The Girl from Rawblood

by Catriona Ward

“They hear it,” he said, “but they do not mark it. It is a constant; they have accustomed themselves. But if I increase the pitch so”—he poured ale into the glass, and it sang out higher—“and so on, eventually, the glass will shatter. That, they will note. There will be a great fussing with cloths and restitution and a new glass, as if it were a surprise. But the warning has been sounding”—he made the glass sing again—“all along. Do you understand?” “I do not, I confess.” I was held by the lights that moved in his eyes. “It is so that death sits beside us every day, until it is forced upon our notice. Until the vessel breaks open and life flows out, we must be blind and deaf to its presence, or we could not conduct our carnival as we do.”

I would not have thought he still lived; to me, he looked old when I was young. But the eyes of youth see nothing as it is.

The lamp fell on objects of a sudden, giving them a surprised and strange look, as though they had been doing something furtive in the dark and had only resumed their immobility that instant for our benefit.

Loneliness is not what people think it is. It is not a song. It’s a little bitter thing you keep close, like an egg under a hen. What happens when the shell cracks? What comes forth?

The bones lie in beautiful order, each leading naturally to the next. His skull is a calcified apple.

“I mistook it for horror, but it was merely love, in the end.”

I swallow, sea grit mingling uneasily with sweet crumbs in the imagination of my tongue; everything is in disorder. The sharp dun crescent gives way to wet olive sand beyond, a blinding sheen, a net of glassy pools. The sun falls upon the bay, is hurled back in serried points of light. The sea is cast across the skyline, beaten steel. A gull bawls, high, distant. The world is dangerous. But it is also beautiful. I had forgotten.

The sudden twilight of the carriage is shot with arcs and bolts of pink and yellow and gray, endless waves breaking. My heavy eyes. Burn it, whispers someone in my ear. Burn it.

I’ll go into him like sickness.

Grief is a strange beast. It lives in one like a worm, curls and uncurls at will.

Her head is free of bandages, and without them, she is suddenly sharp, alive, the shape of her skull tender beneath fine new hair. The scars stand up like valley rims in the moonlight. The raw wound where her shoulder bleeds, syrup dark on her white skin. Her face is a mask. Her blank eyes have no center. The eyes expand, grow, and take up her face. They swell, spread into the air, take in everything until the world is made of one mad eye.