’t like Luba, who often took a spot to the left of her at the barre. Luba called Marina “Sarah” and poked her in the ribs with a bony finger when Comrade LeFleur wasn’t looking. Luba used this latest diversion to break the rule against talking. She spoke quickly, spittle foaming at the sides of her mouth.

“A horned little demon hooked his claws into Ninel’s collarbone. She hopped up and down all night long, her knees bent backwards like a grasshopper’s. She can barely stand, the poor thing. Maybe it was you, Sarah. Your little Jew horns are starting to sprout.” Luba felt the top of Marina’s head and laughed in a fake, tinny voice. Marina wasn’t afraid of Luba, whose legs were bowed, guaranteeing she wouldn’t get far. There were even rumors that she had to wear itchy straightening braces at night, laced up from ankle to upper thigh that made it hard to sleep.

“You worry about your own knees bending backwards,” Marina hissed and pinched the base of Luba’s earlobe with the nails of her forefinger and thumb, before Comrade LeFleur could see. Luba yelped like a kicked dog.

“Let’s resume, girls!” Comrade LeFleur commanded. “Back to the top of the adagio!”

Marina didn’t believe in spells, curses, or demons. Such superstitions were retrograde, unbefitting a young communist. But Ninel was very ill and none of the fifteen girls in Comrade LeFleur’s studio knew why. When she didn’t come to class on Thursday or Friday, Marina took the tram to Pechersk to check on her. Ninel’s babushka, or possibly someone else’s babushka who had put herself in charge, waved her away. “All these strangers coming here. What do they want? She’s resting. Leave us alone.” Ninel was gone for a whole week, then two weeks, then three. Ballerinas didn’t just give up their spots at Kiev’s Choreographic School. Something was terribly wrong and thoughts of Ninel haunted Marina day and night.

Since her parents were taken away, Marina didn’t like coming back to the communal apartment before her aunt got home. Raissa’s job at the state nursery kept her until eight in the evening, and without her protection Marina was treated roughly by their neighbors. There was a crass woman from the countryside who clicked her tongue at Marina and banged loudly on the door of the communal bathroom whenever Marina was inside. “Enough preening, you little poodle! Working people are trying to start their day!”

Then there was Platonich, who had lost his arm and some of his short-term memory in the war and grinned a brown-toothed smile from his permanent perch on the kitchen stool. He seemed kind until he came up from behind one day and grabbed Marina’s side with his good hand. “We’ve got to fatten you up, girl! No husband wants a bag of bones in his bed.”   

An extra hour a day at the dance studio, Marina promised herself, then she would definitely get into Kiev Ballet or maybe even the Bolshoi! She stretched at the barre, letting her back lengthen into reptilian languor, hung down, ragdoll style, taking measure of her own length—the spine, the dangling arms, the legs. The pianist had gone home for the day, so she would practice some of the more difficult sections from that afternoon’s adagio without accompaniment. She preferred it this way, to be unobserved in her artistic solitude.

But today the silence of the dance studio had a texture to it. It tricked the eyes, like floaters in your field of vision that disappeared as soon as you shifted your gaze. Marina kept looking around, ready to catch the elusive presence in the act. The act of what? She didn’t really know. She was certain, however that even if she caught the thing that hung around like strands of spider web, she’d be helpless against it.

Tfu, tfu, tfu. Marina urgently spit three times over her left shoulder like her mother used to. An embarrassing, provincial gesture to be sure, but thinking of her mother gave her comfort. She began with the opening arabesque. But extending her leg into this eerily occupied emptiness made her edgy, like sticking your hand in a tree hollow where an animal might be hiding and ready to bite. What was watching her? There was nothing here, and yet she felt timid. Her reflection in the wall-length mirror, the one whose graceful lines she had spent hours admiring from every angle, looked lost, like an unlucky ragamuffin with eyes too large for her face. Marina half-heartedly performed her adagio warm-up, but gave up without working on her allegro. For the first time she felt unsure of herself and that doubt made her movements anemic. She left the studio disheartened, and killed time walking circles around their apartment building until she met aunt Raissa at the door.

~ ~ ~

That night Marina awoke from terrible dreams. The woolen blanket she shared with her aunt made her too hot. She noticed a faint smell that usually only bothered her for a few moments before she began to fall sleep. The blanket was acquired second-hand from a man who died not long after moving into their communal apartment. He coughed and coughed before passing and although they scrubbed the blanket twice with brown laundry soap, Marina wondered whether it was still diseased. She looked at her sleeping aunt. With her thin arms folded across her chest and her mouth open, Raissa appeared child-like, helpless. An absurd thought occurred to Marina: a once-celebrated Bolshoi soloist now snored in a tiny shared bed under a dead man’s blanket.

Usually Marina fell asleep before her aunt, who whispered wonderful things to her before bed.

“You’ll dance in Bucharest, Tallinn, maybe even Paris … And the flowers they’ll bring you! I got five dozen roses in one night. I barely managed to carry them home! The men look at you like you’re a New Year’s Eve candy wrapped in shiny foil.  They’ll take you to the opera. I walked down a marble staircase in a black silk dress! When I extended my arm it moved with me like a second skin.”

In her hypnotic voice Aunt Raissa recalled dancing Coppélia and Gisele in a snow-white tutu, as silver stars shivered in the ceiling above her. She promised that Marina was fated to be a great dancer too. Raissa told Marina to imagine herself descending a marble staircase, just like the one at the opera. With each step Marina would feel lighter ten…nine… sleepier…eight…seven…six… and every night, right before Marina reached the last step, Raissa told her that her parents were safe and happy, that she’d see them soon. But now the enchantment was broken. Marina felt scared and alone.

