Death of a Child

The walls do open but reluctantly, and she fears the lighting most. It is stronger now in this new place, it swells the retina and the pupils dilate beneath its abundance. It was darker, for nine months darker, but now is immersed in ubiquitous brightness- the coldness gone- her eyes open. Soon, they told me she could swim, because she is young and the umbilical cord still appends her. In water she would thrash and frenzy and her buoyancy would never leave her. She came from water too. In the cavernous liquidity of the womb she had lived like a Nereid.

I had taken her to the coast once. It was of unadulterated air and black crabs. They sold crustaceans on the beach and I salted them duly in toast- their amoeboid bodies lodging in my throat.
It was a lethargic day- the sun appeared too somnolent to shine and all sauntered in natural inebriation. It was too hot for movement; even speech required a conscious effort. It was the type of weather that warranted nothing but rest and mindless relaxation.
Ice cream was all we ate. It congregated on the faces of little children who could not manage to lick it off and this vexed me because, when wrapped in the sun’s penumbra, it would solidify and harden until it appeared to be a second skin. The sand spread in favourable equilibriums and it accommodated the construction of sandcastles. I let her help with the building. It seemed shameful of me to take a child to the beach and not indulge in the building of a sand castle.
Ours was large and prodigious- not the same mounds of mediocrity that the other children had built- unaided by their sunbathing mothers. We had three turrets- our base was sturdy and our moat was filled with an approximate three and a half buckets of water to fend off any intrusion. Of course this defence did not last- a Border collie tore down our fortifications and she cried and cried. He was our Trojan horse.

I had been to the sea often as a child. It had always enthralled me. My mother used to say that Poseidon could see that I had no respect for his waters. I would desiccate crabs and enjoy the fragility of shells beneath my feet. She said that I had no respect for nature- I was just a child; these ignorances would not last-one day I would see the omnipotence of it all. One day its waters would swallow me and I would drown. She tended to indulge in hyperbole like this. Her statements didn’t scare me, they just seemed exaggerative and stupid; the sort of narrative old men would tell children in the park- designed to excite fear among those who didn’t know any better.

My daughter played for intermittent hours. Now and again the sun would shed its somnolence and shine too brightly for anyone’s enjoyment. I plagued her with varying degrees of sun cream. Once the highest factor had been exacted she was indomitable. I do not know from whence this care came- perhaps it lay submerged in the fact that I had been duplicated when this child arrived. What had occurred had been a dichotomy of myself, and now her body was exposed and liberal to the corruption of everything. It was my volition to have her back in side me once again- amid my strong heartbeats and the amnion of the womb. This new profundity seemed to have germinated and flourished with the rigours of motherhood.
Soon she had stagnated. Her baby hands fingered the sand and I saw her eyes fight to avoid closure. In subsequence, she lifted her thumb toward her mouth- a gesticulation I thought she had shed in her younger days. But it had returned- a habit used only in mollification. I remembered when I had tried to stop it. I had tried all I could think of- refusing to consult the multitudinous ‘help for mothers’ catalogues in my cupboard. Yet she herself stopped it. She had it killed overnight.

As a child my habit was exploration. It would take me to various places of varying dangers beyond my sentience. My mother fretted about this. She said that I did not respect life and therefore did not deserve it. These statements were designed to increase my awareness of the precariousness of life She claimed that life was a gift- not to be abused by a ‘senseless proclivity toward adventure.’ But I disagreed. I believed adventure to be everything; I thought that one day I would drown in a microcosm of safety!
I never had the great adventure I sought. Of my own volition I endeavoured to throw myself into varying degrees of peril. Yet no matter the magnitude of my danger my mother always caught me prior to my harming myself. I grazed my knee once and that was the summit of my injuries. It had been in a nettle patch. The girls at school had said that nettles stung unbelievably. They claimed that such a Celtic myth existed- stating that nettles were irreversibly poisonous. So I ventured toward them and contracted their venom. I suppose in retrospect I wanted to invalidate their fatuous belief in myth. They were like my mother with her incessant references to Poseidon and karma.
My mum; she had rescued me still. She retrieved a Docking leaf from the garden and alleviated my pain. I had failed yet again to escape the safety that was smothering me.

My daughter had gained more energy as the result of thirty minute’s rest beneath a crimson parasol. She frolicked and this pleased me. She seemed to have an innate lack of caution such as I possessed in the thralls of my youth. She poked crabs with a stick and the greatest dexterity!
I rested for a while as she adventured and played. My eyes seemed heavy and magnetic; a force bade them to close. A force bade her to the sea.
It did not take gallons of water to submerge her diminutive body. She ebbed irrevocably with the tide: reversed further and further in its mania. Its turquoise particles enveloped her and she was pushed under- her arms waving and beseeching; penetrated its membrane. From the distance it seemed poetic, as though she struggled beneath a dress that was various sizes too large. It moved with such irrepressible thunder that for one desperate moment I thought that maybe a god was at work, as my mother had often said.

Perhaps Poseidon had exhaled.

Screams followed. Women clutched their own children protectively and I levitated, sinking further and further into a sleep-like nausea. She thrashed belligerently in the waves but the buoyancy of her youth had diminished. She sank below its glossy surface. Thence its semblance returned- sated after its repast. It ebbed once again as though it had swallowed a tendril of coral.

In the womb of the sea she lay. Dead and submerged in a different world, a different dimension: in which she could not be retrieved. It is a cruel thing; the death of a child. In the liquidity of the oceans she had died like a Nereid.