Dear Martha - coursework piece 4/4

The final, fourth piece to my Creative Writing coursework for Year 13. And what a whirlwind it was:

Dear Martha,

I know you would have preferred the title of ‘mum’, but I have not known you as that. Nor did I get to. I have lived with you as Martha and though it is only the second name I have known, it is by far my favourite.

When the warmth suddenly spilled away from my body, I was not to know that all I had experienced in my gifted cocoon would be different. Dreamily drifting was my only existence, as my body began to grow and expand. I did not even question this until my feet began to kick out at the pillowed walls. I could hear you laughing, a muffled river of vibrations wriggling into my ears.

As it grew colder, I uncurled my fingers and felt around my home: I was not nestled but encased. Floating was no use when there was nothing to make you weightless. My elbows became points, embedding into my stomach.

Hearing was not clear in my nest: I translated laughter from when I drummed against the skin and a lurch of the diaphragm slithered out into the other side and created a hearty booming. Sometimes, the outside was quiet and I thought there may never be sound again; when sound did knock again, however, I became full and content. When I wasn’t, I would become restless and I would hear that laugh of yours once more. It was our own secret game.

The noises were loud, louder than the word will describe: a wavering note so sharp I wanted to scrabble the other way, even though there was no other way to go. You were in pain, or what I believe to be pain. I know it wasn’t in me but I felt it: we were still connected.

Before, we were not only connected physically but I felt you too. When he clomped near and lightly squeezed us, you began to buzz in your blood and everything was balmy. Yet, when he was silent, your songs ceased for just a moment: a longing for him?

Leading up to the moment, I experienced these two perpetually. You had emotional pain, unlike the jarringly physical we would face, together.

As I struggled further from my soft shell, the sounds became more intense and the atmosphere was heavy, yet not with warmth as of before, but of air. I did not like it yet I kept crawling; I knew you needed me to.

This was the moment when our connection was at its strongest: our hearts were bouncing as rapid as one-another’s, as we jerked and strained together.

I never did get to explore further than that heavy air but I doubt I would have liked it. Martha, I do not know how you enjoy swimming in that, compared to the warmth you provided me. Or, maybe it was your sacrifice for me.

I believe our skin finally met, but by then, the dense air had halted from circulating my body. Do not worry yourself that I disliked those minutes, for although I was not enclosed in you, I was really with you.

I never did experience pain in the end. Nor depression or guilt or illness. But, Martha, I did always feel love. I will always love you like you have loved me for all this time.

I hope to see you soon,

Sofia

(I believe this is the name you labelled me. I do like it very much; it is my second favourite, after yours.)

RED - Tinted Poems No. 3

It's the tsunami in pulsating arteries
Spurring the heart to its conclusions.
It's the embrace of two lovers by the lips
Drawing a pigment along the cheekbones.

It's the blaze embellished on fallen leaves
Summer fruits plucked from their root.
It's the comfort on your fish fingers
Smearing on your childish cheeks.

It's the crisp carnations lain on a doorstep
The declaration of svelte body language.
It's the suggestive gloss under the cupid's bow
Sweeping proclamation of lustful confidence.

It's the lash of tongue in vile rage
A wet snake with cutting eyes.
It's the torrent that seeps out of open flesh
Leaving you with only crimson on your gums.

Vegetable - coursework piece 3/4

Third instalment of the four pieces that made up my Creative Writing coursework for Year 13:

Uncrossing her legs, Martha swallows, tightening her clasp on Adam’s unresponsive hand. She stalls for a few moments, her internal engine frosted with taciturnity. Martha does not register the monotonous beeping of the heart monitor or the breathing apparatus inflating her husband like a paper bag; like their honeymoon in Greece, she is deaf to the hospital noises, as if they were innocuous cicadas.

            “They – the doctors – Dr. Milton really – was talking today about the-your life support.” Martha feels like she must correct herself, even though her husband cannot assist.

            “They – Dr. Milton – said that if you continue to show no signs of improvement, they may turn off your life support. Me. I’ll have to turn it off.”

