Mesmerized by the ghostly crags that dwarfed the lowly black meadows, Olive imagined what those last seconds must have felt like for her father. A swirled cataract of the amber castle collapsing into a rising clocktower shooting up from the ground. It was a horrible thought, but one she could not shake. Her mother’s flowerpot, a ceramic blue engraved with tiny purple and green thistles, was the last living memory of him. Looking at it now, she thought how it represented a life before he was admitted into the Royal Psychiatric Hospital, to days before depression came polluting the family, dragging them about like a stack of corpses on a fever cart.

The Paramour rented a flat just south of them, a man that paid their bills and covered the monthly rent, asking in return what could only be considered prodigious sexual recompense from Olive’s mother, even in the last years of her marriage. Only hours after her father’s body had been found cold at the brae of the hill, his face grey from days lying flat between two stones on that downward slope, Olive and her mother moved in with him.

In their new flat, the rhythms of life started anew. On Sundays, when the grey skies alternated between drizzle and dry, Olive’s mother would open the north-facing windows at nine o’clock to let the church bells resound from the tower across the links. The Paramour worked late, driving lorries to Glasgow full of trout and pike caught in the Leith Harbor. In those days, it was not uncommon for him to work so late that not even the church tower hymnodies could wake him.

The flat itself was not much to boast of. Neither The Paramour nor Olive’s mother came from wealthy bloodlines and suffered, like many poor folks of those times, from the intrepid and impassive hands of unemployment and its quickening cuff, rent inflation. On the floor, a faded shanti rug, threaded with shades of lime and avocado, lay at the foot of an old woodstove. An oak table stood with a rubber plant inside the thistle-engraved pot at its center.

The windowsills, bare for Declan to wander. A love seat, patterned with pink and purple flora. An unused computer, crammed between the woodstove and the bookshelves. Bookshelves in the living room, bookshelves in the bedrooms, bookshelves in the kitchen. All half-empty, all sparsely filled with old torn maps of the Highlands and tattered histories of Scottish Gaelic ancestry. Dust scattered the floors under the beds. Dry lards stank the loo from Declan’s arse. Lamps in the master bedroom and a candelabra for Olive for when she would read in bed—two novels over and over, Tess of D’Urbervilles and Wuthering Heights—unless of course she was sitting instead with Declan in front of the woodstove, talking until she yawned and stumbled down the short hall to sleep. In those days it was not uncommon for The Paramour, on his way out, to find Olive slumbering before the dwindling embers, her hand atop Declan’s restive paws.

That was before her first confession.

Her first confession concerned the ceramic thistle pot. It was late afternoon and Olive had sat by the window, listening to The Paramour slam the sliding door of the lorry and the metallic clanking large locks. Soon enough, he would be driving the same white curving lines between black hills for hours until just before the light returned. Olive imagined him, sitting silently, the only sound the murmuring of a radio he paid no attention to, entranced by the looming tiny dots of white that would emerge out of the distance into large listless sheep, ballooning lamps of fur out of darkness.

Out the window she peered at the towering crags and the stumpy point of Arthur’s Seat that rose high above the shedding trees of the meadows. She thought of her father tossing himself from one of those peaks. The image made her skin crawl. She wondered whether he made a sound during his descent. Had he fallen mute like dead weight? Had he recited a last prayer for her and her mother? Had he shrieked as he hit the hard wet heath below?

People scuffled below on the cement, trampling upon the leaves that stuck glued to the ground liked steamed peach-colored patches. At the bottom level of the flat stood a dessert parlor painted in a lavish vermillion red. They had bought her birthday cake from there, the birthday after the suicide, and she was made to celebrate her sixth year of life, blowing candles, and smiling for her mother’s new Paramour who held a camera in front of her ashen face, and who of course had purchased the cake.

            When later Olive recalled her first confession to Declan, it was the smells of delicious tarts and cakes and bread that came to her first and foremost. After the flowerpot smashed, it was the first sensation that she noticed that was not panic or guilt—the scent of hot, steamy, leavened dough rising through the shafts.

She had almost licked her lips.

