Where I End

by Sophie White

I had children and felt the terror of my own power to destroy them.

but the islanders know the sea is God. They know that religion is a pathetic performance, a plea for clemency by lost people. The sea laughs at such pleading.

She was an island and I was trying to claim her. Eventually the trying started to hurt me. The trying made my chest cramp and my heart dreary. After a while, the trying hurt more than not trying and so I stopped.

Island mothers outside the shop reached for their children and their children shook them off with impatience, sure in the knowledge that the mother was always at their back ready to lay loving hands.

‘Don’t go looking for things and then you won’t think you see them.

Through the books I learned about things I didn’t have and things I wouldn’t do. Some seemed unappealing. Jobs and exams and that. Other things were just baffling: the children in my books led lives of incomprehensible simplicity, lost balls in the park and new pets. I

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

beautiful. At the base of the cliffs at the west end, it licks

His memories sustain the love and the thing he sees once a month is tidied up by us, neatened for his consumption.

(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.)

I know it’s my fault, which makes me madder.

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.

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She gives it a percussive little tap every couple of seconds, keeping time with some mysterious motherly rhythm.

She is done washing and the baby is starting to mewl—an irritating noise, though she smiles down at it anyway. Imagine being looked at that way. That baby doesn’t even know any different.

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

The baby had to come from somewhere I suppose, though I don’t like to think of it. An ungrateful man rooting around between her thighs, fiddling and probing at her.

‘The baby looks well. He’s lovely.’ When I say this, she smiles even though it is patently untrue. The baby is a fattening tick.

‘I can’t do the things I usually do. I have so many things I want to make but I feel so stymied. My mind is just so fixed on the baby. Even if I try to think of something else, a painting or whatever, I start to panic. I feel like I’m being selfish, neglecting him.’ Her face is caving in on itself as she struggles to get the last words out: ‘And I feel ashamed of some of the resentful things in my head.’

‘I don’t know why. I don’t know if it’s me or this place. I feel so wide open since having the baby. When I was pregnant I felt so happy. I made beautiful things and it felt like the baby was with me as I created. Then they pull you open and they pull the baby out and they leave you like that.’ She looks back down at the baby. ‘I haven’t closed back up yet. I feel like anything could get in.

Such a caring death, this overzealous feeding. Such a flaw in our design to have a mouth. A wide-open crevasse, into which such effortless destruction may be poured.

She tells me that drawing and painting and stitching are just doing, that what makes something art is the intention behind it. If the intention is to communicate some intangible feeling or slippery truth that resists capture by words, then it is art.

That’s what a baby is, I’ve come to see now. It is the mother’s whole soul extracted,

My mother’s body gives three thrashing thrusts. Why do death and ecstasy look so similar?

How does he still get up and put on shoes every day? How does he eat? How does he use those arms for stupid mundane things, the arms that lost his baby?

‘I never found Baby Étaín. I searched for hours. Móraí found us a while later. She held you and begged me to come in, but she couldn’t get me back out. I couldn’t walk out of the sea without my baby. I couldn’t leave her in the ocean.