Maybe working on the adagio would make the world feel well again. Marina got up and lightly stretched her toes next to their bed. She went out into the dark, dusty corridor near the common bathroom. Tubs, basins and washing boards hung on the walls. She hopped up very quietly and carefully, feeling the relief of expelling her nervous energy. She jumped up a little higher, taking pleasure in her controlled, soft landing. But then she remembered Ninel. Marina jumped higher and faster to shake off her despairing thoughts. Now she could almost feel a little demon hanging onto her own back, squeezing her in a suffocating embrace, making her itchy all over with his bristly legs and spindly arms. He kicked his hooved feet into her sides. The zinc washtubs on the wall trembled in rhythm with Marina’s movements, but as she landed hard on the creaky floorboards, one small basin came crashing to the floor.

Aunt Raissa came out to the corridor and shushed Marina, “Shh! What’s that thumping? You’ll wake up the whole house!”

A young married couple peeked through the crack of their door, the light of their kerosene lamp searching for the noisy culprit.

“Is someone knocking?” the wife asked fearfully.

The husband opened the door a little wider. “No, it’s that cursed girl rehearsing!”

“Please stop jumping, Marinochka!” Her aunt tried bribery, “I’ll buy you a new silk ribbon for your braids. The pink one you saw in the shop window.” But the compulsion only grew worse. Marina, leaping in the air, was in tears. The little demon slid in between her ribs. Now he was inside her. His ankles hooked around the vertebrae of her neck, he hung upside down inside her rib cage and stuck his forked little tongue out through her bellybutton. Marina threw herself from side to side, swaying her whole body, punched herself in the hipbones trying to dislodge him. These were the ugliest movements she had ever performed. She was all jagged elbows and froggy legs, her head rotating wildly as she tried to bite her own shoulders like a dog infested with fleas.

More neighbors woke up and came into the corridor, some grumbling and some shouting at her to stop.

She no longer knew where the little demon ended and she began. They were nesting dolls dancing in unison, the demon insider her and Marina inside the belly of the communal apartment. Soon all six stories of their building would sway from foot to foot like Baba Yaga’s hut on chicken legs. The building’s concrete stomping would reverberate across Kiev, spreading quaking chaos all over Ukraine and the USSR.

“She’s possessed!” one-armed Platonich shouted, getting dangerously close to Marina with his lone fist raised.

Raissa blocked his way, “Go back to your rooms. I’ll deal with this.”

“She needs a good whipping,” the newlywed husband stated matter-of-factly.

“And maybe you need to be reminded that she’s a treasure of Soviet culture. Don’t you know who she is?!? She’ll be dancing for Stalin himself!” Raissa declaimed proudly.

The neighbors didn’t seem to know who Marina was, but the evocation of Stalin’s name quieted them and they began slowly walking back to their own rooms.

“Bit by bit, my love,” Raissa soothed Marina, “It’s just hysterics. I’ll make you some tea.” After a few more minutes of miserable flailing Marina tired herself out. She drank a cup of chamomile and laid down, closing her eyes as she listened to Raissa’s voice, her heart still beating wildly and her calves in spasms.

A neighbor must have complained, because a black automobile came for Marina a few hours later. The men in the black leather gloves ignored Raissa’s pleas.

“This is perfectly routine. Let go of her.”

“Don’t worry, my love. You’ve done nothing, nothing wrong!” Raissa quickly whispered before Marina was escorted out.

Guided into the back seat of the car, Marina felt herself trembling. They arrived at an old building and she walked inside, one man in front of her and one following behind. Marina was led down a staircase, and then another, descending into the building’s depths. It reminded her of the cold cellar in the village. Panicked, she realized how badly she needed to urinate.

“This is Yakov Ivanovich, he’ll be speaking with you,” one of the mustached men said before lightly pushing her into a small room that smelled of mildew.

Yakov Ivanovich looked at Marina without discernible emotion and told her to sit.

“I just need to…” Marina mumbled half-audibly.

“Name, Patronymic, and Surname.”

“Marina Efimovna Eydelman, Could I…?”

“Comrade Eydelman, I will ask you not to interrupt. Parents’ names?”

Marina squirmed in her seat. “Efim Eydelman and Faina Eydelman.”

“They were arrested last year?”

“Well, yes. But I expect them back soon.”

“Nationality?”

“Jewish.” She swallowed hard.

“Statute of arrest?”

“Bourgeois nationalism, but papa just told a joke and it wasn’t meant to be…”

“Do you like to joke too? You disrupted the sleep of good working folks. How can they achieve their production goals when they’re exhausted?”

She couldn’t say that it was a little demon that made her dance so grotesquely loud. They would ship her off to an asylum.

“I think I might have an illness. A classmate of mine has been sick with something.”

“Ninel Semonova? Yes, we’ve spoken with her.” He lit a cigarette.

Had Ninel’s parents been arrested too? Was Ninel? Marina suddenly had the urge to stand on her metal chair and shout at the interrogator, to turn around and lift up her skirt to expose her buttocks, to bare her teeth and growl. But the urge passed quickly and she remained sitting, nearly paralyzed by the interrogator’s cobra stare.

“What I really wanted to speak with you about, the real reason you’re here, Comrade Eydelman…” Yakov Ivanovich made a dramatic pause.

At that moment the door opened and a much younger man with darting eyes walked in and quietly said, “Moscow just announced.” Both men left in a hurry and left her locked in, alone for the night.

~ ~ ~

Marina was released the next morning without an explanation. But what had really happened to her? she asked herself. A man with a mustache asked her some questions. It’s true that it was humiliating to have made a puddle on the floor. Yet no one had hurt her or even threatened her. Yes, time had stood still in that windowless room where the artificial light and her fear made it impossible to sleep, and she hadn’t been given food or water. But she wasn’t very hungry anyway and only realized how parched her lips had become when she stepped out of the building.

