a seed of sin
It’s easier to do than Joanne had ever dared to believe.
And when It’s done, it’s even easier to walk down the stairs from Apartment 9 and out onto the dark street. She feels light.
A single breeze could blow me away, Jo thinks and it’s true.
She’s insubstantial, a shadow drifting between the sickly yellow of the streetlights. No one who passes by looks her direction and it’s better that way, she decides.
That way no one can look down into her through her eyes.
No one will stare into the oily black of her irises and then farther still, back through her eye sockets and down the wet hollow of her throat. Past her fluttering, flapping lungs — a bird trapped inside a cage of bones — to her deep, dark stomach.
Because there — there in the heat and the dark — is a seed.
A seed she had felt for the first time tonight, in Apartment 9, watching those egg yolks crack and split and bleed all over the floor.
And that seed may grow. It probably won’t.
Because Jo isn’t afraid of it… of it sprouting, growing, pushing up up up until it blooms and chokes her.
Jo isn’t afraid.
She feels light.
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Her house is quiet when she gets back.
Jo takes off her shoes and walks into the kitchen, flips on the light.
She’s left the milk out so she puts it up. Then puts the kettle on to boil.
Then it’s down the narrow hall to peel out of her coat, gloves, hat, scarf — to turn on the tap and wash her hands in the sink, scrub at the beds of her nails, change into something more comfortable.
Her clothes whisper up and off of her body like the memory of a touch against her skin. She drops them to the floor in a rustle of chiffon, kicks them to a corner. They’re like wings she no longer needs, discarded as if she’s plucked the feathers out herself, one by one.
Down in her belly, the seed sits. Tiny, compact, hard.
And Jo doesn’t look in the mirror. Not tonight.
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By the time she returns to the stove, the kettle is whistling, building itself up to a stiff shriek of fury. She takes it off before it can reach its swan song, killing the scream in one swift jerk.
Outside the night is beginning to bleed from the sky. The dawn light crests blue and milky — runny like yolk splattering from a broken egg.
She’ll sleep a little before packing, Jo decides, as she sips her tea and stares out of the tiny pane of glass above the sink.
And as she watches the magpies outside flutter and flap in the yard, her mind wonders who’ll find the broken things she’s left behind tonight.
Just who will walk through Apartment 9 with its peeling paint and well-oiled hinges? Who will clean up the mess? The mess and that carton of broken eggs, seven of them cracked and leaking into the grooves of the linoleum floor.
Jo hadn’t meant to knock them off of the countertop. But she had slipped in all of that mess and her elbow had caught the edge of the styrofoam and the yellow of the yolks had turned crimson on the floor.
But someone will clean it up.
Someone else will deal with it.
Seven magpies, Jo counts.
"Mummy?"
Jo tears her eyes away from the window. Alec, her son, stands in the kitchen doorway, one chubby hand raised to rub at his eyes, the other clutching the threadbare teddy he never sleeps without. There are faint lines along one rosy cheek from his pillow.
Jo puts her tea down, crouches. "Come here, darling. Did I wake you? I’m so sorry."
Alec walks to his mother. He reminds her of a bee in summer, bleary and hot, buzzing sleepily around the flowers until he comes to rest in her arms, his soft body firm and warm against her.
She hums and stands, strokes the silken strands of his bangs from his piercing dark eyes.
"Mummy," Alec says again.
"Mmhm? What is it, sweetheart?" Jo reaches for her mug again, balancing his weight in one arm and against her hip.
"Were you painting?"
Jo laughs and shifts. She loves him so much. "Painting? Why would I have been painting, silly?"
But Alec only reaches out, his hand wiping clear any space between them like the sun is clearing the dark outside. Warm, innocent fingers touch her right cheek.
"You have red paint," Alec says, little forehead crinkling in concentration. "Red on your face."
Jo goes back to the washroom, carrying Alec with her. She looks in the mirror.
Red.
A single streak along her skin, more brown than red now and crusted and dried, flaking when she reaches up to touch it. She hadn’t noticed.
She sets Alec down, rinses it off, and watches it swirl down the drain to join the rest. Proof of getting rid of the wings she no longer needs to fly.
"Alec," she says, crouching once more. "Do you like the ocean?"
Alec removes his thumb from his mouth and nods. Jo’s smile grows larger. The seed inside her moves, writhes, buries deeper — down down down and away from the light that it must be able to see between Jo’s parted lips, suffocating itself.
And Jo knows then, in that moment, that soon even she won’t be able to see it through the deep black of her irises, down the wetness of her throat to the cavern of her stomach — and she laughs because then she will be truly weightless.
"Good boy. We’re going to be living near the ocean soon, and then you can swim all day and play in the sand. Would you like that?"
Alec nods again, smiling now at the excitement in his mother’s voice.
Jo feels light. She picks up her son and he feels light.
So she keeps talking about the house they’ll live in and the places they’ll play, telling Alec all about the candy-colored beach huts and the sweet treats he can eat on the pier of Southwold. She lays down in her bed with him held to her and she keeps talking until his breathing slows and evens… until his cheek rests on her shoulder and his eyes flicker with dreams of the future behind his thin, pink eyelids and his small, wet mouth parts damp against her skin.
And then she stares up at her ceiling and she thinks of their new home silently.
A new beginning. Finally, a fresh start. A small place by the sea, just for them, where they can both float on the breeze with their new lightness.
And Jo thinks she’ll grow a garden in the backyard.