Hot Milk

Restoration

The faux ancient Greek vase I smashed before I left for Athens is still lying in pieces on the table of the beach apartment. I wonder if I should attempt to put it together again. The seven female slaves collecting water by the fountain are shattered. Their slave bodies are broken, their heads cracked. I gaze at them for a long time and then decide not to restore them with putty and a paintbrush. Instead, I open a bottle of wine and drink it on the terrace.

‘Get me water, Sofia. Water that is not cold.’

I am a female slave and a female wine drinker.

I bring my mother water that has been boiled in the kettle but has not been chilled in the fridge. It is still the wrong sort of water. I am learning that there are more acceptable shades of wrong. I no longer speak to her. The news of her wish for the amputation has shocked me to the core. She has forsaken her right to any kind of conversation with me because she has replaced words with the surgeon’s knife. I cannot live with the violence of her intention or her imagination. In fact, I’m not sure what kind of reality I am living in right now. I don’t know what is real. In this sense my own feet are not firmly touching the ground. I no longer have a grip. My mother has abdicated, resigned, relinquished, declined, waived, disclaimed everything and she has taken me down with her. My love for her is like an axe. She has grabbed it from me and is threatening to chop off her feet.

It is also true that this threat of hers, the severing of her limbs, has galvanized me. I am discovering that sleep is for happier people. I am awake all night making my application to complete my doctorate in America. I want to be as far away from Rose as possible. Last night I hammered the keyboard and the sentences found their shape on the shattered digital page under the desert stars. I watched the sun rise. It slips backwards and forwards across the sky but it is the Earth that is moving around the sun, tipping, spinning.

I am spinning with it and I am pressing Send.

I dreamed again of the Greek girl. We are lying on a beach and I put my hand on her breast. We both fall asleep. When she wakes up she shouts, LOOK! She is pointing to the print of my hand. It leaves a white tattoo on her skin where everything is brown. She says, I will wear the print of your monster claws on my body to frighten my enemies.