            The Paramour was already halfway to Glasgow, hauling several hundred tons of fresh pike, when Olive jumped up and grabbed Declan by the tail and announced to the empty flat, “Declan! That man’s out and Mamma’s fast asleep! It’s a dreich night, I’m feel rather blue, and I want to dance in my pants, and no one can say nutty about it!”

With that, she tossed off her breeches and climbed onto the table. Declan sat on the windowsill, gazing silently with his yellow eyes at the spry young girl trouncing about. Just as she was about to spin, the table wobbled beneath her bare feet and shook the flowerpot so forcefully that it rolled off the table and smashed against the floor.

It is important to note that from her father she had received brown hair and from her mother she bore rosy freckles. Far from her floral namesake, Olive’s complexion was as pale white as the bottom of a minke whale. Just so, when her mother dashed out from the bedroom and saw the splattered soil and stems nicking the carpet, the remaining shrapnel of pottery and plant life like an unfinished puzzle before her, Olive’s rosy cheeks blazed into two maroon moons, suffusing her characteristically ghostly skin.

Her mother stood trembling, fuming inwardly. Her eyes burned up with unspeakable sorrow. And so, she said not a word about the affair. It seemed there was nothing of value to be said. Only sorrow remained, as though she had once more to grieve for the death of her beloved husband. For weeks her mother was silent, but Olive noticed that something had changed. A misery now followed her like a dark overhanging cloud, like a festering gnomic demon that strung her like an invisible ventriloquist wherever she went and moved, making out of her a lifeless doll. In every word she spoke to Olive there lay unspoken vocabularies, articulated in the form of a gulpy swallow, as if to choke back something irrepressible from within.

In those weeks, her mother would dismiss herself to bed early, having hardly poked her dinner with her fork, saying, “am pure done in,” and leaving her food entirely untouched. One evening, Olive could not withstand the punishment any longer. As her mother pushed back her chair to leave, Olive muttered (so quietly that, if the room had not already been born in perfect quietude, her mother would not have heard her), with tears flowing down her pale cheeks, “I’m sorry mama. I’m sorry I broke the flowerpot.”

At the mention of the flowerpot her mother stopped midway between the dark corridor to the bedroom and the dimly lit kitchen where Olive sat. Her head turned down toward the plate of mush. She could not bear to look at her mother. The sky outside had darkened from grey to black. Olive then remembered something her father had once said to her on a walk along the Leith Harbor, that “in Edinburgh you never see the same sky twice. And yet, no matter how much the sky changes, it never strays from a cold, inextricable grey.”

Her mother sighed and looked at the floor, her back facing Olive. She did not move for a long time but remained there motionless. The two of them fixed there, their necks bent toward the floor like curled lampposts, smashed and lightless. The only sound that could be heard was a whining wind beyond the thin walls.

Without turning, she said in a harsh whisper, “Think nothing more on it, Olive. Nothing in this life is ours, nothing is for keeps. Not even those we love most.”

She paused for a moment, a shiver jerking her shoulders and neck, and then went on, “Everything is borrowed for a short time before it is violently wrenched away without warning.”

Olive noticed her mother’s fists curl up, tighten as if in each one was held a spear, and then loosen again before disappearing into her bedroom. Olive did not know how she knew, for there was nothing to prove it, but she was certain that her mother was crying in the dark.

Things were noticeably different when The Paramour was home. Her mother was civil then, treating her with a tenderness that she often questioned to Declan on her own. And yet, as soon as The Paramour would leave to drive the midnight hours westward, her mother withdrew once more from her, leaving her supper cold and uneaten on the dinner table. Some nights she would not see her mother at all and would prepare dinner for herself. It was on one such night that she first confessed to Declan, sitting near the windowsill, and watching the cakey night sky churn buttermilk clouds.

“Don’t you think the sky and the clouds look lovely tonight, Declan?” she asked.

Declan sat perched on the windowsill, staring at Olive with yellow eyes.

“It makes one feel like nothing is really yours at all doesn’t it?” she said. “Look at those crags out there. Blacker than the Earl of Hell’s Waistcoat. And that’s just it. I’m far too small to really own anything of that size. I’m just borrowing all this here world. Mama is right. The sweet sights and tastes and flavors are just here for a little while. Don’t you think so Declan?”