So why was she so tired as if her body had been drained of blood? She felt aged, her skin and muscles sagging, dangling on her bones like a patched up old coat as she dragged herself toward home in the cold March air.

Even as Marina walked free, she was certain that no matter what happened to her from this point forward she would forever be trapped in that room with the mildewed pine-green walls. Had her parents been questioned, one at a time, in that same underground dungeon? She felt orphaned, completely alone in the world. For the first time she cried in the open, letting her tears spill publicly for her mother and for her father.

Marina looked around. The other pedestrians were weeping too. Had they all lost someone? She collided with a tall man hurrying to get by her. Marina meekly looked up at his agitated face. 

“Watch where you’re going!” he snarled, and then softened his tone. “Our father, our dear father has died!”

Marina stared uncomprehending.

“Your father? I’m sorry…” Marina stammered. He waved his hand dismissively—“Achk!”—and walked off. Now she noticed that many people were walking fast, some were running, but all in different directions, as if part of some disordered mass migration. Stalin’s solemn face stared at her from the front page of Pravda abandoned on the curb.  Marina picked it up and squinted in the morning sunlight to read the small print:

On March 5, at 9 hours and 50 minutes in the evening, after a serious illness, Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin passed away.

Comrade Stalin was dead?! What did it mean? What would happen to her now?

In the distance, beyond the crush of grieving pedestrians, beyond the flocks of loose newspaper pages flapping in the wind, she saw a figure on a hill. She couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, an adult or a child. They spun and spun in wild circles with their arms out and every once in a while they paused their dizzy dance and jumped up, as if trying to touch the sun burning in the morning sky.

###

Masha Kisel holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Northwestern University. She currently teaches at The University of Dayton. Her short stories, essays and flash fiction have been published in The Forward, Columbia Journal, Gulf Coast, Vestal Review and elsewhere. You can find more of her writing at mashakisel.com or follow her on twitter @MashaKisel1

The Seventh Carving of August Hale 

Pine splintered my fingers. The carving I held was a sea turtle, one so alive it might’ve jetted out of my hand. I tightened my grip. August stood beside the open door of the truck, whittled at another sculpture. His blade wormed around the figure. The turtle was a gift, something he’d made on the ride over. Even as dirt settled from the plow of the tires, he kept his attention solely on the carving.

“What’s her name again?” my father asked.

August kept working. Though his ceaseless carving was unusual, it wasn’t what surprised me most about him—he was wearing a blouse. Ruffles twined the ends of his sleeves, lace draped over his collars. Overalls, boy’s, strapped over the shirts and gave way to shin-high, frilled socks blooming from hunting boots. I always wore typical boy’s clothes: denim overalls, cinched pants, sweaters. When I saw August, there was a nagging thing, something deep. But how could he not correct my dad? It would’ve been easy, taken a second, but he didn’t.

August’s father pursed his lips. “His name is August.” He beckoned for my father to follow him, and they moved to the other side of the truck as if we couldn’t hear. Apparently, August did strange things, he confided to my father. Strange things like wearing girl’s clothes and focusing on his carving to the point of being so immersed he seldom spoke.

I stepped towards August. “Can I help?” After carving, he must’ve varnished. I could do that.

He squinted at me. “No.” He etched a half moon into his carving, and I could tell it was a Koi fish.

It was then the noticing happened: He tilted his head, and his hair fell over his face. He brushed it back. Thick and smooth, I wouldn’t have been surprised if it dripped with honey. My fingers itched, and I ran them through my scraps of hair. I’d never be blond like him. I wouldn’t have been bothered by the noticing if it had stopped there, but it continued. Every day, there was something new: his delicateness, the shards of amber in his irises, his leg bumping mine. I went to bed warm. I wondered why this was happening. Was I jealous? Infatuated?

And beneath the noticing, this: You want his outfits, but not the overalls, not the hunting boots. You want the blouses and socks and nightgowns. You want his hair. You want to be him.

~ ~ ~

Redwoods loomed over us. Their needles knitted into a canopy so thick I couldn’t see the sky. August eyed them, axe in hand, as if he burned to dig into them and work them to his liking. We padded through the needle-ridden grass until we found the fallen tree. A hundred feet of wood stretched in front of us. At the end, roots gnarled together and parted to reveal an opening. Inside, beyond the nets of spider webs, there was blackness. I skirted around it and walked alongside August to the other end. We cut from this tree for the whole summer and never got halfway through.

His axe slotted into the wood. He heaved it up then down with a sharp breath, then again. Somehow, after years of bracing his fingers against axes and roughing wood, his skin was still soft. Maybe that was why my dad had thought he was a girl—and why does he not care if he’s called a girl? He was the only person I knew who could make a blade seem gentle. After an hour of chopping a week ago, calluses roughed my hands.

You want your hands like his.

“Rowan, you’re here to chop, so chop.” His eyes lingered on me, and summer burned my cheeks. The noticing. Always the noticing.

The weight of my axe surprised me, and I followed his motions. I brought it over my shoulder and into the wood. Each swing was weightier than the last, but I managed. I continued even when he stalled and leaned against the trunk.

When there was enough chopped wood, I rushed the wheelbarrow over and lugged the wood inside. Trees circled us, only us. August brushed splinters from his palm. “Why didn’t you correct him?” I asked.

August shrugged. His face shifted in the slightest. A tug at his lip, a dart of his eye.

I wheeled the wood back to my house as August yawned beside me. Again, his hair was light, brought almost to a melting point.

I found myself in front of the mirror when we got home. August took to dunking his head under the bathtub faucet to wash the sweat and sawdust from his face. In the light of the bathroom, my hair brightened. I turned, leaned my head towards the bulbs above the mirror, and I almost became blond. I almost became him.

