Nameless: A Short Story developed for Resurgence Magazine

He turns. He stares. It is the flat-eyed stare of the startled. There is fear in the brown flecks of his grey eyes. There is a hint of confused panic in his frown. There is the beginning of a smile. It grows wider on only one side of his mouth. The other fixed in a dreadful resentful grimace.
She waits. She grows impatient for a word, stands frozen on the flagstones. He stares and she waits.

"Is you", paralysed speech.
"It is"

"How di you kno where do find m-me?"
A paralysed answer.

The effort to bring the tap into full song is the cause of his current exhaustion. Since his sculptural fingers show no real enthusiasm in coaxing the torrent out of the drip he tries persuasion. She finds him serenading the tap's silver neck.

"A l-little w-water, a l-little w-water, sing to m-me the river's m-melody"

"W-wet m-my lips and s-sing like a s-stream" he mumbles and his voice rumbles like stones in a leather barrel.
He is frail, crumpling, curled and greying, a fragile relic of parchment inside his tired stature. If he were in a scrum now his head would snap off. In his old age a game of rugger would leave him shaken out like a Russian doll. Inside and inside and inside again there would be a small foetus-like creation. There he would be, vulnerable without his skin. He is thin in a way that wounds. He has a hungry kind of thin, an alarming stark quality. The hollowness and the paralysis are framed by a tight silver mesh of curls. His smashed nose leaves little room for breath. His ears are disproportionate. He has a mythical outline. His gigantic stature reduces him still further. The remnants of his resolve to live are engulfed by his redundant frame.

The flagstones absorb the ensuing silence and the evening light is sheening everything up. The tap is in its best light and still isn't singing to his melody. Benedict turns his resentment away from her towards the tap. She is waiting now for her own answers.
She moves away from the flagstone which seems as though it might lift suddenly and topple her over. She waltzes oddly to the tap. As she walks past him she can feel his fear in her chest bone and it lodges next to hers. The anxiety is making her unsteady. Each step takes another two to sustain it. He watches, bewilderment descending. She turns with strong and dignified hands the cold metal grip, grapples shakily with the smooth surface of a clear glass. She is on the wrong side of his resentment now.
She drinks and he is thirsty. He waits and she stares. Her hand reaches out. The glass seems to glide across the air alone. The water is moving at its own pace. He is drinking. She is shaking.
"W-why?" Benedict speaks.
Her heart beats too many times. She can't sustain it. If it carries on beating so fast something will crack apart.
"Because "she breathes sharply upwards, her shoulders lift.

“…cause why?”

The clock taps out his rhythm until her shoulders drop, her head lifts and she sees her own reflection in the glass of his eyes. She says simply

“I have lost all of my rage”.

He nods with the slowness of retirement. He is resigned to the time it takes for each vertebra to creep into action. He finds his eyes suddenly reluctant. The lids close without him, reptilian in their lethargy. These eyelids capture something he has not known in sixty years.

He cannot name the constriction in his throat, the sharp pain in his eye sockets. It reminds him of the scars of his sport. The lids enclose him, there is darkness. He cannot look at what it might contain for fear that it might captivate him. A cough erupts, and another and another, he hears gasping noises. Someone is wailing deeply the notes of a song sung within the depths of a barrel. His face wet, his shoulders shifting up and down, up and down. His body convulsed by a primal involuntary repetitive shrug. Slowly his body loses its construction. An unseen weight presses him downwards. He is weak and he is trembling. He feels like a bird. He finds himself seated. He is in a hard, waxed chair. It is rigid against his tender flesh. As mucous streams he is not self-conscious and no one wipes away his disgrace.

“How”, he gasps, “How d-did you l- lose your rage?”

“I forgave and I turned away”.

“W-what-t ‘appen? Howw? B-beginning…” he tries again to ask the biggest question. “W- where beginning?” and again: “H-How did it b-egin?”


The morning had been fragmentary. Piercing winter light, particles dancing like Parisian Spring. Everything had started to come apart. Her mind disintegrating as she tried to concentrate.

