A six-part monologue
Part 1: The Outpost
(Wet peat sucking at boots. A metallic screech as an iron door is forced, then the hollow ring of footsteps on a rusted grid floor. Her breathing is shallow and never fully settles.)
Step. Just step. Weight on the ball of the foot or the metal gives, and it is already giving, everything in here is weeping orange water. God, it is the exact colour of that cedar oil we bought for the flat, remember? You knocked the bottle over on the linoleum and the whole place smelled of a dying forest for three months. I can taste it at the back of my throat. Or that is the salt off the marsh. I cannot tell the two apart any more, and I have been standing in this doorway for four minutes trying to.
Look at it. Environmental Station 4, painted over the lintel in white letters gone the colour of teeth. Decommissioned. They just left it. Left the gauges to freeze, left the wires to rot in their casings, left a kettle on a shelf, an actual kettle, with a skin of green across the water inside. Smart, though. When the ground turns to soup you do not stay and negotiate with the mud. You pack the bags and you go, and you do not make a speech about it. It is the only sensible thing anyone ever did here. I wonder who was last out. I wonder if they locked the door behind them or just let it hang, the way you let it hang that final morning, the latch not quite caught and the draught finding my ankles all day.
I drove here without deciding to. So much for deciding. Eleven hours, the radio hunting between stations, and somewhere past the last petrol pump the static began to sound as though a lung were filling with water, and I turned it up. Turned it up! Because it was the only voice in the car that was not asking me anything. I did not turn around in the car park either. I know what you would say. You would say I over-correct. "You don't just leave a room, Clara, you evict yourself from it." That is what you said the day I threw out the mugs from Goa, the blue-glazed ones with the lopsided handles. And I did evict them, in a single armful, into the bin by the gate, and you stood there in your socks on the wet concrete and looked at me as though I had thrown out a dog.
But they were cracked. Hairline, barely a thread, you had to hold one to the window to see it. Here is what nobody tells you about a crack like that. It does not leak. A leak you can mend, a leak announces itself. You pour boiling water in one morning, an ordinary morning, with the radio on, and it goes straight down the middle in your hand. Two clean halves and a burn across your thumb. I was not being cruel to the mugs. I was getting there before the water did.
The floor is flexing. Listen to it. Every step has an answer, a small iron cough from underneath, and under that, further down, something that is not iron at all, soft and patient. The peat. Five thousand years of moss folded into itself. I read about it at the services, standing at the vending machine with a sandwich I did not want, the way you read about anything when you are trying not to read the message you have just sent. They pull things out of bogs, you know. Boots. Butter. A man with his last meal still in his stomach and his face so calm he looks to be listening. Nothing rots down there. It keeps. That seems to me the most frightening thing I have heard all year, that a place can simply keep what you give it.
Keep walking. There is a corridor, and a door with a window of wired glass gone white with damp, and behind it a desk, a chair on its side, a calendar stopped at a month nobody remembers. Look at the calendar. Somebody circled a date and wrote one word beside it in biro, and the ink has bled so far into the paper it could be a name or a warning or a grocery item. I will not touch it. I am touching it. Soft as a dead leaf. Orange dust on my fingertips, and my fingertips are shaking, and I am going to call it the cold.
It is not cold, actually. Strange, that. I expected cold, I packed for cold, I have your grey jumper on under my coat, yes, that one, the one you said you would never find again and I said I had not seen it. I am sorry. It still smells of you, woodsmoke and the inside of your car and the cheap shampoo you insist on, and I keep my face down in the collar like a coward while I walk through the ruin of somebody else's work.
Here is what I want to say, and then I will stop, because the air in here is so heavy that every sentence is a bucket carried up a stair. We did not break. I keep wanting to tell someone that. There was no night, no plate against a wall, no sentence one of us said that could not be unsaid. We drifted. Month by month the grey came up through the floor of the flat and neither of us mentioned the damp, and we kept putting down new rugs, new lamps, new ways of being very polite, until one day I could not have told you where the floor ended and the water began.
And now I am standing in a building made to measure exactly that. Water levels. Pressure. Whether the ground is holding. Four gauges on the wall and not one of them moving, all four needles resting at the bottom of their dials like sleepers who have given up. Even the machine built to tell you when you are sinking has stopped telling you. I find I am almost grateful. Let me stay a while. Let me sit on this overturned chair, in your jumper, and not be measured.