Declan sat unstirred. His yellow eyes unblinking.

“Maybe when pappa tried to jump from the crags it was his way of returning… Maybe it was his way of giving back his borrowed life to whomever it belonged?”

Olive sighed and looked around at the flat. There were no lights on save for that of the dim kitchen bulb. The sun had set early as it did in late autumn. The woodstove was cold and black. The throw cushions were neatly tucked into the corners of the sofa. The shanti rug was colorless in the dampened light. Her mother’s plate sat steaming on the kitchen table.

Without reservation, Olive grabbed her empty plate and walked towards the oak table where her mother’s plate lingered uneaten. She scraped the food onto her own plate. Beans and potatoes.

Sitting in her mother’s seat, she began to voraciously scarf down her mother’s portion. Declan watched from the windowsill, the only sound the scraping of cutlery and sloshing of the food in Olive’s mouth.

When she finished, she walked to the pot stationed on the stove. She took her fork and began scraping the leftovers from the pot onto her plate. Again, she sat at the table, filling the void of her mother’s seat, breathing deeply through her nose, and engulfing a third helping of the food.

The plate thoroughly cleaned, she leaned back, placed her hands on her stomach, and leaned her head against the back of the kitchen chair, staring into the dim bulb until red patches began to blot her vision. She got up, placed her plate in the sink and opened the refrigerator. She retrieved two slices of ham, cheese, mayonnaise, lettuce, mustard, and began to make herself a sandwich. Her body moved silently, without any seeming intention or irritation. She sat once more in her mother’s seat and, looking for a moment at Declan, who had not moved from his position on the windowsill, began to eat a sandwich.

Then she began to feel nauseous and stared at the flat again, which remained so still that it began to split and shake in her head. The only sound was the low hum of the computer engine in the living room. She thought of the needless pulses of electricity being pumped every day and night into immortalizing a blank black screen. She rose from the table, belching out hot mustard breath, then walked solemnly to Declan, gave him a perfunctory pat on the head, and vanished into the hallway and to the toilet.

Olive emerged from the toilet as if out of a black hole, hot vomit dripping from her chin. Both of her eyes had popped blood vessels and the smell that drifted into the living room where Declan stayed gave her the look of some lamentable wraith rising from the bowels of a rank pit in hell. She crawled on her hands and knees, gazing upward at Declan’s impassive gaze like a parishioner receiving the Host. A glance of supplication could be decoded in the blood networks that permeated the shadows around her eyes.

“Declan. I ate all mama’s scran again. I did it,” Olive confessed, “I ate it and more and then boaked it all up. Some of it splashed into the tub Declan. Don’t you see I’m all a ruin?”

She could not bear any longer Declan’s yellow eyes and their animal indifference. She peered around the room. Everything looked dead, motionless. She was surprised that, though blood had rushed to her head, the room refused to spin anymore as one might have expected. Now, everything looked dead. She could not bear the obstinate lifeless matter hemmed in around her.

“Poor company I’ve got,” she thought.

For a moment all she craved was movement, an end to the awful stillness. A carousel would do, or a travelling pack of illusionists whose tent, stocked with spinning paper wheels, flickering candles, and glass eyeballs that shifted pupils from left to right like ticking clocks, would distract her from this sedated flat. Anything to unfix the sudden confinement.

“Perhaps these here things are not borrowed at all,” Olive considered, “Declan, maybe they are too much ours, and maybe that makes us slump heavy like chains.”

The very thought of this made Olive gag onto the rug. Declan’s twitching ear gave some evidence, at least, that she had not lapsed into complete madness.

Things continued this way for a long while. Her mother, occupied with nothing but her own private grief, The Paramour’s presence for short intervals which were never long or short enough, Declan’s yellow impassive eyes, and Olive gorging meals in the late evening and early morning, vomiting it all out until every crumb was returned to the earth. Some nights she vomited so much that she felt unable to move, lying prostrate on the toilet floor, her breathing so irregular that one might have mistaken her for dead.

