MAROULA BLADES
Anne stops breathless on the frosty street ablaze with noise, conscious of herself rising to touch the sun midway up the dawn sky in all its greys, purples, and dusky pinks, loosely unfolding in the early stretch of day. Alone with the city’s jagged contours and sharp turns stifling her walk, she hobbles forward, bereaved. Outside the self, it is a time of silence, a belly-aching spell. Age breaks through on all fours, bloated, howling below the skin like a mangy dog sweating in its fur.
“Age is a chisel,” she thinks. “It digs and scrapes, filing away at life. Heat pulsates, flushing the flesh. Minus fifteen degrees and what hell is this sweat that trickles to what used to be the waistline and down the wide shoulders, chunky like my male cousin’s shot-putter’s back, oh God, the hurt and shame of it!”
Scorched by the second, blinded by the minute, fallen within an hour, friction crawls between her 113 kilos and the brown flannel clothing, chafing the skin. Anne tries to rise above the she-phantom now wriggling below her frame like a giant scarlet worm, its hunger insatiable. She shouts and cries, wanting to prise open every red vessel, summoning the waning will to rise and stake the beast and let her body breathe unhampered once more. Within moments she capitulates, falling brittle as chalk onto an orange brick wall, head spinning in a jungle of red and black carousels. She imagines that even the evergreen trees have taken on a psychedelic turn for the worse. Fuchsia leaves and yellow trunks. Green birds savagely pick at black nests. Eggs lie empty of yolks. The turf warps. Sunken to the core, Anne’s nose drips, beads freeze around her blue-tinged mouth. She roughly rubs her face; tiny splinters of ice fall to her lap. Anne looks toward the iceblink in the distance with tears in her eyes and a belated prayer on her lips, as a soft voice patters in her mind, whispering:
“Embrace her to smooth the tidal dance below the skin. Each collision will rob you of breath if you don’t kiss her cheek, now, quietly within the space of a turn. Let her know she is a part of you and you will both ride the incoming swell of a woman’s change. So soft it can be, so soft within your reach.”