Read Online A Woman Clothed in Words by Anne Szumigalski - Free Book Online Page A

black and white again. The only colour the pink of the child’s fingers. You think so? Surely there are as many grey fingers and golden ones, and what of the black so nimble on the plastic keys connected to the hammers that connect with the strings.
    The notes after all sound tinny that should be silver. And she sees again the laburnum tree in her aunt’s city garden dribbling gold onto the small space of mown grass. In her mind there is silence as deep as only the deaf can hear. Must I die, she asks before I can comprehend silence. And she lifts her fingers cold and creased from the pool, pearshaped beads falling upon the green blades of the verge.
    What it is to be left to oneself so early waiting for the dawn chorus to begin. A minute and another minute and another: twit says the first note and then twat, and broader and broader until all the small insults of the tongue have become nothing but notes in a string of notes in the great first song of the birds, the many tiny pips that are part of the golden flesh of an orange.
    The sun, ovoid and not yet glowing, rises dripping out of the water shooting off pale blossoms like a primrose its buds, the buds opening noisily as umbrellas. Now insects are bristling among the blades of grass, hopping and humming and beginning to bite the air with mouths as small as the points of fine needles. And she rears up only to be faced with a strange pair of eyes. Only to be held down by a pair of strange hands. It’s much too early, she hears herself saying. She’s annoyed that she’s laughing when she says it. He’s closing the windows and doors, he’s taking away the garden and bringing her nothing but curtains and looming sofas and chairs uneasy in their dark corners.
    Should I have brought you a rose? His voice is like the sudden appearance of scissors brought out to snip the cords that connect her to herself. Fish swim away from fingers, or with them in their toothed mouths. Pianos float away on streams, never perhaps to be played again, gnats sink back into their beds of weedy grass, the birdsong abruptly ceases. The shutters have been closed against the closed windows.
    In the darkness she thinks of a long green fish swimming inside her trying to reach that part of her mind that can understand the way he is, the way he imagines himself as a kingbird flying upwards until he breaks the sky with his crest, breaks it with a cry that is almost a song.
    Another day she is looking for a home. All this has happened in the past, she reminds herself as she travels on through the world, yet I need not change tense, for the present is merely a knot in the string I move through my fingers. In a moment or two it will have passed on to other hands. And other places other lands. If she is at heart a woman, she will divide and become several interchangeable persons, then these will divide and become a crowd. You cannot call this multitude an army for each of the entities is her own person. Not one will be exactly like another. Each will think in her own chosen images, and each will dress in her own particular manner.
    Here is a story that any of these persons might tell: Once an old tyrant ruled the earth and its many peoples. He it was who set words against other words and caused them to fight terrible wars over things as small as syllables. This went on for many years, but in the end people got tired of fighting and eventually settled down. This did not suit old N in the least and he soon invented another way to get them at loggerheads. Everyone has a double somewhere in the world, he declared. I command each of you to go forth into the world and seek your double and don’t come back home until you find that one exactly like you. No-one stirred. Everyone stayed at home and got on with daily life. Why should any of us want a double, they told him. Enough is the burden of jollity and shame that we each one of us carry forward to the grave, whenever and wherever that may be. Doubleness would