At first no one seemed to notice all the missing food. But it was not long until the cans of beans from the pantry began to diminish, and the bread, salt, cheese, and meat waned. The Paramour wondered where the food could have gone. Counting and taking stock of the food, he began to suspect something amiss. He was not a harsh man, but the family had suffered disparity. Hard times had hardened men.

“Olive, tell me honest” The Paramour said, “and I won’t be mad if you’re an honest gal. But if I find out you’re lying to me I’ll skelp your wee behind! Now, did you take this here food?!”

Olive had prepared for the accusation. She knew she could play the fool.

“But Sir just look at me! I’ve lost only fat these passing days. How could it have been me? Ask mamma or Declan, not me!” she replied, feigning a sheepish dismay.  

Olive knew she needed a new source. Her façade could not continue forever. While just a lorry driver, The Paramour was a clever enough man, and he would find the heart of the matter soon enough.

The very next day, Olive was employed at the dessert parlor below the flat baking cakes and pies and tarts and pastries.

Olive did not consider her gorging and vomiting as an illness to be cured, although she knew of course how it could be interpreted that way. Nor was it a waste of money, food, or energy. For her, to gorge and disgorge was merely what life demanded from her. It was vital that every crumb be ousted. Nothing consumed should be allowed to remain so. She had to be assured of this before she could even consider the thought of sleep. Nothing should be held back. Everything had to be purged. What was borrowed had to be returned. There were no exceptions. Food, having been formed in a world of impermanence, was by nature purloined, pinched from the pockets of the poor, and had to be returned to its master, whomever that was.

Not literally of course. This was not the case for every meal. Naturally, breakfasts and lunches and tea-times remained the same. But dinner was irrevocably different. Or rather, it was revocable, here meant in the most literal sense of the word. Emptying her insides gave Olive a sense of power, a solemn relief. There was nothing else that could be so intimately hers, so absorbed inside of her, so her through and through, as that which she swallowed deep down her throat and into her belly.

If the incident of the flowerpot and the cold docility of her mother had taught her one thing, it was as her mother had said, that “nothing in this life is ours, nothing is for keeps. Everything is borrowed for a short time before it is violently wrenched away without warning.” At least with this view, Olive could wrench what was borrowed away with warning, as a resolute act of protestation. At least this way, she would agency in the return. Each chunk of vomit would become a message, delivered to the world from deep inside of her, sent by little mucus postmen, that while her life was loaned for a time from some unknowable cosmic lender, that she was going to be in complete control of the dubious agreement so long as it may last. No one could take this from her. This, and only this, she could take from herself.

Walking through the vermillion entryway, Olive felt as though she were embarking through famished red lips into burning innards, the kind of innards at the bottom of the throat where the heat is stored in the body, the kind that resembled the flames of the bakery and the flux of shapes they wore. Inconsistency was the scorched furniture of her life and she had learned to make her bed there in the middle of its infernal décor, there where she could one day grow accustomed to its painful lick at her back. 

She had been working nightshifts along with one other baker, a woman from the Highlands, just north of Inverness, who rarely spoke and had such a thick accent that Olive’s city ears could hardly make out the few words she did speak. For the past five years, Olive had been working under the counter on weekends and several weekdays. A fifteen-year-old wee gal working nearly full-time. These were the days she was to be having sleepovers with schoolmates, competing on the junior softball team, living the life set before her by society. Instead, Olive nocturnally sweltered over the bake oven kneading dough, lining them in holiday shapes and figures that happy parents would buy for their children the following morning.  

Olive preferred the isolation. It allowed her the perfect means to prolong her secret, now so embedded into her life that it was as if she life always been this way. When the Highlander went out for her nightly smoke and stroll through the meadows, Olive snuck small biscuits and cookies, bowls of pudding, custard, ice cream, and any other baked item not counted to the number—anything that would not be noticeably missed—and engorged herself in the private staff toilet, heaping double cream and assortments of sugary icing into her mouth. She did this quickly, like a business transaction, greedily swallowing without chewing whatever she managed to sneak away.

