Wellness Rituals

You never understood me until you watched me wash the inside of the well, with clean wellwater and invisible soap which dissolves the dirt and then clumps up and floats to the surface, suddenly iridescent.

I net up the greening lumps, skimming. I leave the net out to dry. Within hours the lumps are coagulated and bacterial, dirty heads striated with living question marks, leech-pieces, worm eyes, segments of fertile sediment.

Enough bio-material to assemble themselves into flying animals, little glowing spitballs. They waver off into their new lives. I made them surely as I made my daughter: without knowing how.

I washed down the sides with seasponge, as far as my arms could go then lowered myself in the bucket. Down there I used my feet. Scrubbed the stones and cracks of moss and slime and what else? Dead water. New algae. Legs of things.

I held my breath against the earth perfume in case it was infected, and spread my legs to straddle the diameter, my toes clenched on wet grit. My own holes amphibian as ever. Where does my water come from? From myself you know.

I am a self-cleaning animal and my children were born glistening under all the soft trees leaving, breathing. You understand me now; the well was always clean. I clean it anyhow. It is no cleaner now than it was but I am.