FROM DUST TO DUST

When you get to my age, your connective tissue has all but disappeared and your bones are just right up there against each other, sanding each other down until you’re no longer a person, just a bag of calcified nubs having been sanded to make perfect smooth little spheres like a rock that’s been kicked for too long. That’s why you start to love long walks outside when you’re my age despite the pain. You’re speeding up the process, getting yourself reacquainted with the dust to which you soon shall return.

Anyway, when I am wary of my bones grinding as I move about, I like to rest at this lovely hollow, just beyond that gravel path back there. Maybe we’ve gone a bit further beyond that—I’m not exactly sure. My old brain does not remember, but my ever-fragile bones do. There is a hollowed out tree here. If you sit—just as I am now—come here, move closer—if you sit, just so, you will catch a glimpse of this space where the ground seems to shimmer. Come here! I took you here because I want you to see it! Isn’t it a beautiful sight, my love? One day you will be old like me and you will find this silence and this scene as breathtaking as I do. I suppose you don’t understand now and that’s why you can’t see it. I would like you to put me here, please, when it’s time. I think it will be nice to rest like the ground does. Glittering.

THE SALE OF A LIFETIME

I know The Grove well, oh yes. I’ve been there many times myself, sir, of course to scope the land to make sure I can give you the fairest deal possible. And let me tell you The Grove is a downright magical place. Yes. Can’t be captured in a picture, wouldn’t do it justice. It’s the bedrock, you see, it’s full of minerals, I believe, which of course yields that healthy amount of shrubbery and of course those tall trees that would be great kindling.

Yes, of course, you can knock anything down when it’s yours. Knock down the whole forest, for all I care! I just want to get you this deal. Forget what you’ve heard. The Grove is not Elusive to All Who Seek It. It’s a private place, yes of course, great for your solitude, nobody will find you there unless you want to be found.

I would take you to see it, but I want you to lay eyes on it for the first time after it’s yours. You know? It’s just that special! Will be a special moment for you. I got a sweet deal on it and I know a guy who can guide you there as soon as the downpayment is set. Yes, it’s safe. Yes, it’s real. Too good to be true, eh? It’s not a high price to pay for peace of mind. I’ve been there many times myself, many times. Don’t worry about people finding you there. Just make the check out to me and my guy will take you through the forest and that land will be yours. It’s all yours.

CASSANDRA IN THE CLOUDS

There is always one person in the family who connects the dots to a degree that makes everyone else uncomfortable. Unfortunately, our in-house auditor is my vaper cousin Megan, who is due to inherit all of the good china and silver because she validates Gramma Louise’s semi-dementiaistic delusions.

I think Megan secretly got Louise to start vaping in the bathroom with her when they went to go “tinkle,” which I’m not actually that mad about because I think women should start indulging in vices again after menopause, but I am pretty mad about the silver.

First of all, Megan is actually on to something. Case in point, the fact that she told the entirety of the family that my sister is only a banker because she was an IVF baby. She was an IVF baby, but I don’t like that she knows that was the case.

Mom specifically hid it from all of us and I only found out because Gramma Louise started inventing slurs for my sister and my mom had to sit her down and ask how she found out. Guess who? Megan. Guess how Megan found out? Intuition.

Louise told me it’s a matrilineal gift and my sister can’t get it because of the tube situation, but I can.

Well, I am intuiting now that I am going to inherit the silver. And the tiara, too.

REFLECTIONS ON PUNISHMENT

When a young child misbehaves at the dinner table, there are a few options to rectify the issue before it recurs. One, you ignore the behavior completely, indicating to the child that the attention-seeking behavior will not yield the type of reaction they desire. Two, you discipline kindly and with purpose—a sharp tongue, a withering glance. Three, you enact light corporal punishment and prove that you can hit a child.

The fourth is the rarest kind—yet the most common in the household of Gramma Louise: if one were to think about acting out, they were instructed to go polish silver until they could get in control of their impulses.

There was something weird about that lady, always. I did not frequent that house as much as my siblings because I was overburdened by negative thoughts and always spent the majority of my time at Gramma’s in the polishing corner. You know, I always suspected that her posturing as a witch was likely more symptomatic of motherhood, or being intimately familiar with the minds and wicked hearts of spoiled children.

Now that I have my own, I think Gramma might have really had something special about her. I wish I had the silver disciplinarian in me, sometimes. I always go for option one.

I’VE SEEN YOU HERE BEFORE

It’s always this exact cove. I just can’t hack it. There’s something about the rock pattern—I think it’s the way everything is shaped just like a human and I get terrified and then I end up trapped, but here I am again, for the third time this moon cycle, stuck on the sand during low tide, totally at risk of exposing my hideous gills.

These are the things I think about in the heat of the daytime waiting for my uncertain demise: Will someone come by and find me? Will it be a human? Will they look like the others, or do the landlocked ones have a better head on their shoulders? What will the other sirens say that I came this close to land again? Why am I, with the alluring voice and gorgeous mug, always so attracted to what I fear the most? Am I in my luteal phase? What will I do if I’m discovered? If a siren washes onshore and nobody comes to save her, did she even exist at all?

WHAT SHE FOUND WHEN SHE WENT LOOKING

I went looking for love and what I found was solitude. What I found was the filthy gossamer wing of a scavenger seabird. What I found was myself in the reflection of the crystalline tray I brought with me to eat a sandwich I forgot at home.

What I found was a novel which didn’t belong to me, a discarded pile of shells, and mysterious scales from a fish that seemed too large to have been this close to this little cove.

What I found was myself and my hunger, not to be mistaken for ambition—no, I found actual hunger, gnawing away at my empty stomach. This cove was too melancholy, not in a beautiful sense but in the tragic sense that someone more interesting than I would find the whole scene—the discarded novel, the gentle scaly patterns in the sand, pleasant and poetic.

I went looking for love and realized that I didn’t care to be sitting like a fool on the beach. I went looking for love and what I found was an unfair amount of self-critique for a midafternoon beach day. I went looking for love, but then I went back to my car.

Photographed by Julie Dickinson

Styled by Hannah Roy

Illustrated by Bell Hutley at Roar Artists and Elisa Alcalde at Breed London

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