Part 2: Corroding Logic
(Her palm strikes an old metal console. Then the quick, frantic clicking of a dead toggle switch, over and over.)
Click. Click. Come on. Just a spark. One small green light to prove the world has not dissolved outside these windows. Nothing. Of course nothing. The generator is a rusted drum in the yard, I walked past it, I put my hand flat on its side and it was colder than the rain. Click. I am doing it again anyway. You used to say that was my entire method for everything, flip the switch, flip the switch, and then look wounded when the light does not come on.
The logbooks are damp. Look at them, the pages stuck together like wet skin after a fever breaks. I can peel one corner and read half a line, a date, a reading, a set of initials, and then the rest is a brown bloom where the water got in. Somebody measured this marsh every day for years. Depth of the water table, temperature of the peat, the pH of the pools. Every morning, a person in boots wrote down what the ground was doing, and nobody wrote down what to do about it. That is what a gauge is for, I suppose. It tells you the truth and leaves you standing there.
The last entry I can read is in a small slanted hand, initials R.M., and it says only, Pool 7 rising, third day, no cause found. Third day. Three days of watching the water climb and writing it down, in blue biro, in a tidy column, and then the page ends. I keep turning to the next sheet in case R.M. went on. R.M. did not. R.M. wrote the truth for three days and then, I think, put the pen down and went to find a car. I find I admire that more than I can say. A clean line, a measured retreat, and no one waiting at the top of the stairs.
Do you remember that July the air conditioning failed? Thirty-eight degrees in the flat, the fan only pushing the heat from one corner to another. We lay on the bare mattress with the sheets stripped off, too hot to touch and too frightened of the distance to move apart. So we did not. We let the sweat glue our ribs together. Your hand was on my hip and neither of us said it was too hot for that. I can feel the weight of it now, right here on my sternum, only it is cold, and it does not feel like your hand, it feels more like a stone someone has set there to keep a page from blowing away.
The fog is coming up through the floorboards. Not through the windows, the windows are shut, I checked them, three of them, the frames swollen tight. Up from underneath. It is thin, like lint, drifting at ankle height, and it smells of old copper, the way a coin does when you have held it in your mouth as a child. Funny. A machine built to measure the weather ends up as the weather. The rust is eating the dials from the inside, starting at the pivot where the needle turns and working outward. It does not hurry. Nothing here hurries. Even the damp has the manners of an old servant.
Tuesday. I left on a Tuesday, I have been keeping hold of that, because the days after have run together and I need one fixed thing. Tuesday, the car, the motorway, the services, here. If I say the days in order they stay in order. Your mother rang on the Wednesday and I let it ring. I thought about her garden, the well at the back, the one with the boards across it that she was always telling us not to lean on. I let it ring until the screen went dark. I do not know what I would have said to her. Sorry about the boards.
All right. All right. Here is the one I have been walking around since the car park. What if I had not said it? What if, when you turned at the door with the blue crate in your arms, I had simply caught the corner of the box? I would have been quick enough. I was close enough. My fingers would have slipped on the plastic and we would have dropped it, the extension cords, the mismatched spoons, the heavy winter coats we never once shared. They would have gone down the stairs in a long clatter. We would have laughed. Or I would have cried. Either of those was better than what I did.
Because that is the thing. I did not say it. Not the cruel thing, not even the sorry thing. Nothing. My tongue was three pounds of salt in my mouth. You stood in the doorway for what the clock on the cooker says was eleven seconds, and I counted them, I know it was eleven, because I thought that if I could get to twelve I would be able to speak. You waited. You looked at me so patiently. Then you shifted the crate higher on your arm, and I watched your heels go down the stairs. Click, and click, and click, each step a clean small sound.
Just like this. Click. Click. The same sound. The same dead switch, and my thumb keeps finding it as though it were the stair. Come on. Come on. Say it now, Clara, say it to the empty room, it costs nothing, there is no one in the building to hear. Say, wait. Say, please. Say, I am here, I am right here, I did not mean it, I do not even know what it was I meant. My mouth opens and the air in the room comes in and sits on my tongue, grey and metallic, and that is all that comes.
Entirely dead. The console, the switch, the green light I wanted so badly. I will say something sensible now, I will say that I am tired, that it was a long drive. I will say that no one is to blame for a machine that stopped working before I was born. And the fog will go on climbing, thin as lint, up past my boots, and I will stand here with my palm flat on the cold steel and pretend the cold coming up through my palm is only the steel.
