All One Horse

another woman?

She washes up in her dinghy on the shore, she has no oars, she clings to the sides of the boat, the sea is insurrectional like a Japanese woodblock print depicting the engulfment of coastline and small human figures, waves sough and smooch on the shale of the beach, sprays give the air a glisten and a sparkle. Flotsam and jetsam. The dowdy dress clings to her shapeless body, grey locks plastered to her forehead, her eyes lie low and sullen in their sodden coffins. She gets out of the dinghy, the dinghy is rolled over by the crashing rollers and smashed to smithereens and rolling planks in the sud and the suck. Unsteady, difficult to keep the footing, slithering through loose pebbles smacked at by the foam-laced water. She goes to hide in the darkest retreat under the jetty, puts her back to a mouldy wooden pillar, turns upon her tormentor, now she is cornered, a snarl on the lips, she is brandishing a pistol. ‘I’ll kill him, I’ll kill him!’ she screeches above the slough and the slosh, the boom of the breakers, spittle flecking her chin. ‘If he comes near me I’ll shoot him like a dog. Imagine, good people, imagine. Why is he after me? Hew says I murdered his wife. Imagine! Why would I do so? I know them from nowhere, never saw them in all my life. Me shoot his whaif? Why ever? She’s exactly my age, I hear. I hear she has the same eyes. I hear without listening. What was there to gain? I’ll kill him, I’ll kill him!’

‘Indeed,’ an onlooker murmurs. ‘I knew the couple. Man and wife. This one here is the spitting image. Same dress. It is passing strange.’

‘Ah, yes,’ the second onlooker sighs. ‘I witnessed the shoot-out this morning. On the other side of the island. On the terrace of the hotel. A man came storming out screaming streams of curses at the mouth. Of his wife having been killed by his jealous mistress. People were knifing their breakfasts. The man was shooting at the air and the earth. People shouted hey hey there! This woman shouted and shot back. Six people died with red flowers in their hair. She ran off screaming to the marina where the boats are kept like mistresses. I saw it with my own eyes.’

‘Indeed,’ a third onlooker murmurs. ‘Ah, yes,’ a fourth one sighs. What makes you think there ever was another woman?