Doing so gave her insurance against discovery, leaving just enough of an interval between the final break and the shift end for her to begin that swelling sensation that accompanied nausea. By the dark early morning, when the birds began to chirp before light, her body would begin to bloat, her muscles ache, her mind tire, as she waddled back to the staff bathroom to deposit into the toilet what had been stolen above.

This was not to say that the thieving in the flat ended altogether, but it did soothe the perceptible decrease in groceries. On the days between her shifts, Olive was forced to take serious measurements of each food she devoured—a half-cup of dry cereal, one block of dry noodles, four slices of cheese, a half-glass of milk, five scoops of yoghurt, four scrapings off a block of butter, one leaf of dill, a portion of cut ham, two handfuls of bagged crisps—each serving carried out with mathematical concern. Declan would sit languidly on the windowsill, watching Olive scurry like a rat back and forth in the dark pantry while her mother lay asleep down the hall, the unblinking cat never wavering in the slightest as he listened, less than an hour later, to Olive puking in the toilet, the almost noiseless gagging and sloshing and flushing carried like sparks from a distant anvil and then softly disappearing into nothing.

This was always followed by the same abject confession, Olive collapsing in front of Declan’s furry mass, weeping uncontrollably.

“I did it again Declan. I needed to get it out of me. It’s like giving birth Declan, you hear. I couldn’t have it all inside me, not with all that out there demanding it back. It’s all inside-out, or outside-in. I can’t keep track of my ins and outs. My heads full o’ mince and I can’t think straight for naught!”

            Another year passed this way undisturbed until Olive returned home one morning after a long shift and found Declan gone. The Paramour and her mother sat before the woodstove on the sofa gazing silently into the fire’s unsteady movements. Olive approached, unsure as to the nature of this early conference. It was just past four and the sky was still dark. Rain pattered against the black windows. All was silent but the crackle of flames and the patter of rain.

            After a time, The Paramour spoke.

            “Sit, gal.” he commanded.

            Olive walked to the unused computer desk, pulled out the oscillating office chair, and sat down.

            “We found who been stealing our food” he continued, stroking his chin stub. “Took some time but I been paying close attention. I’m cleverer than my looks.”

            The Paramour did not move his eyes from the fire, he seemed to be mincing each word as to heighten the impact of each ensuing sentence.

             “It be that cat. Declan” he said. “I found ’im sneaking through the pantry before my shift.”

            Olive’s heart stopped. The Paramour shifted his feet on the shanti rug, his eyes snarled to the woodstove.

            “I can’t have no cat scraping food from our plates. We don’t have the money to…well…So I did what I had to. I took ’im in the lorry and dropped ’im off in a field somewhere between here and Glasgow.”

            Olive’s mother wore a cold and distant glare. An ambulance siren pealed across the district. A night bus zipped like a firefly on a distant hill.

             She could not remain there, sitting like a humiliated little girl before the two who had excommunicated Declan, her priestly feline confidant, her clerical kitty. Before they could stop her, she rose from her chair, running as fast as she could down the stairwell and out into the meadows.

How the meadows changed in the early bottoms of morning! The electrical wires and vines that clung like garland to the buildings during the day took on a dark serpentine quality at night, drooping ophidians from another world. Pigeons and magpies that would otherwise be in deep slumber lay awake with shivering feathers under the grainy city lights. A young man lay against a mossy stone wall, his feet tucked into his sleeping bag, rolling a cigarette, and laughing at a stray mut. The crags overshadowed the deep swathes of dead cherry blossoms, black insensible giants laying in the soft reefs of a glowing golden lake, a lake whose benthic depths discharged rain out of rusty manholes.

These were the early hours where cyclists and pedestrians hid away in their homes and where the stragglers, having emerged from behind large bins and carried out their miscellany of objects rejected by society, now collapsed into heaps of huddled freezing bodies in corners and alleys where they could find a spot warm enough to sleep. There, old men lay crumpled like old newspaper with grey wizard beards and cracks on their lips and cheeks. Some jeered at the raining sky, guzzling rainwater without knowing from where it came.