Part 3: The Ghost in the Gauge
(Her voice drops to a low, uneven whisper. She shifts her weight against a metal wall and slides down it until her boots meet the iron floor with a dull thud.)
There. It is touching the back of my neck. I know exactly what it is. A cracked pressure seal on the secondary valve, the little brass wheel by the door, and every time the marsh exhales it pushes a thread of air through the gap and along the wall to me. That is all. Physics. Cold air finding the warm place. But it lands at the base of my skull and it stays there, and I am sorry, I cannot make it be anything but your thumb.
You always put it right there when I started to spin out. Not rubbing, you never rubbed, just the pad of the thumb resting in the hollow where the head meets the spine, warm and entirely still. "Breathe into the pressure," you would say, in that low voice you saved for fevers and bad news. Thirty-six point six degrees, you told me once, reading it off a thermometer when I had a fever, that is as warm as a person is meant to get before the body starts to argue with itself. I have never forgotten the number. I do not know why a number like that stays. And I would. I would breathe into the pressure until my shoulders came down from around my ears. I am breathing into it now. In, and hold. But the air is thick. It is like breathing through wet wool, and it tastes of coins and cedar, and the pressure does not go anywhere. It only leans.
The fog is not staying outside any more. Be reasonable, Clara, it is damp, it is a marsh, it will find every gap. But it is coming through the rivets. Look at them, the whole line of them along the wall, and out of each one a pale curl, slow, unhurried, winding around the legs of this rusted cot like white hair in water. I put my hand through it and it parts and closes behind my wrist. Cool. Then, for a moment, not cool. Then the exact temperature of a mouth.
It is so quiet. Too quiet. A marsh has no pulse, did you know that? I thought it would hum, I thought there would be frogs, birds, an insect rasp. Nothing. It has only a slow, collective swallow, and every so often a bubble comes up somewhere in the dark and breaks, and the whole place seems to wait to see if that is going to be the one. I close my eyes against it, and at once I can feel a mattress sinking under me. No. Not a mattress. The station. The concrete stilts under the floor are groaning, a long low complaint, the sound of something very heavy asked to hold on a little longer.
Two tons of iron balanced over black water. Of course they are tired. It takes so many calories, so much fuel, simply to keep two people from falling into the dark, did you ever think of that? Every conversation about whose turn it was to buy bread was really a conversation about holding the roof up. We were tired too, weren't we? We never said so. We were very good at not saying so.
Your skin was always warmer than mine. I do not think you ever knew how much of the winter I spent stealing it. My feet on your calves under the duvet, ice against heat, and you would curse under your breath, a long grumbling string of words, and you never once pulled away. I loved that. The curse and then the staying. In the dark I would put my mouth against the place below your ear where your pulse was, and wait for it to find a rhythm that was not just yours but ours, and for a minute, I swear, there was only one heartbeat in that room, and it was borrowed, and it was enough.
There was the sofa, too. The green velvet one we found outside a charity shop and carried up four flights between us, laughing, arguing over who was lifting the heavier end. It was always a little damp from some leak in the wall behind it. We sat there every evening for six years with our feet touching and a plate of toast between us, and I never once said it was my favourite place in the world. When we put it out on the kerb in the rain, last spring, the velvet drank the water and went black, and I stood at the window and thought, well, that is that, then, and did not say anything about that either.
You never pulled away. You never pulled away until I gave you a reason to. Let me say it, then, since the walls are listening and they do not judge. What if the reason was not real? What if I invented the rot? I have been asking it since the services, since the vending machine, since the long grey strip of road. What if the flat was not damp at all, and the mugs were not cracked, and what I could not bear was how clean everything felt? Clean, and warm, and mine, and so easy to lose that I preferred to do it myself, quickly, with the lights on.
That is a terrible idea. I want it back. No, I do not, I want it where I can see it. Is that the draught again? The back of my neck, the hollow, the thumb. It is moving now. A very small pressure, a slow stroke, down toward the collar of your jumper. I could not say it is not the wind. I could swear there is no wind. I sit very still, the way you taught me, the way you teach an animal not to run, and I let it.
