Llanfaria: Flash Fiction
When it became clear that she would live her husband told her he was leaving her
The flesh of her body gathered itself into knots, mounds and cairns of tumors erupting beneath her skin. When the disease was at its fever pitch she laid in bed moaning in pain, wavering off the shore of consciousness, drifting into the gray sea of death, floating back again toward the vivid pain of life, the struggle. She awoke finally on the shore, her transformed body pallid and glistening. When it became clear that she would live her husband told her he was leaving her.
On the boat to the island of Llanfaria the cold spray of water stung her skin. For the most part, only the most recently-arrived women covered their tumors, which protruded from beneath the formless black gowns in which they outfitted themselves. The guilt of self-loathing sagged within her heart; looking into the blemished face of the moon she tried to calm her desire to tear her body to pieces. When she and her sisters laid in the Llanfarian fields of green just off the shore and let the sun warm their skin, Julienne felt ashamed of her shame; she wanted to forget what ugliness was but could not. Overcome with the simple joy of being alive she could have kissed the bodies of any of those women, could have told them, You are so beautiful, You are so beautiful; she could have cried from the love she felt. Every time she awoke in the hospital, ran her fingers over the bandages where some operable tumors had been, instead of feeling joy that they were gone, she felt a brutal anger that her body would never again be the way it had been; felt a brutal anger that even then she had not loved it; felt she had been robbed both of her past and her future.
She was inclined toward reconciliation, and when she left the island one of the first things she did was to visit her ex-husband in Redington, along with his wife and their two children, who were not brought out to see her. Of the younger generations there were already those who had no memory of the epidemic, knew nothing of its symptoms, and treated her with contempt; on the train a pair of teenagers noticed the tumors that remained on her ankle, and then on her forearm, and then on her neck, and then caused a ruckus about it, saying of her, What the fuck, what the fuck, I can’t deal with this shit; — until moving away. That night as she fell asleep in her hotel room she held her body as if she was another person, caressed it as if to soothe it of all its pain. She felt like a mother and her body the child: she felt like she would love it, in all its dumb tyranny, no matter what. She dreamed she was back in the field of grass with her sisters; she dreamed not of the fullness of her body but of the fullness of her soul.
