Perilous Adventures
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Pandora

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Olvar Wood Writers Retreat

 
 

Rellik

Tracey White
 

Bend, heave, pull, stroke.
Bend, heave, ply, scull.
Bend, heave, pull, stroke.
Bend, heave, ply, scull. 

Bend. I steady my vengeful gaze, fixed hard on the past before me.

Heave. With every feeble tug of the oar I see Eliza.

Pull. Always, she floats on my mind. Always, awash in the stream, my last vision of her. That flint of blood at her temple.

Stroke. I squint into the creeping mist, watching as the black swampland recedes, with its littering of skeletal trees, sticks of the dead seeing me off. Reckoning is my future and it waits at my back, while I row.

Bend. Slow and brown, in my wasted sinew and scarred hide, I row out into the bleak river, towards retribution, Eliza floating in my mind.

Heave. There is no reflection in the black face of the river. No glint in the muddy swirl of the oars, and no light in the sluggish ripple of the bow. The open waters slap and sting.

Ply. My wounds, like my memories, are as raw as yesterday.

Scull. I stare out over the choppy blur, to the fading whip of marsh where I’ve left him, the boatman, hooded and grounded, leaning on his pole, awaiting my return. The coin on my tongue is corroded and bitter, tarnished with foul spittle. A refund, of sorts. My return passage.

Bend. Eliza crumpled into the shallows that day.

Heave. Her small face, pointed and ringlet framed, not at all pretty, although far prettier than mine, had borne a faint shock as she reeled from the glance of the stone.

Pull. I watched her float, suspended in all her billowing linen.

Stroke. We’d first met by the stream, where Eliza was fond of walking. From my rest in a secluded nook I heard her singing. Aroused, I followed the chime of her bird voice lilting an old lullaby.

Swish goes the river
Sweep goes the oar
Baby is rocking
In the boat floor…

Bend. I was just a lad, respectable, but never mixing in Eliza’s privileged circles. I found her there often after that, and joined her along the stream. She was a coy one, never allowing me to hold her delicate gloved hand.

Heave. I stare hard at the far strand of swamp, like one of Eliza’s ribbons fluttering and fading in the haze.

Ply. I’d cast my impetuous stone that day and watched, as Eliza’s new beau lifted her paleness from the stream and retreated, glancing around, frowning in perplexity. Thinking, what animal would attack his little bird like that?

Scull. Impetuous. I hadn’t known the meaning of the word. Or that it would change my life in a moment.

Bend. One impetuous moment.

Heave. I’d gone to the stream that day hoping to find Eliza in her usual place. From the nook I saw her, on the bend of the stream. Eliza was not alone, not there for me.

Pull. She’d gathered wildflowers, laughed her tinkling bird laugh, and placed her hand on another man’s arm.

Stroke. I watch the horizon, the past, reliving that day with every aching stroke. That day of my life. The day that sets eternally over the swamp, where I’ve haunted the shallows until now, reckoning the fare that will right my crossing.

Bend. My lungs rasp with a life term of vengeful air. My tongue burns under the boatman’s unpaid due. The cold chalk of my bones grinds with all the weight of a cast stone, eroding in flints of vengeance and regret.

Heave. I hadn’t meant to kill her. Not that day.

Ply. If I had wanted to kill her, I wouldn’t have hurled that puny stone at her from afar. I see now what I should have seen then. I bring one hand to her nape. Before her surprise turns to distress I raise the other, and with a river rock smash her pretty skull.

Scull. That’s what I should have done.

Bend. Through my mind, Eliza floats in her Ophelian pose, struck down by a stone no bigger than a coin.

Heave. I watch the blur of the swamp smudge the horizon. The river caps shred the last ribbon of dark, distant hell.

Pull. It was as if I’d winged a small bird. My fury ebbed the moment Eliza fell into the stream. I wanted to rush to her, hold her, make her love me, explain. I wanted to hear her tinkling voice again.

Wish sings your Mama
Wash sings your sleep
Baby is dreaming
Down in the deep…

Stroke. I pause, pitching, the river chop clapping my soul, and I narrow my gaze. The shrouded horizon bleeds to the grey sky. My cold life dips beyond the curve of my stare.

Bend. I watched them take her away. I never saw Eliza again. In my mind I walk with her, arm in arm, into the secluded nook by the stream. Where I lay her down, bustling on the soft leaf litter of her ruin, and reap her. Spreadeagled and suffocating under those interminable skirts, she can whimper and writhe, but I will have her. And her face will be cast on the back of the coin.

