A Cast of the Causeway / Liv'd But Three
by Jordan Harrison-Twist
A cast of the causeway
Mum, I say, when I open my eyes. It’s me, I’m back, and reach for her hand, a mooring knot, throttling the bed rail. She turns and drips pity, disgust at my wounds. I touch my gown, an unknown thing between fingers, winched above scabbed legs taking shape like landscapes. I’m not your mum, she says. I do not know you.
My blood is rich with sedative; I am wine. Water tantalises but my reinforced spine holds me heavy. Yes you do, I say, know me; but she sits there looking off. In this room lost things swim—all that I had lost already, and would come to lose (we were not finished yet); all her mind’s mutilations, devoid of cracks in which to settle, sprout, withstand. A sorrow of offerings.
I half expect her to bemoan my hollowed chest, my screws and plates, for I am not the son she remembers, the son to whom she addressed her last loveletter. In the corridor, blue pyramidal lights, her voice, the letter-writer, I know you think it is easy to be old, that all I do is sit, creak, love.
I never did tell you how much it frightens me that all you have forgotten might one day recompose, remember who was not kind to you, or patient.
liv’d but three
In reflection, he hides in the depths of the bay window, and you compliment the leadlight. A halfway decent lover I would love to be, but it isn’t up to me now. When we fuck facing the window I am searching for your gaze but you have escaped into the glass to find him, concentrating. Our bodies rust over. You don’t even like design; you can tell by the amethyst on the ledge.
I close the incognito window and where there used to be clean lines below my abdominals, I have secreted our bumper-decade of contentedness. Between the comfortable hips I am red and sore and in retreat. I pull up my trousers and tell you later that I am just not in the mood. The amethyst winks with his thousand eyes.
You can be whichever version of yourself you want to be, you tell me. And it needn’t always be the one you seem to choose, who is a pitiful drunk.
We strive for the charisma that means our friends have to apologise for the things we have said once we leave. I hold you when we go out to show them that I care and I think you look good in the mirror behind the optics; you say you wish I was pale like a lamb again. When we were solarised. Pale enough to be picked from the curtained bay. In the mirror’s faults, he eats blood oranges and botanicals.
Our sheets hold both shadows and secretions and when you sleep with me, facing out again, you are lazy like a corpse. Last year is dead says the back of your scalp, your wrist with the cat scratches. Why is it we do not kiss wrists, so close to the artery?
I pick up my things and tighten my belt and put a hand each side of the bay window. The night is moss green and the moon has emptied itself into a passing cloud. If he is here tonight, he who watches, who steals us, then I will pull him, glass dust spilling from his lacerations, from his observatory. I angle apart the leadlight and flick off the switch. For what I am about to do there will be no witnesses. I pick up the amethyst and break the night.
Jordan Harrison-Twist is a writer and editor based in Manchester, UK. His essays have appeared in 3:AM Magazine, The Double Negative, iiii Magazine, and Corridor8. He is the one-time winner of the Retreat West micro fiction competition, in which he has been variously shortlisted and long-listed; he has also been long-listed in the Reflex Press flash fiction competition. His story 'Plethora' appears in ‘Between the Lines’, an anthology published by Comma Press.