Her bottom lip quivers but she has learnt to steady her voice. If Adam can hear her through his jigsaw skull, she would not want to worry him.

Glancing to the bedside table, Martha falls upon the bronze-framed photo of the couple, taken on their second wedding anniversary just two months before. His brother had caught her laughing at Adam balancing the soupspoon upon his nose, at the restaurant that took three-months-advanced booking. Instinctively, she twirls her gold band, with her thumb, around her ring finger on her free hand.

            “I know you’d want to hear this Adam – can’t keep you out of the loop.” She allows a gasping laugh to trickle out of her throat. She misses his chuckle.

            “Why did this have to happen Adam?” She bursts, as if the oxygen machine was pumping her with choking emotion.

            “Why wasn’t loosing our baby enough? It’s as if grief stalks us-“ Martha stops; succumbs to the rhythm of the beeps, while stroking Adam’s head, avoiding the missing segment of skull the surgeons had to extract last night.

***

I can feel her touch on my skin, just about my right eyebrow. Her fingers are soft, delicate – I thought from all her crying, her skin would be raw from dehydration.

Because I had to see you, my love. How could you be alone in a hospital bed, after all that has happened? Oh Martha, please don’t blame yourself: it will never be your fault. Sofia just wasn’t ready for the world – I’ve had enough time to contemplate in this state.

In moments like this, I wish we had bought a dog, a bouncy retriever, or a scruffy collie – like Bramble. I knew I’d never forget her, like I could never forget your face, Martha, even when I haven’t seen it in weeks… I just wish I could open my eyes, just for a few moments, to see your face; maybe it would awaken my body from its internal imprisonment.

It’s funny: this is not what I thought a coma would feel like. I wish I could tell you Martha. It’s like I’ve dived down a pit, a long black tube, with smooth sides so I can’t climb out. And, instead of my vocals echoing when I shriek, they are suffocated by a thick blanket of blackness, and evaporate before reaching me in the hole again. I’m sure you have a dead leg – maybe the shuffling before you spoke was you shrugging off the numbing pins-and-needles. My limbs feel like they’ve been long dead; they’re not mine anymore. The nurses – usually Michelle, isn’t it? Or Nancy – cycle my legs back and forth, gently, to continue the blood flow I think. Stop bedsores and muscle wastage I think… When I wake up, I bet I won’t even recognise them!

Don’t worry Martha, I heard Dr. Milton too. I wish I could tell – whisper to you even – that I am not a vegetable yet. I can’t stop thinking about the limp cabbage my mother served us on Christmas day, stranded in the colander.

I miss you Martha. I know I keep saying it, over and over like the first vinyl I bought for us last year, but I will never be tired of it, of you. If I could lift my arms, I’d close them around you so much – so tight – you’d want me to be asleep again. I don’t want you to think it’s your fault. It’s not. It never will be. It breaks my expiring heart to think you believe this, or plague yourself with ”why me?”’s. In this world, so much can happen: I could have crashed last week, last year, before we even met (Oh Martha, I couldn’t stand that!) And we would have never even anticipated Sofia! She’ll be ok wherever she is, Martha, like you will be, and I. We’ll pull through.

JAUNE - Tinted Poems No. 2

They are outlined by an angelic glow

skip-roping with a halo, as they drift

golden embers ablaze in monochrome

lingering towards my lips when we meet.

They wield the sun on their shoulders

while pirouetting under the clouds.

To hold onto their fingertips would not burn

but simply radiate, igniting your singular spark.

They have skin diffusing resplendent beams

baptising your cheeks to glow eternal youth.

And like sunflowers, they peer out of their petals

with an internal bloom that will never wilt.

They can coat you like caramel

and sweeten your aura like honey.

But as stalks of straw amongst a flaxen field

these people are modest to their own brilliance.

Grief - coursework piece 2/4

The second piece of four of my Creative Writing coursework for Year 13:

From being born of Love and Sadness, I have, of course, danced with Death. But I want more than haunting; I want to be with them. Have a family of my own.