Look at my hands. Look at my fingers. They have gone white from the damp, the knuckles waxy, the nails faintly blue, and where the fog has settled across them I cannot quite find the edge. Here is my wrist, and here is where it should become my hand, and between the two there is a stretch of paleness that is only a little less than air. They are only cold. That is what I am saying. Or perhaps they are simply turning into the room, one soft grey inch at a time, and I am too comfortable to object.
Part 4: The Sinking Foundation
(A sharp, sudden intake of breath. She scrambles to her feet, her hands scraping along rough, rusted iron. Somewhere below, water shifts.)
The water is coming up through the floor. Not an inch. Not yet. A film only, a greasy black mirror laid across the grid, and in it, nothing but the shape of my own chin and a long smear of the ceiling lamp that is not lit. I can see the peat down there between the bars. Black, ancient, five thousand years of dead moss pressed into one continuous choke. It does not judge what falls into it. A bird drops out of the sky, the bog takes it. A tooth, a wedding band, an entire research station, it simply opens and closes without so much as a bubble. I used to think that was the cruelty of a place like this. Standing here, I think it might be the mercy.
That is what the guilt does, you see. It does not scream. I expected it to scream, I braced for it for weeks, I held my breath at traffic lights. Instead it sat down in the corner of the room like a wet coat, and every day it was a little heavier, and every day I walked past it and did not look, until the floorboards began to sag towards it. Beams, somewhere under me. I can hear them going, one dry crack and then another. Or that is my ribs. I honestly cannot tell. It has been the same sound for a week.
You said I was hollow. Do you remember? You said it in the kitchen on the Sunday, not angrily, almost kindly, which was worse. "You're an acoustic chamber, Clara. Everything echoes in you and nothing stays." I laughed. I said that was very poetic. I took a piece of toast and I buttered it all the way to the edges and I ate it standing at the sink. Well, listen. Listen to the echo now. It is the only thing in here with any life left in it. Every word I say goes out into the corridor, the dark, the stairwell, and comes back a half-second late, softer, with something added.
The radio. There is a shortwave set on the shelf above the console, a black box the size of a loaf, with a dial gone yellow and a cloth grille. It has been dead since I came in. I looked. The mains lead is cut off at the wall, the bottom panel is hanging open, and the wires dangle out of it, grey and pale and loose, a tangle of intestines. It is not plugged into anything. And it is hissing. Not the clean dry hiss of static. A softer sound. Long, and slow, and then a small wet catch, right at the end.
I know that catch. Of course I do. It is the sound you made in your sleep, that low rhythmic stutter in the breath just before you turned onto your left side. For six years I lay awake and waited for it and when it came I knew it was safe to close my eyes. In, and the long hiss. Out, and the catch. In, and the hiss. It is coming from the speaker. It is coming, I am almost sure, from the speaker. How can it speak if it is dead? How can I hear you from three hundred miles away, in a well-lit kitchen, with the kettle on, I think, and the radio on, and your phone face down on the counter where you promised you would not leave it?
I will go and look at the dials. That is sensible. Machines first, then the rest. Here is the pressure gauge, the one on the north wall, and the needle has gone the colour of dried blood, a deep brown crust all along its length, and the glass over it is beaded on the inside with tiny drops. The inside. How does water get inside a sealed glass? It cannot. Therefore it is not water. Therefore it is only condensation, or an old fault, or a trick of the lamp that is not on. I press the back of my knuckle to the glass and it comes away wet and warm.
It is warm. And that is wrong. I know it is wrong, because I read the whole article at the services, standing at the vending machine, and a bog is cold. That is the entire secret of it. The men they pull out whole were not kept by kindness. Three things work together. First the acid. The moss gives it off as it dies, sharp as vinegar, and it tans the skin the way a tannery tans leather, so the skin stays and the bones dissolve from the inside, which is why they come out looking deflated. Second, no air. Nothing down there can breathe, so nothing can eat. And third the cold. They have to go in at the end of winter, the water barely above freezing, under four degrees, so the acid can soak all the way through before the rot gets started. The peat does not heat anything. It is lagging, wrapped around the cold like felt around a pipe. It keeps what it is given cold. So why is this glass warm?
And you will not ask me what I did. I notice that. You have not asked once, in all this time, in all this noise. You said it in the car park when you loaded the last bag, you said, "I'm not angry, Clara, I just want to know what's in there," and you tapped, very gently, with one finger, against my breastbone. A knock at a door. And I stood there in the sodium light with my own hollow ringing under your knuckle. I could not give you any answer except the echo.
