Phantasm - Wattys 2017

-1-

The maternity ward is quiet now, its empty, clear corridors stark with silence.

I am black, black, against the white, white.

And I swirl around myself, like the waves ebbing at a beach, lapping against the ground, something liquid about myself, something insubstantial.

Maybe I am gas. Maybe I am dark light. 

I am gathering now, storm clouds, around the door of a room.

There is a woman lying on the bed, and her screams are painted on the walls. She's quiet now, perhaps she's asleep, but her arm is stirring, grasping the air.

She wants to hold the baby.

But its been a long and painful labour, and she is too weak, she is too tired. It is printed in her hair, sweat-beaded and fanned around her face, pale blond waves that lie limp. It is embroidered in her face, in her creases, in the skin around her eyes. Eventually her restless arm flops onto the sheet, while the nurses around the cot at the end of the bed fluster around the plaintively mewling baby.

Sweep, I do, across the floor towards her, and I remind myself of sand.

I can't stop myself when I, painfully, carefully, look at her face. A sleeping smile.

My opaque folds shift as I bend towards her, whatever I see out of following the lines of her eyelids. And I grant myself a touch of her hair, with my edge. I shiver, because how long has it been since I felt something?

I can't speak to her. So I repeat words in my mind, clustering, catching, and they are truthful.

I will not abandon her.

I will withstand for her.

I will heal her.

I will teach her.

And I let her go, I will see her again soon. Another one is mine.

I make my way towards the cot at the end of her bed, where the bundle of flesh has gone silent. Nurses are next to the mother now, they pass by me without comment. I am not tangible to them. Only a presence. Only a ghost.

She is a peeking face, out of the blankets. Dark hair that makes you think of the word shock. Yawning now, small pink mouth.

And stars, she is the brightest thing in the room.

I reach out to her (can I touch her?) but my hand goes through her. I allow myself to feel shocked, for a minute, as a human would. But I know I cannot forget what I am, no matter how much I already love her.

So instead, I think to her.

I will get you through this pain.

I promise.

And then I pour into her, scorching, because I am a jar, I am overflowing, and she is one to share with. She is simultaneously the guide and the follower. All at once I feel her painfully pure flood of mortality, and fragility, sweeping around me, knocking me out of myself. She is so tiny. She is so strong. She is mine.

And that is the truth.

The perfect, undeniable truth.