***

When Love fell for the multitude of spirits that breathe upon the Earth, many new forms were created. And, when Love was entranced by Sadness' melancholy depression, I was born; like them, I was to drift around the humans, shadowing their actions until they called for me to invade their lives. Everything is controlled by us for these beings, otherwise their motions would be meaningless: to take someone's life would be a careless act - as hurling out an overripe fruit - and therefore be a ritual in their lifespan until there were none of them left. However, instead they are infested with emotions, so as to aid their life (we are almost as their servants, until we come to rule them; look towards Depression for example – how does one believe that happens?). When one human contracts the despicable urge to decapitate another, Sadness, Guilt, Anger, Fear, we all swarm into their skull, until the bone is almost shattered. And, if this does not stop them, myself - along with the others, who are otherwise repressed into a deep corner - emerge. This is where I am different to Sadness, but mostly Love. I wish I could be Love. For at least the majority crave her. Only the humans depleted of us may request me.

For I am Grief.

As I began to unfurl to the Earth – my life source, like they praise the sun, or oxygen – I was taught how to study the human’s expressions, their thoughts, the wavered foreheads and more so lips. When they called out as the speckled moon, Sadness or Joy would swoop over their heads, to hook their grins or withdraw their heads. I was put in my place. When Sadness or Agony or the other ‘negatives’ hailed upon a human – or Love withdrew – I would linger behind the shrubbery or from under the manicured couch, from where I would creep; like the wisp of air changing direction in the leaves, I would rest upon their shoulders. Lean in. Whisper in their ear. Enter into their brain and heart and blood until I was all they could focus upon: grieving.

If Death follows a human into a hospital ward, I will chant around the waiting room. When a friend has transported to another Isle, I will perch in the waver’s breast pocket. And, if Love withdraws her clasped fingers from around two human’s hands, I disperse, like glue, around both. Stuck with me: Grief.

Some days I do not mind watching the humans’ tales; from afar, their mournful skin appears merely whitewashed with emotional exhaustion. But, mostly, I want to be more. I want to be with them. I want to be like Love.

I understand how these beings contemplate when Jealousy hunches in their pinnas. How I desire to be summoned by their hypnotised hearts. Pray to be craved by one, by two, by many. I wish to be in a human family, like Love is.

And, one day, I did try. So desperately I wanted to be loved, like her. 

*** 

Her laugh wheeled above the valley she was trundling into, whistling over to my metaphoric ears (for I am sadly but an emotional spirit). I had just delivered the realisation to a young father, an afternoon behind, in Bogotá: a son - no older than a tree’s first saplings - was wilting like a root, suffocated by the ivy twines of his dreaded diagnosis. What must it be like to have a body succumb to biology’s misunderstanding? I was tired. Flailing under yet another case where my name is engraved on the file. Grieving. He was grieving for the son Hope was unlikely to rescue.

Martha held, outstretched on her fingertips, a remedy I was willing to self-administer. She was to prevent my mind stumbling over past journeys, such as the father in Columbia, forever slumped with the anchors of Sorrow. A joyous glint prancing in her eyes, as her husband smirked bashfully, as if he were in adolescence again: Martha and Adam, kindling Love with every cradle by the roasted fireplace or a walk that rushes the blood to the cheeks into circular pools under the eyes. Trust had weaved his ribbony body through their cells, nurturing a new life in Martha’s own body: Sofia. She would have her mother’s artistic fingers and her father’s hay-tinted pin-curls, both unfurling in the sweet liquid that surrounded her. Martha and Adam and Sofia. And I.

***

Adam Finnegan – born as Marion, but swiftly exchanged this for his second name – found Martha on the fourth morning of year five, solitarily swirling a dish of purple paint, until it resonated into a deep mauve. He could recite lyrics after only indulging in the eddying accompaniments to strums and percussion, and had a fond memory of nibbling chips on a Welsh seaside visit with his parents, so hot they prickled his teeth. I had met him just before his fourth Christmas, when Bramble – a whiskery collie, mottled with burrowing silver strokes – slept one evening and awoke the next unable to stand.

