Our daughter is in hospital again, her fourth visit in two weeks. The doctors talk of transplants and transfusions, extreme solutions, percentage chances. We sit and wait, hold her hand, listen as bleating machines record the patterned rhythm of her other working organs.
Before we spent our days in hospitals, she used to trail the beach, hands and hair caught by the wind as she danced to the tide, the thought and care of a six-year-old geologist as she stooped to sift through shells. At the ocean’s edge, she watched the tiddler fish swimming fast in shallow water. Once, she found a minnow, spluttering half-in, half-out, its belly blood red, side-up to the sun. She watched it flop and arch on the sand, tears welling as it faltered.
Upended by her unhappiness, I pointed to a spot beyond the coast and as she looked away, I placed my foot across the fish, pointed to another silver shadow swimming deeper - tricked her into thinking Death had passed by empty-handed. Relief warmed her skin, but as she laughed and paddled towards the shadow fish, I could feel the hidden fish beneath my foot, still beating, still heaving itself back and forth, grappling to keep its fragile hold on life.
And now in hospital, I see the mounds wrapping her body are not bedsheets but sand-dunes, her head heavy against the grains of her pillow, already filling her ears with silt. And her lips are turning blue, and all the other silver fish are swimming fast into the ocean, but she is sinking.
The other fish will swim deep, disperse, and form new shoals, but she will end here flailing, broken before she can burst forth, brief as tidelines coursing tracks across the shore.
Jo Withers writes short fiction and poetry from her home in South Australia. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in MOTEL from Cowboy Jamboree, Bath Flash Fiction Prize, SmokeLong and Mister Bull. Her first novella-in-flash, Marilyn's Ghost, with tiny stories from the death scene of Marilyn Monroe will be published in June 2024 by AdHoc Fiction.
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