Amongst the Thorns
Deep in the thicket of her sleep she vainly tries to reassemble the scattered pieces of her life.
They surround her like leaves caught upon thorns. One by one she picks them off and examines them. Does this one come before this other? Is there a beginning? An end? To her they seem all alike, all present at once. There is no time, only the infinite now.
Here is one. She is lying on her side, wrapped in twisted metal. Centimetres from her face, there is the spinning wheel of a car, the tread of its tyre blurring past her eyes.
Somewhere there is terrible pain. Running through it all, between every piece of memory, the ghastly pain. Pain, and the memory of pain.
She picks on another piece of her life. She is in a pink party dress. Her father bends down to kiss her forehead, calling her “Princess”.
Another kiss, soft and gentle on her lips. But this time her eyes are closed, she cannot see who it is.
It is her wedding day. Dressed in white she stands in the church, her heart fluttering with happiness, next to her charming husband. Over near the font, there is a disturbance… but no, that is a different piece of life: her mother, telling her a story, oft repeated. The baptismal font, the priest, the holy water. And the crazy mad woman, a distant relative, turning up uninvited, having to be dragged away, screaming insane curses at the baby. The shocked face of the priest.
Again comes the pain. Like a red thread it runs through the warp and weft of her mind.
She pushes the pain aside, remembers the car again, the shattered car, the snow of broken glass in which she lies, the wheel of another vehicle almost touching her face, spinning, spinning.
Then there is a prick in her arm. How can she possibly feel that prick, a mere drop in the ocean of her pain? The face of the paramedic, murmuring something kind as the hypodermic slides in. And so the sleep begins.
The hypodermic is just the start. Somehow she knows that her flesh is pierced, penetrated, in a dozen places, by the briar thorns. Their shoots, their clear transparent shoots, flowing with liquid, are all about her, tangling her, entering and exiting the piercings of her body.
Someone, far off, speaks a word. “Rose…”. Is it a flower? She sees the bright red flower in an immediate series of static, unconnected images, the flower in full bloom, the swelling rosehip, the bud, the loose petals withered. They are like playing cards discarded loosely onto a table, no card following or preceding another.
“Rose…”
Or could it be a name? Could it be her name?
At the thought, the leaves, the pieces of her life, suddenly whirl, as though a strong wind has blown up and scattered them yet again, forming another pattern. But this one is no more comprehensible than the last. She despairs of her task. Perhaps there is no sequence, perhaps her life simply consists of these unconnected pieces. Is that what life really is? Is time an illusion? Does one thing follow another?
She picks up a discarded piece, one she has looked at already.
The kiss. Not her father’s kiss, but a loving, gentle, kiss on her lips, filling her with an access of joy. Her lover’s kiss.
Now at last she knows its place. That is the last piece, the end of the sequence! She has just been kissed, and he has spoken her name.
She opens her eyes and wakes, and it is as though a hundred years have passed.
This is one of the many stories in my collection The Dark Lighthouse, available here.