~ ~ ~

August’s cot was in the living room, but most of the time, he slept on the grass in a sleeping bag or nestled on our front porch. “My room has air conditioning,” I told him. He laid back on our porch and said nothing. A nightgown wisped around his knees. You want it. “Or heating if you get cold.”

“I like it better out here,” he finally said.

“Fine.” I brought my sleeping bag onto the porch and laid beside him. We were silent as the night deepened. It wasn’t enough for me. “Why are you wearing a nightgown?” I whispered.

“I want to.” He stretched an arm over his head, and the pink of the nightgown streaked the dark. “They’re comfortable.” His eyes met mine, the same earthy color. “I have an extra one if you want.”

You do want one, yes, yes, yes you do, and he knows, he knows. I shook my head.

One leg hung out of his sleeping bag, and he kicked me every time I’d almost lost consciousness. I kicked him back. When I woke up, I curled next to him, so close our hair mixed into one shade. Our legs both folded into our torsos, his bundled under his nightgown. My eyes closed, and I knew his were shut too. Sleep still slowed his breath. I deepened mine to match.

He sat up when he woke, and we no longer mirrored one another. His hair knotted at the ends, a thing only sleep can do. A thing only people close to you get to see. “You kick too much,” he said.

He knew how I slept. Blood beat in my ears. I wanted to know how he brushed his hair, if he picked vegetables out of his dinner, his favorite color, his secrets. I wanted to know how his fingers would feel against mine. 

His legs slipped out of his sleeping bag, and his nightgown enveloped his thighs. He combed his fingers through his hair and tucked it behind his ear. You don’t know if you want to stay or be closer or to be him.

~ ~ ~

August hardly ever stopped carving. He chipped at his seventh sculpture, a Canada goose. He crafted each animal with delicate precision. Each one lingered in his hands once he finished, and he brushed his thumbs over them, admired them, almost intimately. “Can I help?” I asked.

He eyed me. “You can try making one.” Our pile of chopped wood sat beside the porch. I hopped from the porch and picked the smoothest piece of wood from the bunch. Once I sat back on the porch, August offered me one of the extra carving knives he always kept in his pocket. I tried to grab it with the same gentleness as August, but my fingers were too big to fit neatly on the hilt, so I seized it instead. You hold the knife like a boy and August doesn’t and why doesn’t he care. I dug the point of my knife into the center of the wood and flicked a chip away. I tried to do it like August did, the blade drifting down the side of the wood. My blade snagged on a slivered section. I jammed it through the wood, and shavings sprayed from beneath the blade. The hilt dug into the heel of my hand.

August’s eyes carved into me as I sliced into another section of wood. The rub of the hilt against my palm burned. My fingers ached. “Your angle is off,” August said. As always, his voice was as smooth as his finished carvings. His words came more in sighs than anything.

I straightened the knife and tried carving from there. The handle rawed my skin.

“I meant the angle of the wood,” he said.

My knife halted. “What angle do I carve at?”

“Whatever angle is right.” He dug his blade under the wing of the goose. A chip loosened and fell to the floor by August’s toes. Suddenly I couldn’t finish the sculpture. Any way I carved it wouldn’t please him. I scowled at the carving; my skull buzzed. I needed to be like August. I needed to hold my knife with soft fingers, not bulky, rough ones, and you need to have hair like him and a voice like him and clothes like him, but you don’t. You’re not like him. I jabbed the knife into the wood. When I tried to yank it away, it stuck. August reached for the carving, and I gave it up. He eased the knife out of the wood. “Be gentle.” He demonstrated, smoothing the blade across the surface. It molded into a curve after a few strokes. He handed it back to me. “Try that.”

I took the carving and knife. My fingers slid around the hilt of the knife, and I dragged it over the wood. Shavings scattered across the floor. A curve emerged in the wood, but it wasn’t like August’s. It was a mockery. I needed to make something he liked, something like him. I liked that. The idea of him liking me. I liked the idea of working on his carvings with him. Feeling his hair. Watching the nightgown he shouldn’t be wearing float around his limbs.

I handed the knife and wood back to him. As he took it, his fingers brushed mine, soft and somehow clean. Mine were blistered and littered with splinters.

I left to the sink and heaped soap onto my fingers, scratched at my pores, scoured them with a pumice stone my mother used for her feet. The splinters disappeared. But so did the grooves of my skin, and soon, they were red. I returned to the porch, where August still sat and carved his goose. Our fingers were smooth now, but even after ceaseless scrubbing, mine were rougher than his.

~ ~ ~

Pine perfumed the air while August added the finishing touches to his goose, the intricacies of the feathers and eyes. Moths cradled against the winking porchlight. I sat beside August, legs dangling off the porch, and watched the hem of his nightgown shift. He had two. Two. You get none, and he gets two? I had pinstriped pajama bottoms that cut the circulation from my legs and a collared shirt that stuck to my chest when I sweated. And you have skin that sometimes feels too tight because you want to get out, like when you leave the lake and it feels like your pores will break, the physical feeling that you want out of something. Something but you don’t know what. You didn’t know what you wanted into until August, August with his fingers, August with his nightgowns and dresses and socks and sunswept hair. You want to be him and be with him and you don’t know which and it only makes it worse.

I said, “August, why didn’t you?”

His eyes stayed on the goose. “You’re still wondering about your dad.” Feathers spurred beneath his blade, and the goose’s wing was complete.

My bare feet swung, the hem of my pants with them. A breeze tugged August’s nightgown. “Not just that. The nightgowns. The socks. I think you did care that my dad called you a girl. You liked it.”

“And?” Wood flecked from beneath his knife.

“I’m just confused about you.”

“I like girl’s clothes. Is it that hard to understand?”

“No.” I stuffed my hands under my thighs, and circulation fled. “How do you wear them? How do you not worry about everything else?”

His knife came to a halt. He set the carving beside him on the porch and pulled his knees to his chest. “Why don’t you try?”