Martha Finnegan knew of Adam’s existence on the fifth lunchtime of year five, both unfolding cellophaned sandwiches to uncover a shared insistence for cheese and pickle, brown bread on a mother’s persistence. She was once Martha Perrin, until a signed paper twenty-six months ago announced otherwise. On that day, she wore lavender in her hair and danced to a French tune she learnt at thirteen on the violin. I had studied her long before she was to learn of my existence, as I was already present before her birth: an anchor to her mother’s spirit, from her sister who would never be fulfilled as an aunt.

From the moment I had been intertwined with them; I knew that in under a season’s twirl, Sofia would begin to write – and be written for – her own script, while I gazed onwards. Anticipating the unplanned second that grieving is unconsciously demanded.

I did not want to do this any longer.

After a few mundane days, I had learnt more of the Finnegans than most emotions recite about our own kind: she wore dresses on Fridays, he became a baker on Sunday afternoons, warming by the cooker, as the newspaper imprinted on the side of their hands. I would love them. I did love them. My own family to distract me from Depression’s sombre opera and Death’s march. It was what I had always wanted: to be like Love.

I could not be Love when March beckoned time into another inch around the sun.

***

Her crying was a hurricane in each eye, bulging above her cheekbones and dying the whites a web of carnations. The phone locking into her grasped hand – imitating the fist of an infant - remained solid, even as her arms, her body, shook. Martha was not like the woman I had netted from devotion and admiration. Like so many swept into my clasp, encircling their individual worlds like jellyfish stingers, she was grieving. Sofia, three months too early. Too immature, undeveloped to survive. A fervent doctor referred to it as an ‘incompetent cervix’ yet, gazing back, I feel the culprit was I: if I had not loved Martha and Adam, little unborn Sofia may not have slipped from her home too soon. May not have shattered the fragility of life I know like unconscious recollection.

I could not know this though. Not then, that is.

Martha now needed me: not to be Love but to be Grief.

Yet, I still adamantly parented both roles, coddling her, as she lay, foetal, on the hospital ward’s bedding. As she held the phone long after her brief call to Adam had ended; its silence indifferent to his voice. She was calling, bellowing to Death inside her shrinking skull, demanding to be with her child she had prepared so long for. Little Sofia, with exaggerated lips and slim ankles and a penny-sized stork mark, where the spine joins to the brain.

***

When the words slithered into his phone’s receiver, Adam had darted for the couple’s car: his arms blazed from the glacial winds, but had no capacity to think of more layers to cover his body, already pinched with shock more chilling than that March morning. Unaware of my own bitter breath: unaware of anything. When I am haunted with the Finnegans – after Death reels past with another infant in his jowls, after a family huddle in solidarity against the loss – it was that moment that I entertained Regret: why must I have been the passenger?

The speed an existence can implode – rapids changing direction after washing past a single pebble – has been of fascination to us emotions. How, within a second, we are exchanged, as if the previous were never in the present for a human. One expression can signal arrows to pin the heart to Love or Loss or me.

Adam Finnegan was filled like an overflowing bathtub of stagnant water when his blood slugged down his temple and his eyes didn’t register the white, wintery sun. Blinded with a reality shackled to me – how I smouldered Martha’s mother, a suffocation that was always on the brink – he could not register an onslaught from another car, emerging from a junction: an infected twig that destroys a hundred-year old oak. I submerged the cars, the road, drowning both Adam and the other, unsuspecting driver with an elongated sigh. Death knelt next to Adam, blood like black opal dripping onto the adjacent seat.

He was not dead.

Not at that moment anyway.

***

I hid from the Finnegan’s after encasing Martha a second time, like another wave of toxins; penetrating her every cell. I could not peer upon her swollen features, as she drooped over her husband in his hospital bed, induced into a healing sleep. Love pulsated between them, as if it were stitching over and over, between their two hearts. But that was Love’s medication, not mine. For I could never be Love. Love could bind a heart to make their eyes weep with happiness, could offer Joy like a freckle you never knew was on your cheek.

