The sea lulled her again and again, like a gentle mother, and she did not resist it.
I.
It had been a pigeon. Previously. Now it was hard to tell, although there were tiny, plucked feathers scattered all over one side of the bobbing boat. The feather strewn side was also the bloody side if one observed closely, with trickles and splotches of red having soaked deep into the old wood of the boat. To think she had managed it all with her pocket knife, which was visibly rusty after two weeks of exposure to the naked sun and salty air. At least, it felt like two weeks to me. I can no longer tell time with any certainty.
She’d severed the bird’s head and only the badly de-feathered carcass remained, whatever resistance its life had offered, long ended in the relentless sun. She’d washed off the blood from the carcass as best she could with seawater, using her thumbs and palms. Finally, having laid it aside, she turned her back to me and got busy trying to start a fire using a few strands of coconut-husk-like fibre from the boat’s insides. She trained the sun’s rays through a single piece of scratched, spectacle glass on to the fibres. It was a hopeful effort but not without promise, since the trick had worked the previous day, only she’d had nothing to cook with on the fire. Today, when the stricken pigeon, circling overhead, desperately hunting for a place to land, dropped exhausted onto the boat, she had pounced upon it, giving the bird no chance.
Having succeeded in starting a fire, she rested her back against the boat’s side, a smile of satisfaction growing on her weather-beaten face like a mad woman’s grin, as white smoke wafted up. She clasped the pigeon’s carcass, forced a make-shift skewer through it and held it over the sputtering fire that was growing stronger, salivating at the imagined taste of the meal to come.
The endless motion of the sea was something that, when she stopped moving around restlessly and when her mind wasn’t pursuing a worry, she found hypnotic. The boat bobbed, as it had done continuously during our time at sea. The rhythm of the boat caused a creaking sound which together with the waves lapping the sides, deepened the effect of drowsiness. The sea lulled her again and again, like a gentle mother, and she did not resist it.
Her hand held the skewered pigeon steadily over the fire while her eyes glazed over. I wondered if she was remembering something. Had she remembered me, for instance? At times like this, her eyes were of no help at all. They looked vacant, as if her soul had departed for someplace else, leaving behind a vessel that was a stranger. Just like me. Well actually, I should say, unlike me. The opposite of me in fact. I only had my soul now and my physical self, my carcass if you will, was somewhere at the bottom of this very same sea, ripped away and tossed off. I recognized a glimmer of her familiar self in her eyes only when she attacked the pigeon and cut its neck off.
Continue reading “The Woman in the Boat”
