My feet sink deep into the snow. It is hard to move forwards. I am panting, I press myself against the thick snow, I have to trudge all the way to my mother’s chamber. It is only then that I notice. The house has grown smaller. I push onwards, and her small house becomes an ever-softer grey, blue as her eyes. It is hard to make out the door from the wall, though the car’s lights illuminate the whole garden. I knock my hand against the railing by the step and fumble around until I locate the door. I slap the door with the flat of my hand, hammer it with my fists, rap it with my fingertips, kick it with the tip of my shoe, but my mother does not open it.
I know she is in there, I can feel it. She is inside the diminished house, and she can hear me, hear my lungs gasping for air. She can hear the banging and the kicking. In her mind, she has asked me to come here, and I have come, but she doesn’t have to open because I can’t get angry about it, can’t lose my temper over it. I cannot judge my mother. I can consider her neither healthy nor sick. She is not the object of my desires; she is the reason for my desires.
I retreat through the compacted snow; it is hard going, but I cannot turn away from the house. I take a few more sluggish steps backwards, take the mittens from my hands and look for the lump of volcanic rock I have wrapped in a scrap of paper and stashed in my pocket. I clench the small packet in my fist; the paper has softened and is pressed tightly around the rock.
I pull my hood down further, reach my arm back and hurl the rock forwards; the tendons in my shoulders tense, then release. The rock hurtles towards the house, strikes the surface of the window, crumbles, and what doesn’t crumble on top of the snowdrift sinks into it.
I breathe and count to three. Nothing. The car’s engine switches off; its lights go dark. I collapse on my back in the dry snow and look at the sky. It looks like eternity, not finality.
Why try to tighten the knot or travel all the way to its end?
I have been lying on the spot for a long time … well, I don’t know, it doesn’t feel like time is passing. It starts to feel heavy, which means an ill wind is approaching, its intermittent buffeting. It whisks all genuine awareness away with it, stripping the skin from the face and taking the tongue, piece by piece.
My hands look for a hard surface in the soft snow; I roll on my side and stagger to my feet. I feel my footprints with my whole body and begin wading along them all the way back to the car. Then I hear the door opening.
Fog invades my psyche and descends upon my skin, burning: uncertainty about the situation, uncertainty about our ability to manage, to cope, uncertainty about the antagonist’s intentions.
On the veranda outside the house, a light goes on. My mother is outside. I can see her partially; her other half is cast in shadow. Her surface has melted, her chest is transparent, her stomach is transparent, all her organs are glowing. I see two oval pieces of flesh behind her ribs, the pipe rising up towards her mouth, a white blob that looks like a foetus, beside it a soft, red mass covered in yellow tissue and an enormous parasite curled inside the pelvis; another parasite is winding its way around it.
She moves and her organs shudder with each step. Only a small, wheezing breath escapes my mouth.
Didn’t she see me with a knife at my throat? Or hadn’t she wanted to think about herself with a knife at her throat? The aura of evil exuding from within me, a knife at its throat, reminded her of something, and she was angry. A mother must be able to despise her child.
My mother starts walking towards me. This isn’t like her. I’ve made her angry. I have invaded her space, her life, I’ve been acting up, weeping woeful tears, I have been thinking about her, talking about her, I have brought shame within her walls.
She steps into the dark section of the garden and I cannot see her any more. But I hear her wading towards me. I don’t want to confront her after all. I snatch at the snow with my hands and feet. I don’t know whether I will soon knock into furniture or the fence, whether I will find the gap in the fence, I can no longer tell the floating snow and the fog apart.
I hear a swoop, I try to see my mother, but it is a bird taking flight behind the house, a magpie, I assume, opening its curved, black beak and squawking; its neck trembles, its wings beat frantically, and my mother is on my tail, there is snow in my mouth, snow in my eyes, the crystals melt, turn to water in my mouth and eyes, I reflexively push myself onwards, she lashes on angrily, and the magpie’s squawking comes to an end.
Black and white feathers flutter in the air, droplets of blood cascade to the surface of the snow.
She stops. Her interest wanes, then snuffs itself out.
