I will be devoured. Immersed. My totality submerged. All will be changed beneath the surface of this water. A world of altered senses awaits. Sound will become Auden’s muffled drum. Smell disappears. Taste will hang on, hiding in the oxygen of my last breath. Beyond the threshold, a faint taste of the world lingers inside the earthy wetness of her womb. But feeling? Touch becomes an exquisite emotion unhampered by the complications of life above; it’s inevitable finality. Water caresses. Bubbles are whispers, flitting across my face, catching on my thighs in sensual kisses. Plants will lap at my skin and the thin material of my swimsuit like lovers long since departed, who once wished to drink of my body, to devour me.
Dressed in her yellow and red lifeguard’s uniform, priestess of our temple, Liz, let us in. I was not the first here in the drizzle at 7am. Isra had already arrived, headscarf over her swimming cap, and an overcoat covering her wet suit. Tammy and Alison are here too, holding hands. Others are also making their way through Hampstead Heath, walking toward the Ladies’ Pond.
Each of us has her own ritual, hidden within the walk to the pond, in the pleasant chat at the waterside. Shedding the skins and masks of our lives, we expose ourselves to the moorhens and geese. Nio on the temple’s surface, they glide away from us permitting entry. At the threshold, coats are folded or heaped, shoes placed or dumped, caps are fitted, goggles adjusted. Some use nose clips others ear plugs. No façade. Nothing disingenuous. Personal rituals, between the jokes and laughter, separating ourselves from our other selves. The sacred is personal and within each of us, the fisherman said. It is our Euclidian preparation for the threshold. Our baptismal prayer before the naked truth of the cold, that we are slime crawling back into the place that begat us, and looking for…?
Am I looking?
Escaping?
Praying?
What is the difference?
Drizzle beads on my skin. My toes curl over the edge of the wooden jetty, the world swaying, spinning, spiraling out of control. Or am I fighting the dive into nothingness? A mad queen shouting at the tide. Lady Macbeth scrubbing raw the indelible mark of her unseen malady. Guilty of a fleeting romance with life.
Each time my body tightens at the thought of my penetration and the silent scream from the frigid embrace. A final deep breath, but not deep enough. A tell-tale rasp from my chest. Alison looks up from arranging her clothes but stays her lips. They are for Tammy and not my woes.
A leap into the deep.
The flash of pain.
I pass through the cold, wet fire.
The world dissolves.
The scans, the pills, the consultants, diagnosis, separation, mastectomy, remission, divorce, metastasized, prognosis, terminal.
Immolated and extinguished.
I am ravished.
I am devoured.
# # #
Once Daniel Soule was an academic, but the sentences proved too long and the words too obscure. Northern Ireland is where he now lives. But he was born in England and raised in Byron’s home town, which the bard hated but Dan does not. They named every other road after Byron. As yet no roads are named after Dan, but several children are. He tries to write the kind of stories he wants to read. Dan’s literary fiction has featured in Number Eleven, Storgy, Dime Show Review, and The Incubator; his science fiction in Phantaxis and Shoreline of Infinity. And his horror and speculative fiction can be found at theGhostsSory.com, Disturbed Digest, Devolution Z and Sanitarium Magazine. Dan also edits the children’s literary fiction magazine www.strogykids.com. Twitter: @Grammatologer, Web: www.dansoule.com, Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WriterDanielSoule/, Instagram: @writerdansoule.
Photo: Karim Aazzouzi
