‘Transfemoral amputation’
Since the accident, things have been much slower. Every Sunday I go to the beach. You still shoot guns at birds in the bush. This is how it works and I know it, but I shudder every time I think of the trigger. We both go home for dinner at six, but these days you’re the one who does the dishes.
It’s my fifty-first afternoon here and the sand is getting firmer each week. Gritty under my foot, I’m finally getting used to navigating this place even though the geography is really very easy.
There’s sand everywhere, which does limit one I guess. The distance between the bench where I sit eating sandwiches and the sea appears to get narrower every time I come here – familiarity I guess. I know you’d drop me off at a different spot if I asked, but there’s no good reason yet to dislike this sand.
My cell phone screen is blank and tells me that it’s only two pm. It seems like it should be almost time to go, much darker, much later, but I will stay here till six. Sitting down, I find myself thinking again about the domes of our un-new duvet that I bought just last year from Smith and Caugheys. Before that day, they had kept it together to cover our legs, even when we forgot to make the bed. Ironic isn’t it that such a new duvet became un-new so suddenly. I’d rather talk about it in the past tense, to be honest. You weren’t watching and neither was I.
Today, like most days, watching is all I can be bothered doing here. It is too grey to attempt anything else but I do wish I could move away from the army boys with their fish n chips. I do not like them because they never notice the seagulls or small children. Each week they have new girlfriends that look the same as the ones from the week before. I can’t stand watching them laugh together, building sweet plans with their morbid hands.
Instead, I turn to the water. It always looks too cold for one but sometimes there is a swimmer who takes me in with him. He hasn’t come for three weeks now, but together we used to make saturated rotations of arms and legs and arms in arms. You’ll be armed when you pick me up tonight I just know it. Your guns on pick up quickly became a silent retaliation to my surprise swimming. But I still wait for the swimmer each week regardless. His presence is the only variable in my afternoons here. Even you arrive predictably late each week at six fifteen.
Six pm, the swimmer is yet to arrive and you’re on time. Bird blood, but no gun in your hand you are holding the duvet. I let you wrap it around my body and as you carry me back to our car.
Written by Emma, August and September 2009
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