Where I End

by Sophie White

The bishop dispatches him to sell their stories, but the islanders know the sea is God. They know that religion is a pathetic performance, a plea for clemency by lost people.

The gaze of the house is now unnerving. It has been gagged, the eyes and mouth stuffed shut with the stacked splintered rock. The straight-edged lines are steely stitches that have sewn our house closed. Inside is worse.

‘They’ll think we did this to her,’ she said. (did we not?)

So even though I note the traces she drives into the floors, I know that it’s to no end. It has become one of my obsessive gestures. I don’t want to drop the thread because what if— whatifwhatifwhatif (one day there is an answer?)

Dada is the most alive of us I think. He hogs all the feelings in this withered house. He is swollen with guilt and pressed down with disappointment. He leaks tears like bilge water. It’s a relief when he goes.

The island is hostile; the seas murder the men and regurgitate them for us to see and know what’s coming for us all.

And still the people of this island never learn to swim. Never, ever. They are superstitious. They believe to do so is an act of hubris, an outrageous and foolish attempt at dominion over nature.

The islanders treat their sea like a cruel, unstable parent to be appeased. If the sea decides to...

The sea didn’t love me—I am not stupid, no one loves me—but it didn’t ignore me. When I was younger, in bed at night, I swaddled myself in the blankets trying to make a tight embrace, but the exertion required ruined the illusion. In the sea, I didn’t have to drive this embrace around me. The sea swarms me, reaching up my body as I make my way in. The sea wants me.

I am not just dwelling, servile, at the foot of a rancid mother’s bed—I am living, even if it’s only for a short while.

The sea is death reanimated. Down under the shimmying surface, the currents conduct the corpses and they sway in a dance, ringed around the island’s underbelly.

He loves the thing somehow. His memories sustain the love and the thing he sees once a month is tidied up by us, neatened for his consumption. Without it in his eyeline constantly, it is easier for him to recast this thing as a tragic ailing wife and mother.

He can’t see it for what it is because he has the luxury of never looking straight at it. He has the luxury of looking away.

Dada says it’s our minds playing tricks on us, but I think it’s the island playing tricks. And ‘playing’ is much too sweet a word.

‘Your mind is playing tricks on you.’ Desperation bleeds into his eyes even though he’s smiling as he says it.

The islanders call it scáth suarach anama. Soul-stench. Where I touch—the door of the shop, the baby’s pram that time—they spit and mutter these words to rid the place of me.

(Hope, I’ve come to learn, can be a noose. When we hope, we willingly, blithely, put our heads in a sadistic coil and wait to be hanged. I hoped for things when I was younger—pathetic things—and was always left swinging.)

If she were not so empty, I would be full. I would be boiled pink with love like Rachel’s baby. Instead I am an echo.

It was hard returning to my narrow life and the hours clawed back to a crawl once again, each day advancing so slowly it felt like the island’s patchy scrub was growing faster.

In the next room, she creaks. We never see her move.

I imagine unseen forces holding the surrounding water back, stopping it from spilling down into the void. The island drags everything down and might one day drain even the huge sea.

I think I can feel her, the aliveness of her. Can she feel me?

She is like the sea, constantly churned up and moving. In comparison, I am blank. Empty like the island, this hole in the ocean.

From standing at the window for hours at a time, I have become familiar with the rhythms of the screaming. A consistent, grating bawl means Rachel is asleep and the baby is tiring, perhaps sensing the futility of carrying on full throttle.

I pick through them and every one of them shows the bed-thing back in the smiling days (when she was my mother)

Why do we keep her going? On and on she will go. She will last forever.

(when I began, she ended)

The desire to hear the words of the bed-thing for the first time in my entire life has seized me—my every cell is bursting with this desperate want. It feels like the twin of my want for Rachel.

I need to explain to you. As the time has gone on and I’ve returned to my self, I have looked out of my eyes to the world around me. A small world now. I glimpse it only through cracks in the sheets of stone stacked from top to bottom of the window. Between each is an upright sliver of this awful place and I am assailed by the images of that day. My hands doing the doing. Regret is too slight a word for it all. I sit in horror. I don’t deserve to die, I deserve to live. I search out new methods of pain

Maybe it’s never worked because cruelty is what she craves.

I say I am to blame: For ending you before you began. I murdered your soul and you are empty now. You’re a damned thing.

My smile is the leering twin of her simpering one.

They’re lost in an ocean they’re not even aware of, and I am a dense wave rearing over them.

I am their god. A quiet god. A loving god.

That’s what a baby is, I’ve come to see now. It is the mother’s whole soul extracted, freed from her body and out of her control. It is her entire existence absorbed by this chunk of meat, a jumble of tiny bones and flickering organs. That’s what a baby is. A little device with which to torment its mother.

You are a wrong thing. You are infecting that woman and her baby. I can see it in them. Just like you infected us.’ Spit, spit, spit, she goes. ‘You’ll leave them alone or I will see to it that they leave you alone. I’ll see to it that they run from you. That they shut the door against you.’

‘A martyr doesn’t pull every single person down with them,’ she hammered out at her. ‘You sentenced us all to this half-life, you demon thing. And another daughter annihilated.’

We have gathered around her in a never-ending vigil for a long time. This is the end of a nineteen-year wake.

It doesn’t matter that Dada will probably shy away from my efforts. Always deceiving himself. It’s Móraí I am creating this awful spectacle for.

‘Children, yes,’ he repeats and sighs. ‘You had a sister. We called her Étaín but she didn’t live.’

I long to attack his beloved bed-thing right in front of him. I long to hurt him.

I am positive that whatever malevolence is in me was planted that day and certainly not a moment before. Whatever I am, you made me so, Mother mother.

I can hear the churning ocean down there and the crying. Always the crying. I wonder now if the crying got inside me that day. It got inside me and then never left me. The cries hadn’t come from across the fields and rocks of the island as I’d thought, the cries—my baby sister’s cries—called up from the echoing well that I am. The echoing well that I’ve always been.