My voice stuck in my throat. I pointed at his nightgown, and he nodded. Then his hand was on my arm, and we stood. Tip-toeing, we slipped inside and into my room, where his clothes were in a dresser beside my bed. He knelt and slid a drawer open. Inside was a nightgown the color of a robin egg. I stood, stiff, as he held it out for me. At last, he nudged me with it, and I took it. He stepped out of the room. I peeled off my pajamas. I pulled the nightgown over me, and I clutched the fabric at the stomach as if I was nauseous, but I was anything but nauseous. Overwhelmed, maybe. Relieved.

I stepped out the door. August waited against the wall, hair woven over his ears, dashed across his face in single strands. We went back to the porch. Moonlight folded over August’s cheeks when he tilted his head towards the woods, and for a moment, his face was silver. I scooped the goose from the floor. “Is it finished?”

He shook his head. “No, it needs to be smoother. Under the back.” He grabbed his carving knife from the porch, where it had lain in its sheath. I held out the goose, but he didn’t take it. Instead, he grabbed one of my hands. My limbs grew cold beneath my nightgown. He placed my fingers along the curve of the hilt and kept his palm against me. Together, we ran the blade along the underside of the wood. Shavings curled away from the knife. Cuts of light glowed against August’s hair. The wood snaked away, layer by layer, until it was gone.

###

Oliver Reimers is a high school student from Sacramento, California. He enjoys writing stories and aspires to become a published author. He hopes to study creative writing at a university. When Oliver’s not writing, he enjoys playing piano, painting, and reading. His favorite book is A Separate Peace by John Knowles.

The Sea at Catterline 

1963, Scotland

The sound pounds at everything that has ever stalled you, that you have feared. In your winter boots, you feel the vibration of the sea’s insistent thrumming. The North Sea has no regard for you. Its spray blurs your eyes. You stand, legs apart, rooted to keep your body and easel upright. The roar, the shushing of all human sound, is riveting. Clad in a thick gray pullover, a donkey jacket with collar up, your wool hat pulled down, your jaw is as square as a boxer’s, so says your mum back in England. The morning you will die, August 15, 1963, it will be rainy and windy, a day much like this one. Audrey will be at your bedside and will drive back to your home with your mum. Together they will scatter your ashes on the beach here, in Catterline. Now you breathe hard though your nostrils. You push through a headache and a dull pain in your breast that radiates down your arm. You must beat the sea before your vision begins to fail, before you lie on a hospital bed painting gifted red flowers.

From Makin Pier that juts into the water, you confront sky, shore, and sea. The early March sky is steel-colored. You paint wide strokes across your four-by-six-foot board to layer in the immense horizon. You strike mauve verticals through this sunless expanse. The shore, just behind you and curving up ahead, is narrow and dark. You slash lines of ochre and blue-gray onto your board. One swipe masters the sea’s power. Another captures the sky’s fractured light. The final one soars upwards in pure joy. There is nowhere else you would rather be.

Each force is driven by a push and pull. The sea tumbles towards you in monstrous rolls of blue, black, and white. With a quick stiff brush, you capture the fighting foam and then are blinded momentarily by it. A fierce gale thrusts you backward; you lunge forward. You cannot let it win. With a palette knife, you layer white into the sea on your panel. With the butt end of your brush, you dig ragged scrawls into the painted shore.

Nothing rests. Sea creatures, any that can survive this raw cold, cry out. You stand back, size up what you have done, take a gulp of hot tea from your banged-up thermos. A mighty towering wave charges the side of the stone pier and rocks your easel. You reel back and your hip hits the concrete wall. Your jacket gets soaked, your cheeks sting from the wet. As you straighten up, your thigh stiffens, and your left arm feels numb. “Bash,” you will tell Audrey later about how you painted today. “I bash at painting like a beast and barely finish anything.”

A fisherman, driving beneath the cliffs in a battered truck, swerves to a hard stop. He cracks open his window and shouts. He blasts his horn and leaps out of his truck, racing forward, singeing your peripheral vision. You startle at the sight of a human on such a rough day. “Colum.”

“Best to come back in, Joan,” he yells. “You’ll be swept off.”

“No. Not yet.”

You give Colum that intense look that the villagers have come to expect from you. That strong-headed hen, they’ve been known to say, but they love your kindness, your steady presence in the spring fields, the little bags of candy that you drape from your easel to share with them. Now you plead. “Help me. Will you? Drag that anchor from the shore to secure my board. I’ll stay out a little longer.”

He steps toward you, his breath sour, and squeezes your shoulders with his large hands. “Okay, then.”

You two pull that rusted chunky anchor to your easel. Together, you wrap its braided rope around the legs and loop it up to your board’s edge to stabilize your set-up. You must work hard now before the sea lashes at you again, before Audrey arrives. Your breath warms at the thought of seeing her soon. She is on her way by train from Glasgow, over three hours away, as she leaves her husband and teenage son behind.

After Colum leaves, you push your oil paint harder, simplifying the swath of the sea into brutal form. The water is both leaden and light. Its raging wisps, rising above its rolls, are playful; its severe undertow is deadly. Your breast aches more as you carry on. The pain scares you. The doctor told you that you have multiple cysts; she gave you little pills that don’t do much good. You shut your eyes and let the scene before you become a shape inside. You think of the ocean as a massive rectangle and then let its edges blur and fall apart. You love how the sea creates and destroys itself constantly.