My job was to serve Depression on chipped china and infected teacups, be vanquished by the ‘good’ and expelled back to the same corner I was designed to fit into. I, Grief, would wrap Martha with a choking scarf of Sadness and little by little, she would unpick each thread, until I lay, a single woollen strand, in the depths of a coat pocket with the lint and forgotten pound notes. It was not my place to be the knitter, weaving myself between them, craved, desired, radiated.

I am Grief. And that is all I can ever offer.

Apes - coursework piece 1/4

This is the first part of my four-piece Creative Writing coursework for Year 13. And, now I have finally received my results, here they all are! All of these fictional stories flow into each other, beginning with 'Apes':

Silver spills from her face, onto the pillowcase, the bed sheets, herself. Her face is contorted like the tissues filled with feelings around her crumpled body. I can’t stop staring at her, this woman, with tears streaming like a marathon down her irregularly blotched skin.

I am in the hospital for a suspected fractured forearm: a car pulled out in front of my racing bike and I spiralled over the handlebars; an acrobat, but without a net to prevent this ending. I lay on the tarmac, breathless, not focusing on the pain but that man inside the car. I wanted to kill him. I was late for work – now even more so – and there is nothing I hate more than my own employees swaggering in later than is protocol, casually bowling lines to me such as ‘“I just had to grab a coffee,”’ or ‘“Sorry, children, nightmare!”’ I wanted to hurl that man out of his Ford and smash him to the ground and see how he felt.

My arm was supposed to be positioned by my head when I fell, but instead had scuttled towards my feet, the bones crunching when they stroked the road.

He had broken my arm.

I didn’t kill him, by the way. I never would. I get niggling urges, you see, but most people do; Mother always used to say she would ‘box the ears’ of the children she used to tutor. But now I’m in hospital and had to call in sick for work and this woman will not stop crying.

Will I ever cry like her? I have cried from pain, but never happiness or desperation. Sometimes, when Phoebe slouches at her secretary desk adjacent to my own, looming into a mug of weak tea, I secretly try to mimic the lines that fold her forehead and crease around lipstick-stained lips. After a while, she may confide that ‘her boyfriend doesn’t love her’ and I have to practise the innate response of an empathetic gleam in the eye, pass her a biscuit from the tin by the printer. She shuts up for a bit after that, acutely aware of her munching, as to not distract me. But I don’t feel this empathy, you see, I only portray it: a peacock’s display with no female in mind.

People who are gay usually announce that ‘they have always known they were different’: I suppose it’s the same with myself. While other children cried after mummy when they were surrendered to nursery, I anchored myself contently to a corner, holding a plastic train captive in my ABC Blocks castle. They would bring back trinkets from holidays abroad for their best friends, from Disney Land, Edinburgh, Cornwall; I would offer treats to targets I could climb upon, levitating to the top of the social hierarchy. I was aggressive and tactile with my popularity: everyone knew my name.

I am still awaiting my x-ray, but I assume I have fractured my forearm: radius and ulna. Most people would be jittery, legs jiggling nervous energy through the floor to disperse through the other patients, like an infected water source. Never have my shoulders exhibited scars from nerves embedding its nails, injecting white noise as I complete an exam or the build up to a first kiss. Even if that driver had stepped out of his Ford and questioned me, primitive aggression would conduct my reactions: I don’t fear physical injury, only the scenario of allowing the other person to believe that they have beaten me.

Being led, like an orphaned child, through the crudely coloured corridors for an x-ray, I continue my discrete analysis of the crying woman as I pass her, constricted in the duvet that swaddles her shrunken body. An ultrasound scan of purple and grey shades merge to form the faint outlines of a baby, wrinkling in her hands. I wonder if I will ever care so deeply about another life like her. Or if I am emotionally impenetrable, forever feigning normality in a society of melodramatic apes.