Sinking

By Amethyst Turner

Give me a lake and I would drown

Give me a hand and I would come back up

Give me pain and I would hate

Give me relief and I would love

XXX

Richard didn't think he'd ever been so mad about anything in his life. It burned in his chest, hot and red like coal. His vision blurred under the weight of his ire, his limbs heavy with it. He needed a drink.

"Stop, stop, I'm begging you!" Libby shouted. It wasn't really a shout anymore, though; just a slow, labored wheeze.

Richard swung again, the sound of her voice making him feel even worse. "You deserve this," he found himself growling over and over again as his fists made impact with her skin. "You deserve this, you deserve this, you deserve this."

She was shriveled again, bony as the branches of a bare January tree, her hair knotted and oily. Her body disgusted him. In her nakedness, Richard could see the ugly blue veins of milk hardening in her breasts, the wrinkled skin of her stomach sagging like an empty bag. Her face, made even more sour by labor and grief, stared up at him with pleading eyes.

How could she have let this happen? What was her purpose in this life, if not to keep that one little human being safe, to carry them safely into the world? Well, he. It'd been a boy.

Richard let his hands drop, suddenly too tired to move. He fell back on their bed and left her to cry on the floor while he fell into a fitful sleep.

XXX

It didn't make any sense: hadn't Owl said there would be a baby? That it had come out of her mother?

Maybe, Aimee thought, there was just a problem like there sometimes was with the mail, where the delivery got delayed. Maybe someone had to bring them the baby and they just hadn't gotten around to it yet.

But then, there had been so much screaming from the delivery room.

She decided that there would probably be a baby, anyway. They didn't just disappear. She opened the middle drawer of the bureau, the tallest one she could reach and climbed onto her bed to look inside of it. Amethyst certainly couldn't fit herself in there now. Babies must be super small to squeeze into such tight spaces.

Would the baby sleep downstairs, she wondered? Would it occupy this same dresser drawer right beside her bed? Would she wake up to the sound of its shrieking and fall asleep to its gentle coos?

Aimee didn't think so. Sometimes, when the house was silent, her father blacked out in the kitchen and she herself lying in bed, trying not to see the shadows in the dark room, she would hear the gentle notes of her mother's voice floating down the stairs, sometimes songs or little stories. They never lasted very long, but Amethyst knew she was talking to the baby. If she loved it that much, why would she let it sleep downstairs, so far away?

"I love you," she whispered into the bureau. Even if her mother didn't, maybe the baby would love her when it was old enough to decide.

XXX

"Miss Briggs?"

Melissa looked up. Daniel stood in her doorway, looking at the ground. "Oh, Daniel!" she said. "Come in. It's good to see you."

It was, in fact. She'd been feeling wretchedly lonely just a moment ago. She had just scribbled Trent's name out of her little book of phone numbers. Now all that was left of him was a big black indent that tore through to the next page in places.

Daniel sat down across from her, a shy smile on his face. "Hi," he said.

"Hello. How has your day been?"

Daniel shrugged. "It was alright. I have a new girlfriend. Her name is Camilla."

Melissa let herself chuckle. She knew Camillia; once upon a time, she had been a tiny, unsteady toddler with a worried face and Daniel had been just as small, still dressed sharply as a miniature man. "Good for you," she said. "Are you two getting along?"

"Yes." Daniel offered a small smile, his cheeks coloring. "We even hold hands on the bus in the morning."

Melissa couldn't decide if it was sweet or perverse that such young children were already doling out their affections so indiscriminately. She asked, "Speaking of the bus, have you seen your little friend lately?"

"My little friend?" Daniel turned his head to the side, frowning.

"Amethyst? The girl you brought to school, do you remember that?"

"Oh. Yeah," said Daniel.

"Well, have you seen her lately?"

"Nope."

Melissa sighed and didn't say anything else about it.

XXX

Owl sat with her head down, half hoping her family wouldn't recognize her. Then, maybe they would pass her by like the whole idea of their visit had only been a notion left over from a bad dream, and everything could go back to normal.

She wished Amaya was there to lean on. Even if she couldn't tell her girlfriend what troubled her, it helped to have someone solid beside her who knew how to just be quiet and heal.

It wasn't that Owl didn't want to see her little nieces and nephews; she did love them. She loved their noise and the topsy turvy pack they walked in and the way they always seemed to find something to complain about. She loved how they vied for her attention with crazy tricks and possessions of theirs that were supposed to impress her. She loved how the parts in their hair smelled when she pressed her lips to them and breathed in.

But she didn't want them in her town, in her home. She couldn't imagine having to curb her affections for Amaya, especially in the face of such a fresh blooming of passion as the one that flowered inside her whenever she set eyes on her lover. She'd never felt such rapture before, such need. Every moment spent without her seemed like a waste.