            Behind her, Olive knew that the Highlander would be locking up the shop for the few hours between then and sunrise. Facing the urban expanse before her, she could not help but see the world as famished. A few feet above the ground, a fog hovered like foamy crema through which stood emaciated trees like chocolate-glazed stalks of celery. Boulders plastered in bird shit looked to her like black velvet cakes. Post lamps floated in the damp haze like lemon pudding, tarty will-o’-the-wisps stirring in the lower atmosphere.

            All she wanted was to blow-up, to fill like a balloon and then pop, all the gaseous nothing that she was returning to the disparaging hands of The Inevitable. She searched frantically for shops that might be open, somewhere she could purchase food enough to eject the feeling of despair, but it was still hours from dawn. She was desperate to fade from this fleeting world just like her father had done, just like her mother was doing, and in his own way just as The Paramour did every night on those long lorry runs to Glasgow between the endless droning hills. Thinning shadows of an old forest that would one day be wolfed by hungry ants.

            In a wastebin on the far edge of the meadows she found an unopened bag of ramen and five half-eaten pizza slices. She tore open the ramen wrapping and began chewing like a newborn foal, crunching loudly while baring her teeth. Diving into the wastebin, she shoveled through the bottles, peels, and rubbish, discovering fragments of fish and chips stuck to the bottom of a torn paper bag. She plucked out the residuum of meat like pasta from the bottom of a strainer, nibbling on what fat she could find.

            It was a challenge not to vomit early, but to fill herself until the food piled in a mushy tower up her throat, and so she plugged her nose as she foraged the wastebin, holding her breath while she ate. She knew how sickening she must have looked, tossing about in the muck, and the thought of her mother witnessing her rolling like swine in shit sent shivers down her rancid flesh.

            “No one will know,” she assured herself. “It’s a dark and rainy night. No one will know.”

            She ate like this, hunting in the wet dregs of Edinburgh, for nearly an hour. She felt condemned perilously in the fifth realm of the Tibetan wheel, forced to live as a hungry ghost, bound by excessive cravings with a small mouth and enormous stomach, compelled to wander like a stray cat in a wasteland of restless spirits.

Suddenly the world lost its color, the fog having spread and covered the evening lights. She felt her stomach contract, the visceral roof quaking like a cave on the verge of collapse. Falling backwards onto the grass, she breathed heavily, as if weighed down by a giant body forcing her to the ground. For a moment she thought that there actually was another body forcing her down, smothering her, pinning her to the earth. Realizing that this body was in fact herself, she turned on her side and, without moving any of her limbs, let the ghostly body cascade from her lips in the form of black and yellow mass on the muddy park floor.

             Moaning out the bile, Olive thought she noticed through squinted eyes the visage of Declan silhouetted in a thick cloud, but before she could speak, she released yet another torrent of swampy fluid.

            Raising her head again, she noticed that it was not Declan she had seen but another cat whose yellow eyes resembled Declan’s. She tried to reach out to the cat, but felt that other body still strangling her own, pushing her down to drown her in her own mashed intestines.

            Then, just as she was about to erupt once more, she heard something that she could not possibly have heard. The Declan doppelganger began to speak words resembling a koan, a kind of meditative riddle. The words surfaced out as though from the eye of a massive whirlpool.

            “There is not one living creature that must not at some point refuse to give. All things relent. All return. Not even the ocean constantly thrashes, nor does the sky endlessly rain. Only by Nature’s plea.”

            At these words she threw herself before the cat as if before a plinth of an idol, beseeching it to aid her in ridding herself of this other body that she had come to possess, that was suffocating her, to put an end to the incessant exorcism of flesh.

She cried out, “Declan! Declan! Please Declan!”

            A voice answered in the same whirling and riddled hum, “To whom is the olive branch extended?” Then the cat leaped upward and disappeared inside the wastebin, stalking into the black packaging of Olive’s mind as she faded quickly into sleep.

            Olive woke in alarm to rain on her face. The sky was still dark, but the fog had lessened, and she realized that had been lying curled in a crumpled chrysalis shape on the ground in a pool of vomit. Standing up she felt a little bit lighter, the former weight halved by slumber. She tried to place herself but could not recognize at which part of the meadows she had collapsed.

