'Blue Ice' by Shannon Savvas

Jessica looks out at the bleached-bone sky. Her David Hockney pool, shimmers, blue ice, under the sun. Heat undulates from the terracotta terrace. Another Mediterranean summer. Relentless. Inside her stone and glass oasis, she shivers in the sterile air-conditioning, pulls her paisley shawl over her cotton-clad shoulders. She shifts in the wheelchair to ease the pressure on the cling-film skin taut across her bones.

Nothing moves until late afternoon when heat and light ebb. After lunch, every living thing sleeps, including the cicadas. Outside her hermetic room, the air shimmers, aromatic with thyme, syrupy with pine resin. She longs for wet grass, for the scent of creamy roadside freesias.

Nothing stirs the swimming pool these days. No thrashing bodies, no children’s laughter. Only swallows swooping and diving in the early mornings and late afternoons. Their joie de vivre no longer gives her courage.

Nicos dead now. The children scattered; anywhere but here, they say. She knew that feeling once. The Cypriots always smiled but never included. She remained the xeni, the foreigner. No family left in New Zealand. Blue-eyed, red haired Jessica, baby of the family. Ridiculous thought.

She remembers afternoons with Lindy, walking home from school barefoot like every other Kiwi child, shoes and socks crammed into satchels, put on only for the nuns and Masses. She remembers arms wide, heads tossed back to the black skies and fleeting showers. She remembers laughing, soaked to the skin. Uniforms drenched, clinging like second skins until peeling away as they dried and footpaths steamed.

She remembers her feet panic-hopping across the griddle-hot pavements or silky, burning sand on the beach. After fifty-five years. She still remembers the coolness of spongy grass on her stinging soles. She remembers gathering empty Coca Cola bottles for the penny deposit to buy Crunchie bars.  On bountiful days, she and Lindy collected enough for Tip-Top hokey-pokey ice creams, licked fast and furiously before they melted.

Ten years now, since the car accident. Ten years she has depended on the kindness of Sri Lankan girls to get her in and out of bed, on and off the toilet. Nicos claimed asylum in his angina. Neela, the latest, now cooks, cleans and comforts. In the evenings, she brushes and braids Jessica’s long grey hair.

Neela rests in the afternoons. She leaves Jessica her tray of Earl Grey tea, sliced lemon, Villeroy-Boch mug and two slices of ginger cake under a cloth of aged Irish linen edged with local Lefkara lace.

Jessica never sleeps in the afternoons, otherwise she would lie awake all night. Her hooded eyes, blue ice, look through her Cypriot window. Cyprus has left her now, dead like Nicos. Behind her sternum, a familiar, recent aching. New Zealand emerges in the mirage of heat. Jessica never sleeps in the day but she is too, too tired. This time, this hour, this once, she lets her eyes close and her memory open. The black crab of nostalgic longing devours her heart. Jessica is going home.


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First published as a longer piece titled 'Anywhere but Here' at Fictive Dream in July 2018.