Not to mention, she knew she was going to lose it the moment she saw the baby, little Robbie. Even this morning when she'd seen a mother and her little one frowning at each other at a little table in the diner, she'd had to wipe a tear from her eye before she went to serve them. No doubt, it would only be a thousand times worse looking at someone who was her own flesh and blood.

She kept seeing that little baby, too small to breathe, all curled in on itself like a little origami child. She saw the mottled blueness of him, heard the utter silence from his lips and felt the dark, cold peace brewing behind his eyelids.

Owl hid her face in her hands and hoped to the lord that the Turner family would survive this. Somehow, she knew they would, no matter how painfully they had to do it.

XXX

Sue couldn't really tell if she looked good, and she didn't really have anyone she could ask.

Casper slunk across her feet, rubbing his long, white fur on her calves. Sue didn't think it was an affirmation for her outfit, but rather a decided show of apathy. Go where you want, lady the cat seemed to say. I won't miss you. Sue had read that if you died in your apartment, a cat would only wait about a day before eating your body in an act called "postmortem predation". She wondered if Casper found her more tedious than necessary.

Her friends like to tell her that she spent far too much time worrying about her cat's feeling and far too little time sorting out her own. Sue didn't usually listen to them, though. She enjoyed analyzing Casper. What an interesting book character the human cat could make. Someone despondent, cold, but affectionate from a distance. A person who was smart and cunning but relied on others so heavily that they could not even feed themselves alone.

Sue smoothed out her skirt in the mirror. She liked it, but she thought it looked an awful lot like her work clothes.

"Oh, well," she said to Casper who was no longer listening, not that he ever had been. "If she's a keeper, she won't judge me on my clothes, anyway."

Casper blinked as if to say, you don't really believe that, do you? Sue turned back to the mirror and flushed, feeling too foolish to say anything else.

XXX

Amaya jumped on the chance to touch her the moment Owl walked in the house. She pressed her to the wall beside the coat hooks, cradling her soft blonde head in her hands. She kissed her cheeks and her nose, then her mouth, hard.

"Mhm, you're hurting me," Owl murmured. She held Amaya back, worry brewing behind her crystal eyes. "Look, I have something to tell you."

"What's the matter?" Amaya put her lips behind Owl's ear, grazing them softly back and forth. She waited for the shiver that meant she couldn't take it anymore, that she would break and stop talking. She could feel it near, but it never came.

"Listen to me," she commanded, holding Amaya by the wrists. "You know how I told you that my family wanted to come visit?"

" . . . that was almost a month ago, Owl."

"I know."

"They haven't forgotten, huh?"

"No, it's worse than that." Owl's shoulder's sloped down in defeat. "They're here."

"Here? As in here here?"

"Yeah. They're right outside. I told them to wait so I could make sure there wasn't anything that might be dangerous for the kids."

"Kids?"

"Two girls and two boys."

Amaya let out a long, low sigh. "Sounds like I won't have you to myself for a few days, then?"

"I guess not."

Amaya leaned forward and when Owl evaded, she pleaded, "Just one kiss."

"Fine," Owl agreed. "Just one."

XXX

Libby felt empty. The world inside her had gone hollow, deflated to a sad shell of a place that had once ticked away with such a vigorous encapsulation of life.

That morning, Richard had told her to go take a shower. "You stink," he'd snapped. "Go. I said go!" The bruises from the night before still smarted on her arms and stomach and face, and the pain between her legs flared when she moved. She had wanted to tell him, I can't, Richard, I can't, stop yelling at me, but nothing had come out of her mouth.

Maybe it wasn't her voice box that was broken: it was her brain. Maybe her mind had decided that nothing was important enough to say out loud in a world cruel enough to put her under this terrible curse of a life.

XXX

"Oh," said Hannah. "Well this is certainly . . . cozy."

She felt Ryan's hand on her shoulder, squeezing a little. She recognized the gesture: it meant, try a little harder. They had others too, of course. Two hand squeezes might mean you're talking too much and three might mean, you're upsetting people. A stroke of the thumb over a pam meant, I'm sorry and just one squeeze usually just meant, I'm here.

Hannah leaned on her husband, trying to brighten up her smile. The kids were quiet for once, wide eyed and staring. Hannah supposed they'd never been in a little apartment like this before. In their house, everyone but the baby had their own rooms and the walls were painted a calming blue. Light streamed in from all directions, open windows lining the walls.

Conversely, Owl's new home almost seemed like a storage unit when compared. The walls were gray and apathetic, and the few windows were covered by curtains closed tight. "These are nice curtains," Hannah commented, noticing the uneven stitches at the bottom.

"Thanks," said Owl. "I sewed them myself." Robbie began to whimper in his stroller. Owl glanced at him and looked away, swallowing hard. "I'm gonna go get my roommate," she told them. "Make yourselves at home."

"Okay," said Hannah. "We will."

XXX

I read the news today, oh boy
Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire
And though the holes were rather small
They had to count them all
Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall

-A Day In The Life by The Beatles