Listen. Listen to it. The hiss and the catch. In, and the long breath, and the small wet stop. It is faint, and it is perfectly regular, and it matches the rhythm of the water as it comes up and falls back through the grate. In. Out. In. There is no lag in it at all. No lag between the breath in the speaker and the breath of the floor. I think I could lie down here, now, in this thin black film, and sleep, and be safe. I think that would be permitted.
Part 5: The Breakthrough at the Terminal
(Her voice rises and fractures. Metal shifts and groans. Window panes rattle hard under a pressure that has no wind behind it.)
The walls are breathing. Do not tell me they are not. I have my hand on this one and it swells, and sinks, and swells. The iron is expanding, the rust is coming off in big wet scabs, they are dropping on my boots, they are warm. It is not the wind. There is no wind. There has been no wind since I got here, the marsh is flat as a zinc table, the reeds outside do not so much as lean, and the station is shaking. It is the fog. It is pushing at the glass. Look at the panes. They are bowing inward, every one, a slow curve, and the putty is cracking along the frame in long white lines.
No sensible reason. I have run out of sensible reasons. I had a whole stack of them, the seal, the draught, the damp, and they have gone, they went somewhere in the last hour and left me with only what is in front of me. A building leaning inward. A floor with a skin of water. A hiss from a radio with its guts out. Say something. Say something to me.
What if I call you? What if the static is a loop and the loop has a door in it? There is a receiver on the wall, black, heavy, the cord twisted into a coil. If I lift it, will I hear you ask where we keep the spare lightbulbs? You always ask. Every time the hall light goes you stand under it with your arms folded and say, Clara, where do we keep the bulbs, as though I were a cupboard. I pick it up. It is cold. It is not even a dial tone. It is a long, level silence, and in the silence there is nobody asking.
You do not ask any more. That is what the silence says. You have forgotten the layout of my face. You are at a table somewhere, with a light on, and someone is talking to you, and you are laughing in the right places and you cannot, for the life of you, recall which side I parted my hair on. Three weeks. Four. It will take less than that. A person is only a set of habits, and you are so good at breaking habits, you made it look so clean, and I will be a drawer you open sometimes and cannot remember filling.
The fog is inside my throat. I swallow and it goes down, cold, coppery, and it tastes of the water from your mother's well. The one behind her house. The one with the boards across it, the one they closed because it went sour. I did not mean to break it. I swear I did not mean to. I went round the back that Tuesday morning, before I left, I do not know why, and the little padlock key was in my pocket from the shed, and I put it in the door of the well house and I turned it so hard that the brass snapped off in the lock. I was shaking. I have been shaking since Tuesday. I stood there in her wet garden with half a key in my hand and thought, there. Now there is something that cannot be opened.
Look at the terminal. LOOK at it. The screen on the far desk, the dead one, the grey glass, and it is green. A green glow, soft, spreading outward from the middle. There is no power. The generator is drowned. I put my hand on it. And the screen is writing. It is writing your name, your whole name, over and over, down the glass, line after line. No. No, it is not your name. It is the data. It is only numbers, a table, a record. It says the marsh is ninety percent water and ten percent memory. It says that. I am reading it. Ninety and ten. What is the ten? What is it keeping?
Something is under the floor. It is not the peat. It is moving along the stilts, rubbing, a long slow slide of something wet along something iron, and every few seconds the whole building tilts a degree and settles, as though a very large animal were turning over in its sleep. I am not sleeping. I am wide awake. I am more awake than I have ever been. And you are asleep, aren't you, on your left side, with your breath catching, in a kitchen three hundred miles from the only person who still hears you.
I should have said it. I should have said it, I should have said it at the top of the stairs. Eleven seconds, and the twelfth one never came, and now everything that should have followed it is coming for me at once. It is in the ceiling, it is in the pipes, it is in the carpet of the corridor, rolling. We are going down. The floor is not holding. I can feel it in my ears, the pressure, the sudden fullness, a hand pressed to each side of my head. We are forty feet down into the peat already. Forty feet. I know it is not possible. I can feel the weight of the dark pressing every window at once.
The iron is screaming. Do you hear it? It is screaming for me, because I will not, the iron is screaming the thing I would not say. Wait. Please. I am here. I did not mean it. Wait. And the bolts are working loose. Up there, the ceiling, the heavy ones, they turn in their sockets, turn, turn, and one by one they drop out of the plate and fall past me, black, small, glinting, bolt after bolt, and the holes they leave are wet and open, and the bolts are popping out of the ceiling like black teeth!
