English Rose by David Campbell
It’s the small things I notice when he hits me: the fingernails, bitten to the quick on a hand poised to strike; the curl of his mouth, spittle slick on bruised lips; the sudden veins ridging his cheeks as a river in blood bursts it banks to gouge the deep red soil; his eyes like black stones in a salt-crust claypan. I can taste the dirt on his fingers.
“Shut up! Just shut your mouth, okay”
His voice is that of an angry child. He cannot hear my silence.
Afterwards, the bed engulfs him in a sprawl of limbs. His dust-caked boots foul the satin sheets, limbs spidering in alcoholic thrall. The booze streaks his face with sweat and bloats the body that once, lean-muscled and hard, had trembled to my touch. Those were the days when I dreamed of children, the nights when I curled my body to the rhythm of his heartbeat and dared to whisper our names, hope spilling from mu lips like tears on sand.
His animal stink hangs heavy in the muddy air. A blowfly fizzes against cracked glass, and in the distance crows flicker like ash at the dying of the day. I close my eyes, and for a moment there is the hiss and crackle of a bonfire on a midwinter night, toasted marshmallows, and flames dancing above a carpet of snow. I see hedgerows shrouding quiet lanes, daffodils on a spring day in Green Park, and peonies carefully painted on a scrapbook card. I remember the drift and smoke-scent of them around the pond on the common, and his words, like threads of spun gossamer, as we walked. Now there are only curses in the slow fall of days: careless laughter at my foolishness on the horse; scorn when I gagged at the fly-blown sheep; anger as he torched the starving beasts in the pit.
“Christ, woman, get used to it! That’s the way it is out here!”
Hope is buried deep on broken ground. Reality is a straggle of weeds beside the rutted path, a dawn like blue ice, and water in buckets from the creek. The pump is broken again. There’s a red-bellied black under the tank waiting for the slow leak of rust.
I am an English rose cut before time, thrown among the rough voices machine-gunning four letter words. My mother’s words on delicate paper are tiny blades, each one slicing soft flesh. She said it was a terrible mistake.
Dragonflies flicker and dart in the fickle shade. I see an ancient willow folded as in prayer, trailing lank frond-hair in the still water. A red gum, scarred where the old ones cut a canoe, heaves it’s tortured bulk from the earth.
I bow to the only mirror that remains and a face shimmers like a mirage. For the moment, there is a flash of beauty. A smile leaps from the past, but is caught by truth and vanishes.
Blood ripples the surface and is gone.