Late afternoon, you pack up as best you can and move your supplies closer to the cliffs. No one will bother them. “That’s just Joan staking her turf,” the villagers will say. With your chapped hands, you stretch your arms around your board, positioned vertically, and lug it toward the cliff, stopping often. Your shoulders and thigh hurt. With halting steps and a jagged breath, you reach the cliff’s top. You drop the painting on an old pram that you store there. Swaying like a depraved mother, you push your load in the storm for a half-mile. You drop the painting in your cold, unheated studio and carry on to your “home” cottage with its lesser view, with its plumbing and electricity. With the fire lit, you boil water for tea. You peel off your wet clothes, drape them like a drenched beast over a metal stand, pull on a dry sweatshirt and pants, and cover yourself with two blankets. You make a quick meal of canned fish and bread. The steady thrum of the sea repeats itself in your brain as you doze off.

~ ~ ~

Two hours pass. Audrey pushes through the cottage door. The logs crackle and spit. You grip her close, your fish breath moist against her ear. “Sorry about my sea stink,” you say. “I forgot to shower.”

She laughs and musses your hair.

“I have missed you,” you say.

“You too. So much.”

Your love. Stout body, dark brows, and an upturned nose like yours. A sister self. Her strong hand squeezes yours. Her wedding ring digs deep into your knuckle. You’re sure that her husband, the boring barrister back in Glasgow, snores in his rocker.

She shakes off her coat and curls her scarf around your neck. Her skin smells of salt, smoky peat, and moss from her country walks. She unpacks small containers of food for your tiny fridge and gives you five tubes of oil paint. “All the colors you need.” From her suitcase, she pulls out a bottle of scotch and heads to the cupboard to get two glasses. Stopping at the window, she gazes at the moonlight spreading over the windswept field. “What a sheen. Menacing somehow.” You stare at her black pants, shirt and scarf tied around her head. She reminds you of that widow you watched from afar as an art student in Italy. Strong, standing by the shore, ready to witness the world with a steady eye, riveted by a grizzled fisherman thumping an octopus repeatedly against the rocks to tenderize its meat.

“How’d it go today?” she asks, pouring you each a bit of scotch.

“Brutal. But I loved it. I kept my painting board firm and upright.” 

She sits beside you on your lumpy plaid sofa. “You’re flushed. Feeling okay?”

“Wind-whipped is all,” you say, not wanting to worry Joan about your sore breast. “How’s John?”

“My boy’s glands are swollen like yours were. Mumps is tough on a young man. His testicles are tender.”

“Poor boy,” you say, sorry for his pain. You know what is coming.

“I’ll have to leave by Tuesday to check on him. Sorry.”

“Of course.” You nod your head in an obligatory way. You miss her already.

In bed, body snuggled against warm body, Audrey begins to drift off. Her torso jerks and her palm clamps and releases your bruised hip. Body clapping, you call this familiar gesture, and you feel safe and whole.

~ ~ ~

The next morning, you let Audrey drive your dirt-smacked Lambretta scooter. You clasp her belly from the seat behind, both of you in bulky jackets and gray helmets. The wind blows but, for now, is milder than yesterday. How divine to be against Audrey’s back as she steers the scooter from your South Row cottage past the village inn, past the station officers house and the coastguard buildings, round the bend to the primary school and down the steep road to Catterline Bay.

“Here’s where I painted yesterday. I must come back later to work.”

“Maybe.” Audrey speaks in that authoritative way that comes with her extra ten years over you. “It never hurts to slow down for a day.”

Your mouth presses wet between her shoulder blades, a defiance that she cannot see. Already you hear the unspoken. Don’t push too hard, Joan.

“Maybe,” you echo back. You are the one with a deadline, a solo show in London this May, two months from now. You can’t waste precious time.

Yet Joan has come a long way to be with you. “Okay, girl,” you relent for now. “Let’s go out farther and leave the bay behind.”

You feel the surge of energy in Audrey’s arms as she heads up and away. Away from the villagers. Away from the kind folk who mostly let you be, away from the fishermen. You hunger for the angular shapes of their boats, mostly stored now, that bob in the bay in warm weather. In the thirteen years that you have come here, back and forth from Glasgow, staying ever longer now, you have seen how proud the men are of their catch. The lobsters, haddock, and salmon. In summer, their salmon nets drape from tall larch poles to dry. The nets wave like teetering kites in the sky. You paint the poles as if they are boat masts, tipping toward destruction.

Audrey carries on to the cliffs of Fowlsheugh. The wind, fiercer here, crackles in your ears. The towering red sandstone cliffs have stark fissures. Gravel spits from the Lambretta’s wheels as Audrey slows to a stop. She hops off, spins with arms wide in the air. You follow her, laughing. She points to the volcanic extrusions of hot magma, from eons ago, that create striking green veins on the bluffs. She turns to the ocean.

“Should have brought my camera,” she says, “to capture its bold lines, to get you against the wild water below.”

“To get my jacket flapping against my big behind.”

“Oh yes. That.” She smirks and slaps your hand.

If society would let you, you would live with Audrey in a cave here. The more primitive the better, free from distractions. You would paint for hours, and she would photograph the cliffs, sky, and you. At night here, tucked away from the wind, you would hum terribly and she, far better, the classical music that you both adore. You remember one evening, two summers ago, when long dark bands spread over the half-lit sky in Catterline, and Audrey confided, “Your creativity feeds mine. I become a better artist by your side.” You loved how the sea that stirred your senses inspired her too.

Back at the cottage, Audrey heats up her stew, made in Glasgow, of bone-beef shank, carrots, and rosemary. After you eat, you stoke the fire and feel a rare fullness inside of you. All you need as a final touch is your mum’s steamed pudding to warm your big-boned body, but she’s too far away in England.

You lead Audrey to your studio down the way and guide her to your garden chair, rutted by your Lambretta when you were careless one rainy day.

“Let me show you what I did yesterday.”

The sun pushes through the clouds. There is enough light to see your work.

