dirt

I hold the pencil and it seems to grow in my hand as though it were made of cells, spontaneously regenerating. Alive.
It seems to grow, I seem to be able to make it grow, now, for there are so many things coming to the fore of my mind.

The words are blooming like graphite flowers on the page. Now in that empty space between sleeping and waking. free like a rock floating around in the Universe. And so I can write. I can remember.

I remember it like it was a dream.

Mother. Lying in the dirt. Wilfully mourning a bloody bundle. Wilfully mourning, rubbing the apertures of the bloody baby-sized bundle with an enriching humble dirt, so warm from the sun, so brown. Merging minerals, elements, with the not-quite daughter. Rejuvenation from the outer of the womb.

She is not repulsed. I understand that she wants to reclaim her.

My sister.

I can understand that she wants to reclaim her, for I remember wanting her too, but she was never ours to begin with. She left us before she came to us.

Mother. Approaching me. I see that she is approaching me, bringing with her a small piece of gelatinous flesh, dripped with red like a flower losing its petals. She goes quiet, her sobs and harsher, more animal cries dropping to a calm inner cry.
Her eyes stare. They are glass balls. Her eyes stare ahead. And then she brings a wobbling but perfect piece of flesh to her face. I think to myself right then that she will rub it against her face like she does with soft leaves when she walks amongst nature.
She brings the flesh to her face, testing it. on the point of her tongue. Testing it.
She tests it, earnestly, like probing with her tongue.

I quiver, externally, body vibrating. I quiver, whimper, 'you're eating my sister. Earnestly.'

She howls. A wolf will howl at night. This was the middle of the day, mother and son out on the green prickly lawn surrounded by gum trees like a fence. This was more urgent than time would ever permit, and so she howls, without the presence of the dark and the full moon.
She howls and her teeth stick out of her red and bloated face, face as emotive and decorated as a baboon's. She sees young Adrian standing there, she sees me watching her like she is a scene. 'I've imbibed her,' she says, 'but I don't feel her.' And her throat is choking on tears and foetus, choking, pipes clogging and choking, and she still gets out the words: 'you try'.

That Adrian of the past is a lot more 'normal'. Or so you could say. He hasn't had time to reflect on this incident, he hasn't had time to develop. You could say he is waiting for this experience to happen to him and change him forever.
He stands there, a bodily image of a child. He stands there, and does nothing but stand. Sometimes doing nothing means doing something more than doing something.

Her fish's eyes, they fix on me. Cold and fixed like fish's eyes. Cold and blue, and not sad, not pained. Cold and fixed, complementing the red background of her face, blue and fishy and swooping down upon me, sweeping towards me like a multitude of pens, their graphite nibs irascible, petulant, and stabbing the page as my own does, now, in haste. They say that fish are not sentient in the way that humans are, or not in the same way, not in the way that we would ever understand. And they will never understand us.

Cold and fixed and unrelenting, superglued to the bodily image of me.
My face and hair become painted with the blood of a piece of my sister, as mother's arm reaches out and daubs me desperately. Her breath is hot and smells of the iron of blood, like the smell of money, of fish. She lifts her arms to push the foetal 'cake' into my mouth and the rasp of her past-shaven underarms grates on my vision as though she were rubbing her underarms on my eyeballs. Clutching me by the hair, the shirt, my arms, she shakes wetness, tears saliva and blood, onto me.

I feel like i am the spattered drops i have on me, now. Torn apart and not whole. I have become my sister, but I do not think right then to tell her. I do not think right then to stop her.

It is emotion. It is mixed and raw emotion, as raw and infused with potential, as a barrel of yeast and sugar. This is what I wanted, right? To relive this?

To be able to write?