‘The Lay of the Land’ by Emma Flynn
I wake up older and move from apartment to apartment with the same suitcase. I make homes in the pithiness of leases. Before we fall asleep beside each other for the first (and second and third) time, before your presence in the bed is a given, there are calm moments of soft talk. The mornings are unhurried, skin-stuck and pink-limbed.
In March we spend a Saturday walking a terrain with no pedestrians, muddying boots to stop and watch and breathe at a point where the day melts away and the sun falls in orange ribbons into the hills. We eat in a restaurant serving scant portions of rich, precise food and pretend to enjoy it. I order another glass of wine because you are paying. We sit in a white strip-lit chicken restaurant and eat with our hands. Finally full, we lick the salt from our fingers and blot the grease onto clothes we put on especially for the first place.
In June we share a bank holiday with your parents in a dot-on-the-map village I have never been. Sharing the single bed of your youth, you point out photos with bad school haircuts.
In August we squint towards a port and watch reflections of daysailers pan out and buckle in the pulse of the water. The sun is higher in the sky than surely we have ever seen before and to go home is to miss out. A day walking around a small, walled town takes the paleness from our skin and even after showers we feel salt-licked and clammy.
In October we argue for the first time, properly. I surprise myself by indulging what I know will hurt you. I surprise myself with a gluttony for it.
In December and January our nights bleed into sunless mornings and we sleep as if in torpor. Waking slowly as if encased. For a few more months we will keep giving to and taking from each other, constantly restoring a balance after tilting it slightly. You will feel adamant, secretly, about repeating our habits lest change bring us towards some sort of conclusion. I will feel strangled by the familiarity, seeing days and weeks and months and years pour out in front of me, each one as intricately similar as the next.
I take a weekend to visit a school friend but instead stay in a bed and breakfast near the lakes. On my own I feel a guilt for not having to consider someone else before decisions are made. I walk to the pub in the village to sit there among locals and drink until I am warm. The landlady brings me a toasted sandwich and I think about how every bite is intended for me. I sleep in a single bed and tuck thick wool blankets under my feet and around my shoulders, staying up until three or four watching the box of a television, muted. I am a child allowed to stay up late on a weekend. I am giddy being awake at the darkest point in the night, hearing stirrings from a teeming unseen world outside.
Sometimes we share weekends with my parents. We cook for them and smile when they bring us biscuits the same texture as chipboard.
Summer unspools into yellow, warm mornings. We eat breakfast on the patio and watch the beating bodies of chaffinches pick through the soil, uncovering earthworms from sunken vaults and flitting off back to their nests. We spend Sundays a town over in a garden centre buying plants and bulbs to set despite the rot of two wet winters having marred the beds.
How attentive and puzzled we are by this anticipation. By the arrival. Suddenly finding my body change to care for him. My body changing to give more and receive less. Drawing on reflexes I never knew I had to nurse and nurture.
We wear tiredness over everything. In the wrinkles of my clothes and in the grey hairs on your chin. Stepping back into yesterday’s stale warmth after a shower. On Sunday evenings I fall asleep on the chair in the conservatory under summer’s curtain of lingering heat.
We play games where we are shopkeepers, superheroes and witches and watch his small face concentrate on making silky potions with bathwater. Chubby-fingered handprints freckle mirrors and TV screens and windows up to waist high.
We pull potatoes, carrots and onions from their dark hollows. The first few chime as they hit the bottom of the bucket. He runs after painted ladies and tortoiseshells skimming over pea shoots. We spend afternoons washing, peeling, chopping, roasting and counting the day as a job well done. You have worked up a hunger, I have cricked my neck from hunching over rows of potatoes, he is already dreaming. We eat too fast and slouch against each other until the sky mellows orange and pink, wading into the night, heavy legs going upstairs. We sleep with a window open and in the morning we hear the letterbox snap shut and the postman whistle as he cycles on.
From issue #7: autumn/winter 2018
About the Author
Emma Flynn is an emerging writer from Kerry living in Berlin. Her work has appeared in The Cardiff Review, Vox, Bustle and Totally Dublin. She is currently writing her debut novel.