            Walking forward, the fog tore like cobwebs, stringing from her forearms as she cut through the thick substance. Neon storefronts blushed along a side street. She walked a path towards the lights that took her along the cement just outside the park. Looking at her own dim reflection in the dark glass of a store, she could not recognize herself.

            After walking for some time, she came across a woman wearing a black wool beret and a long black coat that reached her ankles. She stood, unmoving, staring into a lighted storefront that sold coffins. She looked young to be shopping for coffins.

Olive glanced at the store and noticed how the coffins shined and shimmered off hanging spotlights revealing various colors and designs. On one coffin she saw the white X of the flag of Scotland, on another she saw a haloed portrait of the Virgin Mary, another made of threaded wicker had a white Buddha painted in its center, another bore a heraldic crest with a standing lion. Above the coffins, in a funereal font, a neon black sign read:

Go As You Please Coffins & Company

On the door front, a list of selections for coffin personalization were printed on white paper, scotch taped to the glass, and ripped at the edges. It read:

We are glad to offer the below for your future casket:

-        Religious Icons

-        Movie Quotes

-        National Flags

-        Labyrinths and Crosswords

-        Household Pet Portraits

-        Landscape photography

-        Optical Illusions

-        Tarot Cards

Don’t wait till it’s too late, keep your loved one’s awake at your wake!

            A car passed by, shooting water from a puddle onto the Woman in Black’s coat. She did not seem bothered by the affront.

“I’m going to die” she said, interrupting an apathetic daze that had begun to creep over Olive.

            “I’m going to die” she said again, this time louder, “on my thirty-first birthday, I’m going to die from fuckin’ diabetes.”

            The Woman in Black said nothing after this but continued staring at a coffin with a mickey mouse on the lid, a white-gloved thumbs-up popping out of the coffin in 3D.

            “It could have been avoided too. I knew I was thinning out, losing weight too quickly, pissing fifteen times a night, always tired and increasingly irritable, losing feeling in my hands for full hour-long stretches at a time. I even wet the bed once. A thirty-year old wetting the bed. And still, I didn’t see a doctor.”

            Olive looked from the coffins to the Woman in Black. She hesitated for a moment before speaking, and then, after a minute passed, she said, “aye, life’s well shan, I myself have not much of life. I must look rather dreary to your eyes. But mama told me that nothing in life is for sure, that we don’t owe life anything. That everything in life is just borrowed—”

            “Borrowed sure enough,” interrupted the Woman in Black starkly, “but something borrowed is not any less mine while I have it.”

            Another silence. The fog looked like a slow-moving cloud in the still slumbering meadows across the street. Olive did not know what to say.

            “My mother said something different than yours,” said the Woman in Black finally. “I’d like to share it since you been standing here with me now.”

            Olive waited silently.

            “Death is like the sky,” she started, vaguely, “the endless formations of clouds, ambling grey and elsewhere floating, all a preamble to light.”

            Olive did not understand. The rain came down hard now, threshing the glossy cobblestone. Water soaked their resigned bodies, undeterred and yielding.

            The Woman in Black continued, “but while the clouds glower above like tattered capes, they follow nature’s blessed ordination, receiving the gifts of the earth and returning them thereto.”

            Following this, the Woman in Black sighed and looked up at the sky. Olive had hardly noticed, but after a few seconds of downpour the clouds had begun breaking up and clearing the way for an interstitial moon to appear, bathed in purple space. The two of them stood there, their breaches drenched from the pour, watching the rain abate and the moon turn the world to stillness once more.

            Olive could not help but notice how the moon illumined the sharp rock face of the crags in the distance, an imposing Camelot of nature, teeming with dark grassy veins. She thought of her father standing there in his last moments, staring out at the grey night sky.

            The Woman in Black turned to Olive, as if noticing her for the first time.

“Look at you,” she said. “You look like you’ve been starved for years. Would you come keep me company for a while? I can cook up some breakfast. If we are lucky, maybe we’ll see the sunrise over the crags.”