Practicing Disappearing.

All week she has watched the river rise. It has rained and rained and the rain, having nowhere to go and nowhere better to collect, finds its way off the hills and into the river, which swells and grows and becomes discontented now with only flowing one way, not wishing to find itself at the sea again it contemplates how it might break its banks, might breach flood levies and land the prime minister in hot water. It will not break, not yet, but soon, if this rain keeps up – or so he said last night, on retiring.

Not just the river, but the spider also has been closely observed. First for the way it weaves its web, so fine, so dense, the way it persists on and on until a new home, a new trap, is made. Then, later, when its 8 legs were watched, it was all woman, all open thighs, repeated four times over, feet arched and tense, is this how she used to look, she wondered, surprised to think she had so much power. Then recalled, they eat their young, but doubts if true, or simply just heard. Remembers how, aged 7 or so, her hamster birthed 12 babies, and all excited at their naked, mole like look, she’d got them out the cage, kissed their little pink noses, then watched with abject horror, as their mother ate them until full to the point of bursting she nipped the others round the neck, and there were no babies after that.

You’re supposed to wait until they’ve got hair, her mother shouted as she cried into her cereal, watched the tears become milk.

This morning she washes herself as the pink light of the winter comes into the bathroom, making it another space beyond the grip of recollection. If she wishes to be washed clean, she’s only got her own blood to do it in. It will not stop this blood, although it has lessened, and is lessening still, apart from the days when something breaks off inside her, flesh of his flesh, embedded into her – retained parts they called it, when her fever rose and rose and they scanned her insides; when she bends say to pick up the boy who is growing and growing and growing with his tiger tongue whisking milk from her and wasting her until she is a mass of skin and glycogen and bone and if she is wasting away then no one notices this wasting of her. Seen instead, is her return to form, the same shape as previously but disassembled and then reassembled, crudely.

Impossible then this task of cleansing when she is still bleeding his blood - or her blood she made his with – plays back how in a hurry he ruptured his own placenta, or was it hers, inside of her as it was, and made a rapid entrance, all bloody and beautiful, all screams and feather down on his back as if he is not human, but bird. He is not yet human still; he is liminal, in the space between knowing and not knowing. He is hers and not hers but hers to birth and to make milk for and the light is pinking and pinking as are her arms as she scrubs and scrubs and scrubs and her legs and thighs too and her breasts leak milk onto the shower floor as if tears from long ago.

She cannot scrub hard enough; absolution does not come.

She turns the shower higher when he mews, bleats, screams.

So much water, she thinks, smiles, another story, another time.

She steps out, onto the floor, which is hard and cold and the heating has not reached this far yet, so early. The spider is at the window this morning, hanging, a single thread. For what, she wonders, no web, just a line.

If the baby should cry louder it is only an experiment on his part to see how loud he has to be before he can make her come to him. He spends his days wondering how to summon what he needs, wants. That, and how to separate his thumbs – not yet opposed – from his fingers.

Quickly steam dissipates until the air is clear. Her head is light, she realizes, she is light headed, should eat before being eaten.

The river roars and does not abate. If it breaks, she ought to wonder, how soon before the house is entered and if house entered, how soon before the first floor reached, the attic, the baby’s room. She does not think these things. If asked a penny for them, she’d say nothing, no thoughts, when instead all the thoughts are all stacked up and up and up until they are many making, not single threads, but a tangle, a mess, a return to when? – or what? – best not, then to ask, if not wanting to know, best also not to think so as to not arrive at one destination, or many points of departure. Best, instead to hurry to the infant who now seems to have separated his left thumb from his fingers and to have pushed said thumb deep into his mouth, and finding this soothing has gone fast asleep without her. He is leaving her already she perceives, and wonders, how often he will do this, how many grazes, how long until it tips and he realizes she too is leaving him, or worse – when will he discover she was never there?

Clothes on the floor of the bathroom, cold, must be stepped into for lack of any others clean. Spider is Sisyphus now, climbing its single strand. She thinks she remembers the story, but cannot recall its logic.

The river muddies, is brown and restless - will break by nightfall, by dusk, she mouths this, this favorite word of hers, and then too velvet, to check the weight and density and feel of it. The spider has a speckled back, did not yesterday, is not then the same spider.

She forgets food.

In the kitchen she finds in the salad drawer, used instead for winter vegetables, a turnip. Its skin - if turnips can be said to have skin and not just a thin layer of something other than their actual flesh, if flesh for the way it’s hard and nearly impossible to cut, how then the jack-o-lanterns before the pumpkin invasion – is wrinkled and lends it a certain air of being past its sell by date. It is big and would feed sheep if sheep there were but sheep there are not, just the boy with his newly found thumb, and the spider, and the river and she sees they all are occupied with their tasks of becoming, belonging and breaking, she alone has nothing to do. She is instead standing in this kitchen in yesterday’s clothes, with yesterday’s milk on them – if milk can belong to yesterday – holding this turnip they will not eat because she does not know how to cut it and if cut would not know how to cook it, but does not have sheep to feed it to and so there is little else to do but do what she does, which is place the turnip smack, right there in the middle of the work surface. And to fetch then a hammer from the outbuilding, where the ground is unstable, is not grass now but only mud, where her feet sink and are pulled into it until she thinks her boots, loose already, will surely be pulled off, or she will disappear into this suctioning ground. But of course she does not, because it’s the wrong sort of mud, just as you don’t want to find the wrong sort of sand, or the right sort of sand maybe, if what you really want is to disappear. She finds the hammer and feels it heavy in her hand; its head indented from all the years it’s been used to hang pictures in all the houses, whose picture, whose house, it was here when they arrived, she’d like to recall, maybe only this house then, the dents on these walls being all its fault.

Once back in the kitchen, a mew maybe from upstairs, but not heeded, because now, now there is a job needing doing. She taps the turnip at first, it stays stable. Next blow, a little harder. Third time brings it down so hard a piece flies off. And it is this flying off of the piece that sets her going until, she knows not how many blows, not how it happened, not how the turnip went from being a material thing, to this not thing pulp under her hammer that now is spread all over the kitchen, pieces of it in all the four corners, and she thinks this should bring me back to myself but she is not sure what it means to come back to yourself, or where she has been, or what herself in this instance is, she could not be said to be in the kitchen for the way she seems to be hovering and to be watching from higher than the floor. She is watching this girl in her kitchen hit the turnip as if she has some horrible thing to avenge on it. She watches her hit it is hit once and twice and thrice and then countless times until it is not good even for the sheep if there were sheep, there is no use for it now and the only thing to do would be to clean it up. She watches this girl who should be cleaning it up, who should be saying oh shit, what did I do, or who should be going upstairs to the baby who’s misplaced his thumb and not yet learnt how to put it back in, these things the girl should be doing. She watches her, as the spider upstairs turns on its thread to make another and another and another to weave into a web, its eggs are weighing it heavy now, will come when the weather turns, she watches and watches but the girl just stands, and if she knows she’s being watched she gives no sign of welcome or surprise, instead stands with the old hammer still in her hands surrounded by the orange and gold pulped mess around her and then, the river makes one mighty roar, breaches its own banks and it is that sound that should rupture deep enough, that and the baby who is angered now by his own impotence – he cannot shout his mother back; but these sounds do nothing to bring her back down and into herself and so instead she watches from up where she is, watches her as she drops the hammer, watches her walk to the back door, and out into the mud.

• 0