Short Story
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18th March 2016
Islanders
She’s been told it’s a whole different kind of love, a bush fire of love. Wouldn’t it be a waste to complete the one life you are given in a single even stroke, without even giving this special, this exclusive breed of love a try? Your body can create life. Add a single cell; one tiny unit of punctuation and your body will light up and begin to weave. Your body has the ability to string together muscle and tendon, the capacity to home a little human form. It will contain the blossoming of the miniature alveoli and the spreading of tiny arterial creepers. It will home a blastocyst before an embryo, a foetus. It will be like a photograph developing inside you, he says, a tiny garden growing for us to cultivate and hold in our arms. But she keeps thinking of how the eyes in a foetus can be seen through the raw and illuminated skin, as though through a sun-lit eyelid, in their black entirety – a soggy, tapioca-pearl black. Too reminiscent of the eyes she picks out of king prawns before eating them. She picks them out for Christopher too so he doesn’t have to; he is incredibly squeamish about such things. She deadheads the damp pink crescents deftly, the same way she deadheads roses, and it seems correct to Christopher that her hands are always busy because restless is how he knows her to be. He watches her fingers extend like the foolhardy necks of wild birds to investigate a tablecloth pattern, to snap asparagus into equally-sized cylinders, to roll and fold a cigarette, a cinema ticket, before pulling it to hundreds of bits which she then wonders what to do with. He knows her nails to be kept very short - the white line always below the fleshy curve of the fingertip – because she nibbles them.