You stand beside her beneath your ceiling made of thirty old canvases, castoffs not up to your standards. When you moved here, you had hired a young man from art school to nail them to the underside of the roof to keep out the wind and rain. You loved these images floating above you—some of waves, others of poor city children who visited your Glasgow studio. Random faces, arms, eyes darkened with black pastel, sea cottages, and flat green fields. The whole, not quite a work of art, but full of life and risk.

You watch Audrey’s gaze flit back and forth over your painting as if she feels each outer force inside her— the shore, sea, and sky. 

“It’s a wonder, Joan.” She clasps your hand. “Think of all the times when you were outside fighting the wind, the chill, your doubts, asking am I good enough? And here you are. A seascape nearly complete.”

You love how she says “nearly.” She knows too well that you always have more to do. You don’t give a fig what most people think of your art. You paint what you want. Yet Audrey’s opinion matters. She understands that raw, messy nature excites you.

You let go of her hand and move close to your painting. “There’s just one thing. This lower left corner. It’s too dark and heavy. Might we bring my board and scoot down to the Pier for a bit?”

Audrey gives you that irritated look of I knew this was coming.  “It’s not the same out there today, Joan. You’ve said it yourself. If the light is off, if the weather doesn’t match your first outing, it’s not worth your time.”

Audrey gets up and pulls out a small board from the corner. “Why not bring your pastels and paper down to the Pier? Use this board as your hard surface.”

She is so reasonable. You won’t fight her.

~ ~ ~

Down by Makin Pier, you draw spirited U shapes with pink and orange pastels on your darkened paper. With her box camera on a strap round her neck, Audrey walks on the shore photographing rocks. The air begins to change. You feel a drop in air pressure that stiffens your hip. The sky darkens, the waves lash up. You work fast, fast. On successive sheets of paper, tacked to your board, you capture the sky as a frenzy of horizontals and the incoming rain as wild diagonals. Your pulse races. You hope to use these sketches to create a new painting soon, Approaching Storm.

Audrey runs to the pier, waving her arms. “Let’s go.” You raise three fingers, your sign for a few more minutes. You persist. You are thrilled by the rising gusts of wind. Your board tears from the easel, flies skyward, spins, and crashes at Audrey’s feet behind you.

“Bloody Jesus,” you cry out, turning around. “That wanker wind. Alright there?”

Your face drips with cold rain.  

Audrey winces.“That thing hit my arm.” 

You kiss her elbow and then flip the board. Its corners are mashed, its surface scabby with grit and sand. The pastel drawings, torn from the clamps, have turned to soot. Ruined. Gone. You will have to begin again. Begin again. That mantra swirls in your head.

Audrey pulls your hand. “We must get out before we get blasted by cold.”

You drive and she clings to you, as you buzz up the hill, riding the rain as if you are on a skiff in the high sea.

At home, your head and bosom hurt, you feel a deeper ache in your armpit. You pull Audrey against you, feeling the strength of her shoulders and hips, the imprint of her breasts upon your damp clothes. “I’m sorry. We should have left sooner.”

“No matter,” she says.

But it does matter. The weather has hurt her too. You press an ice pack against her stiff inflamed elbow, the one that cut short her spirited violin career and persists to this day.

“Let’s take a hot shower,” you say. “And sleep.”

Toweled off, you both settle beneath the covers.

“Feeling better?” you ask, cradling her head on your shoulder.

“Yes. I am.”

You hear an edge, a gray undertow, in her voice. “Is it John? Worried?”

“Yes. And worried about you too. You push yourself too hard. I saw your bruised hip in the shower.  You didn’t take your Lambretta down with you yesterday, did you?”

“A mate brought me down in his truck. I didn’t know the weather would turn so.”

Audrey exhales loudly. “I don’t mean to be a crank, love. But be careful.”

She strokes your thighs, her touch on you, tender, determined, needy. You kiss her mouth with a sure tongue, your lonely body opening to her. You live in a state of want when she is gone. And now you can take. You kiss her breasts and travel down her body. The tension in her, the knot of a life spent in two distinct worlds of husband and you, releases and she lets go. The quiet afterwards is like a windless day. You rest your head on Audrey’s stomach. You marvel that a baby, with its guppy-like head and webbed fingers, grew within her belly fifteen years ago. You shut your eyes. If John had not been born, might Audrey have left the barrister for good to stay with you? Such thoughts cause needless pain. You tell yourself that your separate lives flow together as best they can, that it can be no other way.

You awake early and watch her rise from the bed, the new light suffusing her smooth skin. Her firm curves repeat in the mirror as she dresses quickly to start the fire. You have only this morning together. Audrey fills her suitcase by noon and clicks it tightly. You miss her even before she leaves.

“I’m sorry to go,” she says. “Once things ease up with John and the family, I’ll return.”

You feel hollow. She takes a small radio from her suitcase. “Keep it bedside and listen to Britten’s opera tonight at nine. I will.” You smile. You both adore Britten’s “Four Sea Interludes” that he composed with his male lover, a tenor. They lived together openly in an earlier time and, as you smile at Audrey, grateful for her kind gesture, your stomach burns with envy for Britten and his lover.

~ ~ ~

Firelight at night. Outside is dark and still. Audrey has been gone for a month. You write to her daily. You could not exist without her letters. You send wee notes. Wee, that word that makes you smile like a child. Your mum has told you that you were painfully shy as a girl, turning blotch-faced after speaking just a few words. “Drawing suited you better,” she said. Even here, in Catterline, the townsfolk think of you rightly as a shy, sweet woman despite your stubborn painting outside. You prefer it that way.

You write to Audrey that spring is here, that you often paint in lovely solitude behind your studio, away from the villagers. You view the sea from afar and lose yourself in the fields, tossing stalks and grit at your board, letting them stick. The last time you went out strolling, Mrs. Taylor who owns Sooty the goat, came up to chat. “Do you know beforehand what a painting should look like?” she had asked. “No,” you answered. “Never do.” You wouldn’t say it but you carry an idea, a feeling inside, and then blunder until you find your way, not sure even then.

