He Whispers Tortured Sounds

Nicholas wasn’t sure when or how he fell asleep the night before. He peeled the stiff bed sheet off and sat up, pausing before setting his still-stockinged feet onto the floor.

He hoped with everything in him ‌he would leave the bedroom, only to find his mother and father speaking in hushed tones to one another over a cup of tea. The way they used to. Before last night. Before her sickness. Before the coal mine. Before his sister.

For a split second, his mind played a cruel trick as a woman’s voice drifted in from the main room. It didn’t last though. The voice was ancient and slow. It was Agata, which meant only one thing.

Nicholas stood at the entry to the main room and spied on the conversation.

“Did ye clean her?” she asked.

His father nodded, staring at the wooden floor, his gaze burrowing into the grain of the wood, the space between the grain of the wood, like he wanted to hide himself there, away from all of this. He swayed, only noticeable because he sat in front of the window, his back to the light. His outline rocked in a steady rhythm.

“I know you wanted to keep her here in your home, but you understand why we moved her?”

Agata’s tone was firm, like his mother’s, when she explained the way things are, not how Nicholas wished them to be. She was the eldest woman in the hamlet and these responsibilities fell to her. Always the first to arrive when anyone passed, the older children used to scare the younger ones with tales of Agata waiting outside their doors.

“Both you and Nicholas have lost much already; there’s no need to delay the burial.”

His father didn’t respond.

Agata placed her hand on top of his father’s head, and he fell forward. A spasm of sound burst from his throat before he choked it back. Agata pulled him in, resting his enormous frame against her.

Nicholas couldn’t watch his father break again. He retreated ‌to his bedroom, slipped on his shoes, and left through the window. He rolled over the frame as he did, snagged his coat on an errant nail, a small tear. The sun burned his eyes.

His neighbours rushed about, making preparations for a burial, news of the death having reached them. Several men carried a cooling board into a small structure the hamlet used for viewings. His mother’s body lay on top of it. There were too many men around the board. Their limbs blocked his view but framed her dress. It was blue. There were white flowers on it. The same flowers he used to trace with his finger while curled up on the pew beside her when she used to talk to God.

He circled around the commotion to the back of the bothy, where shrubs and branches would hide him. This is where he and Sam witnessed all rituals, through a small crack in the wood, death framed by knotholes and splinters.

The men laid his mother on a table in the centre of the room to prepare her for viewing. Agata entered the structure moments later carrying a wooden bowl and approached his mother’s body. The men moved back to the perimeter of the room.

Agata drew a candle from the bowl, struck a match, and lit it. She let the flame flicker for several seconds before extending her arm and proceeding to wave the candle over the body, from head to toe, three times. She blew the candle out and placed it on the table.

Raising the bowl again, she ran her fingers through the salt inside. She lifted a small amount of it and let it slide back into the bowl before placing it onto his mother’s chest.

The last time he was here, Sam remarked how much easier it was to balance a bowl on a body that isn’t breathing. The thought offended him now.

Agata turned to one man and nodded. Two of them grabbed a length of rope and tied it across his mother’s shoulders and legs, binding her body to the board.

One man whispered to Agata and pointed towards his mother, and she pursed her lips in response.

Agata approached his mother again and rolled up her sleeves. It wasn’t until then that Nicholas noticed his mother’s arms. They bent at disgusting, impossible angles, curled like a dead spider.

Agata gripped one of them and with a single jerk, snapped it at the elbow, snapped it again at the wrist. She lay the arm down across his mother’s stomach, now malleable and soft, submissive.

Then another crack, then another crack, then finally a snap, the second arm more stubborn. Once the elbow broke, the wrist offered little resistance. Agata posed his mother like a doll, as if she were only sleeping. This side of her face was smooth, younger than any day before.

The sounds of his mother’s arms breaking echoed through him. There was a sharpness to it, followed by a sickening crunch as the bone came loose under the skin. He heard it again, clear as if they were breaking for the first time.

Snap. Snap. Snap.

Nicholas vomited in the surrounding bushes.

Agata and the men left the bothy. Nicholas recovered and snuck around to the front and slid inside without notice. He stared at his mother, now with nothing between them. The stillness of death unnerved him. Making a body that once lived and moved become fixed was somehow more static than if she had never moved at all. The elimination of movement made her seem so much more still than the world around her.

His feet dragged across the dusty wood as he approached her. He leaned over her, brushed his fingers along her stiff arm. Her skin was pale blue, like bruised fruit. He touched her dress, the stiff fabric brushed against his fingers. He found it difficult to look at her face. She did not look like herself, more a stranger who reminds you of someone you know.

Why did he come here? Why did he taint his lasting image of her?

Dust drifted from the roof of the bothy and settled on her. The earth wanted her.

He hated everything at that moment. He hated his life, and he hated that he no longer had a mother. He hated his father for sending him so far to work. He hated Agata for breaking his mother’s arms. He hated the ropes across her chest, and he hated the dust for trying to claim her.

And in this flash of emotion, something passed from him and into his mother.

Fix her.

Her chest rose.

He stumbled back, only realising now how tight his grip was on her arm. Everything went quiet around him, and he swallowed hard.

The dust continued to drift from above; the light continued to fall across her body. The wind, blowing through cracks in wood and stone, continued to blow. She didn’t move again.

Maybe she never moved at all.

Nicholas stared at his mother, unblinking. Part of him wanted to go back to his bed and lie down. Part of him wanted to touch his mother again.

He did neither of these. Instead, he surprised his own impulses and left.

The world appeared dull. From the outside, his home looked no different from the rest. Any or all of them could hide the horror of another dead mother, another dead wife.

A gannet flapped its wings above him. It was gliding through the air, putting forth little effort. Nicholas imagined himself up there, flying above everyone and everything, making this hamlet so much smaller.

He turned his back on his home and understood what his father had been staring at earlier. It wasn’t a space he wanted to hide in. It was the spot he spent his last moment with his wife. These were last moments being conjured, lived again, extending her life, as Nicholas now did against a green and brown backdrop. He thought about her dress, and it was so. He thought about her hair and her skin and her laugh and her heart, and it was so. The illusion was so fragile he dared not move for fear it might break. His mother sat before him, Nicholas at once in front of her and at once curled up beside her. His tiny finger traced the edges of white flowers, and they were suddenly the saddest thing he’d ever seen. But he didn’t cry.

It wasn’t like this when his sister died. He cried then. This was different. It left him hollowed and scraped out. The woman who brought him into this world was no longer part of it.

And this still hurt less than the realisation that his mother died while he was away. While he slept in a stranger’s home, filling his belly with their food, his mother lay in sweaty, stained sheets on a mattress so thin the hard wood of the frame beneath pressed against her. She was covered with sores, leaking and drying to the coarse sheets, peeling open with fresh hurt every time she rolled over to relieve the pain. That was her every day in the last weeks.

And he remembered the moment before he fell asleep at the Chapman’s when he thought about not going home.

Deep inside his tiny chest, which heaved at these thoughts, a tiny black seed of guilt formed in the space left open by his mother: she never knew where her only son was as she slipped from this world.

That thought propelled him away. He didn’t want to be anywhere near this. He ran on aching legs all the way to Edinburgh.