The Ammonite Violin & Others Read Online Free PDF Page B

beside my bed. My skin is smeared with stinking mud, and there’s mud on the white sheets and green-grey bits of weed caught in my wet hair. When I can walk, I go to the shower and stand beneath the hot water beating down on me, trying to forget again, and afterwards, I take the soiled sheets down to the washing machine in the basement. Again. And, the last part of this ritual, I find a flashlight and go to the trunk in the attic to be sure that the bridle is still there, wrapped safe inside its wool blanket.

For One Who has Lost Herself
1.
    The woman stands across the street from the little shop on Columbus Avenue, almost a whole week now and she still hasn’t found the nerve to simply walk across the street and go inside. She’s tall and thin, a bit too thin, some would say, and almost pale as the snow that fell two days before and hasn’t all melted away. Her eyes are a little too large for her face, and the irises are so big and black that the pupils are all but invisible and almost nothing of the white sclerae can be seen around their broad periphery. Her hands are long and slender, but her nails have been chewed down to stubs and her cuticles are red and raw. She’s wearing a tattered grey wool coat with fur stitched about the collar and lapels, and about the cuffs, as well. Catching a glimpse of her (because hardly anyone looks directly at this woman), someone might be struck by how poorly the coat seems to fit her, perhaps a size too large, or two sizes two small. She can’t recall where she got the coat, but thinks it might have been a gift. On her feet, she wears green galoshes, and she can’t quite recall where those came from, cither. Her ash blonde hair reaches down past her shoulders, a tangled, unkempt mane to frame her pale face.
    A city bus growls past, belching diesel fumes and trailing soot, and the woman steps nervously back from the curb. She dislikes the Manhattan traffic, but she dislikes the huge buses most of all. She’s thought of warning the people she sees climbing into them, and the people climbing out, but she knows enough of human beings to understand that none of them would listen.
    From the other side of Columbus Avenue, the little shop beckons, the sight of it calling her like a foghorn or a ship’s bell, or the lament of harpooned and dying whales. She knows that she only has to go to the corner and wait for the light to change, that she only has to walk across the street and place her hand upon the brass knob of the green door and go inside. She has only to step across the threshold, pass beneath the broad black-and-white placard hung above the entrance—GREYE’S ANATOMY (since 1962)—and her journey will be all but over. She’s come such a long way already, has crossed more than three thousand miles and almost a decade since she started out from the red sandstone beaches of Veantro Bay and Shapinsay Island. Leaving the Orkneys behind and wandering the Scottish Highlands, following rumours and hearsay west over the Atlantic to the shores of Iceland and Greenland, then on to America, to St. John’s and Halifax, Winter Harbor and Gloucester, a hundred other fishing villages and smoky industrial towns whose names she’s already forgotten. And finally, all the way down to this terrible city, this canyon of steel and glass and electricity which is always moving and crackling and muttering in its countless languages, always awake and watching her with its innumerable, unseeing human eyes.
    The light at the corner turns red again, and the traffic comes to a sudden, reluctant, grumbling halt. A moment or two more and there are people streaming hurriedly across the street, some of them moving towards her from the other side and many others moving away, walking towards that side and the little shop with its cluttered display windows and black-and-white sign and mocking green door.
    “Is there something over there you fancy, Miss?” someone asks, an old man’s voice, rough but