Heave. I believed them when they tried me for murder. The cut on her temple must have run deep. I had cast away my life with that impetuous stone, and cast Eliza’s fate as well.

Ply. Like a small bird accidentally winged, falling from the sky, alive yet unable to fly, Eliza had fluttered out of my life, rushed home to be tended, the flint of blood moistened from her brow.

Scull. I knew nothing of medicine, of the world of doctors and their influences and their surgeries. I knew nothing of trepanning, or how a simple graze came to warrant such crude drilling of the skull.

Bend. We were meant to trust doctors. And Doctor Flumen, lawyer and upcoming surgeon, moving in all the right circles, should have been no exception. Flumen visited Eliza at home, where she was resting after the incident, and arranged her immediate surgery. Swelling of the brain caused by the cut to her temple. The pressure must be relieved. It was urgent. It was life or death.

Heave. Flumen, doctor of opportunity and self-advancement, drilled a burr hole and removed a core of Eliza’s skull. A coin of bone. Double-sided. Her bloody ruination cast on one side, mine hanging on the other.

Pull. Flayed by time, leathered, skeletal, I lower my eyes, willing my trembling arms to pull, to move, to avenge.

Stroke. Seven days after the trephination, Eliza died. And I was deemed a killer.

Bend. I might as well have approached her that day, despite her new beau. I would still see Eliza floating in the stream, blue in the face, her fine white throat bruising under my grip, her terrified eyes bulging, her throttled scream gurgling with sucked air and muddy water as I straddle her, the blood-red poppies drifting by.

Heave. Doctor Flumen, righteous man of the law named me, the assailant, responsible for Eliza’s fatal wound. No objections were raised when he both prosecuted and testified against me. It was clear cut, gentlemen of the jury, the boy killed her in a violent rage. Modern medicine and our best intentions were unable to save her.

Ply. The day after my one-day trial, I was hanged; the first man to dance at the pearly gates of the city’s new gaol. I might as well have killed her.

Over the water
Under the sky
Baby is floating
Bye and bye.

Scull. Doctor Flumen had not finished with me. I was cut down immediately. The honourable surgeon had secured my body for further research.

Bend. Further research.

Heave. A double- sided coin. Heads, I lose. Heads, I lost.

Pull. A corpse if left in the sun will bake and soften. Or, like a pig to be de-bristled, can be boiled in water. The good doctor opted for the latter and with the preparations made, his research began.

Stroke. An audience of Flumen’s peers looked on – surgeons, students, law men, philosophers – as he started at my face. The incision from ear to ear and across my forehead he then extended to my shoulders. Reflecting the skin, he said, peeling back with one hand, bringing his short-bladed scalpel flat to my skin with the other, cutting away the connective tissue. Down front and back he continued, face and torso, arms and legs complete. The limp, wet layer of me pared away, my carcass of laid bare.

Bend. No strip flaying for Doctor Flumen. He had intended to keep my hide intact. As I, by then intended to keep my soul.

Heave. Muscle by muscle, tendon by tendon, I was dissected and inspected, avid spectators applauding every scrape of my bones. But they weren’t to be the judges of my eternal sin. My organs were held up, measured, weighed. Flumen probed the murky black swamp of my heart, and uncovered a stone.

Ply. Hung. Flayed. Carved. Could they have debased me any further?

Scull. Flumen had me put on display, roped again by the bare, bony neck. My skin was hung out to dry.

Bend. I stare into the mist, back across the black skin of the river. My bones ache. Withered sinew. Scraped hide. Slow and brown, I bend my back.

Heave. Eloquent Doctor Flumen had also secured all the documents pertaining to my case which, along with his notes on my flaying and dissection, amounted to a considerable volume. Flumen lectured on the hide tanning process, while my skin was being treated.

Pull. Cutis Vera. Actual Skin.

Stroke. As the master stroke in the story of my just and enduring debasement, Doctor Flumen had my short life precisely bound and branded; the stamp of impetuous youth scowling in the lines of my browned and borrowed skin. The gallows motif lies, embossed on my face, under the inscription, Cutis Vera

Bend. I am Rellik.

Heave. With an oar blistering each papery palm, I twist my slow, scarred frame to the bow, staring, unblinking, to the riverbank. A grim dawn relieves the mist, revealing my destination in the shadows. My lips peel apart.

Ply. Flumen waits on the black landing as I return for him, his palm held out for the boatman’s due; the double-sided coin protruding between my broken teeth.

Scull. Eliza floats nearby.

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