Anima

I went to live with her. Her letters sounded like they were written a hundred years ago. She sent a photo. She was covered up to her ankles. Her eyes were wide with perspicacity, but there was something lacunaic holding the span of her face. Something told me she’d been poured out. She made me feel hungry and I wanted to sleep in her bed.

*

I wanted the last wrapping of her eye to snap. She stopped sending me letters for a while. I was determined to find her house which she warned was riddled with slick fine-tailed rats. She would not trap them. She was waiting for them to grow fatter than shadows. I knocked on the door. It was her. I smiled. She asked me what I wanted. I told her she knew. She asked me to read one of her letters. She let me in.

*

As she walked, the ruffle of her skirt blurred. She did not speak readily. There was a rattly silence on the stairs. Sometimes her boot dissolved on two floating steps like two drawers enveloping and withdrawing. This wasn’t quite the place I envisioned.

*

The room she had prepared for me was cold and bony. She must have left the window up all day. The hearth was black. She said that money was never spent needlessly. And that it was the throwing around of my money that kept her cold. I smiled. I lay down on the bed first. She took the candle to my eyes and peered into them like a physician. It was a cervix, she said. There was occlusion. My fingers were gripping the sheets. She must have seen that there was salivation.

*

I wanted her fingers to keep scratching my throat. I could no longer see the candle. She pushed her fingers against the depressions of my throat. They felt like round sticks. Then I felt her nails as sharp as torn off branches. They felt like the switches my father propped up against the picture of Saint Maria Goretti. He used to get me to snap them off the plum tree and sharpen them fresh and raw. Then he would hotten my skin with them. It occurred to me that I had never lain down for a woman before.

*

That I had never gone this far with a woman without getting her done. Her hair was as thick as a horse’s tail and as knitted as the bone concentration on her face. My body felt folded and clapped like I had taken neuroleptics through my mouth. It was when her fingers broke through my papery bark-skin and her hand manoeuvred the candle’s fire in the closet of my chest, that I squeezed my eyes shut and picked at my clothes.

*

Her arm was sleeved black, wringing my mind like a snout in a waterhole. It was not until the last of her leg slipped in like a tadpole and the insides of her body mixed with my reds, that I felt how cold and soft I really was.

Annie Blake is an Australian writer, thinker and researcher. Her main interests include psychoanalysis, philosophy and cosmology. Her poem ‘These Grey Streets’ was nominated for the 2017 Pushcart Prize by Vine Leaves Literary Journal. She holds a Bachelor of Teaching, a Graduate Diploma in Education and is a member of the C G Jung Society of Melbourne and Existentialist Society (Melbourne). You can visit her on annieblakethegatherer.blogspot.com.au and on Facebook.