You write again to Audrey before she visits. You tell her you have seen the new doctor. Your cysts are cancerous tumors. It is too late to do much.

You take a deep drink of the Scotch she has left you.

You hear from Audrey.

As the weeks pass, you learn to block and belittle the pain. Audrey has visited again and brought you medicines, dinners, bed warmers. On the few days that you will not venture out, Mrs. Taylor, tucked into a dark dress with floating white circles that match the color of her netted hair, brings you tea and cod cakes. She has no idea how sick you are. You don’t tell her that your cancer has spread to your brain. “Bad headaches,” you say. “They will pass.” One morning when you feel good and she is looking pale, a bit peely wally, you ride to the P.O. on the Lambretta and pick up her pension check. The ride, the fresh air, renews you.

You begin to paint like a determined fool. You’d rather die at forty-two years old like something trammeled by the sea than stand back, hidden from nature, from all that you love. Your spring work is easier to manage. The few gales that blow in are not snorters. You return to Makin Green, to the left of the pier towards Kale Tap, that green mound. You move on towards Dunnie Woof, that small island. The salmon nets, out again, dry in the wind.

You go back to the sea and study a sweep of sky with flecks of turquoise, with white dancing in the waves. Your brushes journey sideways, upwards and across your board at angles. Up close, you see a band of dark blue, a rush of green. You paint in strokes of joyous orange. You don’t need to take on nature’s worst, you realize, to know her. One afternoon, a row of cobalt blue triangles marches across your painted sea and against your magenta shore. You fling a single splotch of turquoise paint into the foam and know that you have created something new.

That night, you have a fever. Your headache is searing. You cannot see so well. With outstretched hands, you reach for your mum, hoping for comfort, wishing her nearby. You think of the hilly dairy farm in Sussex where you grew up as a young girl. You dream of the fishermen in Catterline eager to catch Partans, the local crab, that will bring them money once they are shipped off to England.

In the morning, you write to the gallery owners in London; you have finished rendering waves, boats, and tides. They’d better send a truck soon, while you are well enough, to pick up your final seascapes for the exhibit. You dress hastily and paint in a field outside, just steps from the cottage. The green expanse, which dominates your view, has a narrow hedgerow at its far end. With your brush, you swirl raucous pink loops upwards to capture the tall grasses. Flowers bob before you in a cluster; you shape their pale blooms as heads with half-shut eyes. You love the lightness of working on paper, you cannot manage heavy boards anymore. Your sky, stroked in a mess of gray-green, turns out muddy. Certainly, not your best work, but you feel joy.

The gallery owners invite you to come early for a private viewing. You call Audrey on the one phone in Catterline, tucked at the back of the general store. Audrey promises to meet you in two weeks. Yet just before you leave, you receive a letter. 

As you sit on your old sofa with her page in hand, frightened by the deeper pain in your bosom, you breathe in and out lightly. You feel yourself drift on your back in a shallow pond, willing calm, and know what you need to write back. It’s beyond our control. Don’t worry. You are in every painting. Remember?

~ ~ ~

When you arrive on Cork Street in London, once known for its fine tailors, you enter the Roland, Browse and Delbanco gallery, leaning on your cane. On this bright May day, a kind employee rushes up to you with a wheelchair and steers you inside. What you cannot see, you feel with pulsing sensations and ask her what she observes. Around you, in your one-woman show, are your recent paintings, smelling of sea salt, oil, varnish. You feel proud, yet sad that Audrey cannot be here.

Back home, tired from your journey, weary of the many hands that have steered your passage, you feel scramble brained from not seeing well. You cross out the words— “I’m a touch below par”—and write what you need to.

Audrey sends a letter quickly.

During your last week in Catterline, you tell Mrs. Taylor that you will be off to Glasgow for a consult about headaches. She comes by, with Sooty on a leash, and gives you a loaf of soda bread to take. She offers to pick up your mail when she can and wishes you a safe journey. You smile to mute your sadness, knowing that you may never return home and that she will hate staring at your closed cottage door.

You move to Killearn Hospital near Audrey. With your head on the slim pillow, with Audrey beside you, with the window facing gray light, you imagine your seascapes above you on the ceiling. You see a winter sea with its choppy surf, a swath of sunset gold over maroon cliffs, yellow foam with dancing flecks of white against a summer sky, and a January flow tide with jagged strokes of orange. A painting of a winter afternoon, with a steely sky and one blue boat against a cliff, looms largest for you.

As you lie there, you still feel a hunger to paint. In Catterline, you pushed through every barrier that you could. Yet, you’d like to master the wind more, to dive deeper into that churning sea, to capture that which cannot be expressed easily. To get so good that storms, making their imprint on your body, make decisions for you and guide your hand. You’d like twenty years more with dear Audrey. To nurture her art, to see her son grow into a man, to ask her again if she might leave the barrister once John has moved out on his own.

In your hospital bed, swaddled in a blanket, you envision your last night alone, arms linked, with Audrey in Catterline. You see spots of black in the twilight sky and the lighthouse blinking in the dark sea cascade. You do not know the time. You hear the waves but cannot smell the sea salt, cannot see the rising foam.

# # #

Author’s Note: While this is a work of fiction, my sense of Joan Eardley's voice was informed by her letters, with which I became acquainted through Christopher Andreae’s wonderful critical study.

Pam Wolfson is a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Summerset Review, Vestal Review, Other Voices, SLAB, and Woven Tale Press. Pam earned an MA in literature from the University of Toronto, attended Bread Loaf, and was awarded a merit scholarship to the Southampton Writers Conference. She has served as an art editor for Davis Press and David Godine Press. “The Sea at Catterline” is part of her evolving short story collection about women and art. Pam is both a painter and a writer.