Part 6: Dark Surrender
(The groaning of metal stops completely. Her voice is level, hollow and unhurried. Under it, the soft, slow lap of still water.)
Quiet. Listen. The iron has stopped fighting. The ceiling is where it was, I think, or it is somewhere else and it does not matter. The door did not hold, and it does not matter, because the water has stopped being cold. Or stopped being warm. I cannot tell which any more, and I have tried, I put my hand in to find out. It is the same as my hand. Thirty-six point six degrees, the number you read me off the thermometer, the same as the hollow between your collarbone and your shoulder, where I used to hide my nose when the world got too loud. I know it should be four. I know what the article said. But there is no edge between the water and my fingers, no line where one stops, so there is nothing for the cold to be measured against. I am not going to ask how I know the number. I know it the way I know your breathing. I have always known it.
I am lying down on the grating now. I did not decide to. My knees went, and then my back, and I let them. The metal is not hard any more. It gives under my shoulder blades, soft and slightly yielding, and it has the nap of the old velvet sofa, the green one, the one we dragged to the kerb in the rain and I watched go black from the window. It is only the sofa. It was only ever the sofa. I put my feet up. I find there is room for them.
The fog is not around me any more. It is in me. I can feel it moving where my breath goes, cool in the throat, loose in the chest, slow in the ribs. Every time I open my mouth to say your name the grey pours out over my lips and settles back into the room, and the room accepts it, and that is all right. I have been so afraid of the things I could not say. They were never going anywhere. They were only waiting for a place deep enough.
The station is not an outpost. Not any more. It never was one, was it. It is a sieve. It was built to let the marsh run through it and be counted, and look, here it is, counted. Pale water coming through the cuffs of my coat and up my sleeves. The peat coming through my shirt, thick, dark, kind. My pockets are filling with small blind fish and wet moss and the little grains of old summer. I do not mind. They are the first things anyone has put in my pockets for a long time.
I want to tell you the answer, the one I could not give in the car park. You asked what was in there. I know now. Nothing was in there, and everything, and they were the same. The thing I was carrying and the thing that was carrying me. It was never a crime, was it, or an affair, or a lie. It was one silence at the top of the stairs, a single eleven seconds, and I fed it, and I fed it, until it was larger than the flat, larger than the car, larger than a bog. The guilt and this place are one body. It has just been waiting for me to be ready to lie down inside it.
So. Twelve. There it is. The number I could not reach. Twelve, and my mouth opens, quite easily, and I say it. Wait. I am here. I am sorry. I did not mean it. I did not know what I meant. That is all. That is the whole sentence. It took the full length of a marsh and a night to get it out, and it was only a handful of words, and it fell into the water without a ripple, and the water took it, as the water takes everything.
The mugs. I think of the mugs now, the blue ones from Goa, and I understand them at last. I thought the crack was the danger. It was only the shape of the thing. Every vessel has a seam, and everything poured into it goes down the seam sooner or later, and what I called ruin was a kind of honesty. And look, the kettle. The one on the shelf, with its green skin of water, it is steaming. Without a flame, without a wire. A thin white thread rising from the spout into the rafters, as though someone were about to make tea for two. Let it boil. I am not afraid of the burn across the thumb. I have had it a long time. I only wanted to be the water instead of the cup.
We do not need the logic. Not the logbooks, not the dials, not R.M. and the tidy column of the third day. We do not need the data, the ninety and the ten. We do not need the words we did not say at the top of the stairs. The water has them now. It is all right. I will tell you what I can feel. I feel the thumb at the base of my skull, steady, still, warm. I am not afraid of it. I never needed it to be the wind.
You are not three hundred miles away. I see that now. You were never in the kitchen. You are the water under the grid, the one that holds me, the temperature of skin. You are the mist in the rafters. You are every place I stopped. I am not running any more, and I am not waiting for the bulb to come on. I only want to let the bog finish its swallow. It will be slow. It is gentle. It has been practising for five thousand years.
Close the eyes. Breathe into the pressure. In, and hold. The water is at my ears now, soft, and the sound of the world is the sound of one long breath, in, and the small wet catch, and out. There is no edge to my hand. There is no floor and no water, only this, only the grey, only you. Breathe. Let the cold iron turn to skin.
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