"Hurry up, they have come, they are coming in, hurry!" her mother's voice penetrating the present moment.
She packs the strange grey textured suitcase. It is striped along the centre of its crocodile-skin back. She clicks the small metal buckles, checks the torn leather trim. She piles random patterned skirts, crumpled and ironed together. Squeezes the red Moroccan slippers and still thrills at their glitter and pointed toes even now, even here.
She scans the room. Apricots, peaches and ragged oatcake carpet. She calls out.
"Mum, Mum, I'm ready".

As she turns she goes to speak and opens her mouth to breathe. She pushes the hollow door. She finds herself standing on the edge of an open French sliding door. The metal cuts into her tender feet. The plump soles flush with pain without her Moroccan slippers. She raises her eyes. No corridor, no bathroom, no spare room.

She is on the edge of a vast expanse of water. It is edgeless, mirrored in the glass door, permutations in the sheer gossamer surface. The wide and inky watery darkness merges with the wide and inky absent sky. Where one ends and the other begins she cannot tell. It is a lightless box. It could be glass. It could be frameless and infinite or mirrored and complex but limited. There is no one on the edge of the precipice but her in her tender naked feet clutching a battered suitcase full of ageing photographs.
It happens sometimes, the nameless stuff. It happened in childhood too.
Her life along with the lives of everyone she knew had not turned out as she planned it or as she imagined it. There is no name for that either, the way it all changes shape, all the ideas that weren't and the surprises that were. As children they were all 'going to be' when they grew up. As if 'being' was a thing for the future. Here on the edge of this infinite expanse she wondered if there was any distinction between the past and the future. She couldn’t be sure there was a beginning or an end. In the ice sharp air in her night dress she stood, feet throbbing, shaking violently with cold. Here in this moment she was a young woman of twelve. Her journey had started with an imperative to flee. She had responded to her Mother’s call, packed her memories and started out only to find herself at an apparent end. Now her only hope is the invitation of the water.

In this inarticulate moment, the silences stretching out across the spaces where nothing can be said speak so loudly to her confusion. Loudly they sulk, loudly they swear, loud the whisper into the hush. The tongue sticks, the throat gasps and the teeth clench. Gridlocked the words, louder the whisper, silence speaks to the silent. The silence yells of the future, it sighs, breathes and dreams of poetry, and of the capacity of this silence, the power of the things we never say. The silence is saturated by all the images she cannot paint. She feels her toe dipping into the liquid. It shimmers outwards with the disturbance. She looks up and her eyes adjust to the darkness.


“H-how d-did it b-egin?”

Frustrated and grimacing with the effort of speech and the exhaustion of waiting and the shock of her appearance the contorted man bellows into her strange detachment.

“H-how d-did you l-lose your rage?”

He is flashing with the effort to suppress a rage all his own through gritted teeth and spitting features.

“H-how c-could you? H-how c-ould you? After all they d-did to us?”

“I had a vision.”

Stillness

“…of water”

He tries to create a dismissive expression.

They plunge together at the word

“W-water”

“Water” nodding, calming.

He is captivated and she is tranquil. She is still as she describes.

“In my vision the water’s melody captures me. I find myself moving with it. The river flows through our lives. I see us bleeding, pleading. The machetes mash flesh. The severed heads slung sideways. The sound of our sisters being torn apart penetrates louder than their screaming.”

She breathes deeply, swallows and begins again.

“The water is red with blood Benedict. It is innocent blood. It is your blood. It is my blood. It is our sisters’ blood. Our rage colours the water bleeding into the current. The water carries crimson fury.”

Her eyes are liquid now and different water spills.

“The water sings to me.”

He nods less slowly, his movement more lyrical.

She grips her mouth together with the effort of the word she must name.

“Forgiveness”

The silence is followed by a sigh.

“Forgiveness… is what the water sings.”

She fills her lungs.

“I hear the word and the disgust drowns me.”

He catches her hand and pulls it to the scars of his resentment.

“But under the water there is light. It shines through crystal waters. There is warmth and something nameless.”

The sun stuns them with a final dance before it leaves for sleep. He weeps and she does too. “Let the water sing to you”.

Jessica Boulton

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