The Opposite of Anger

She sits hunched over the once-white shirt, reversing the collar so that it can be worn for another season, and barely notices the Sleeping Beauty stab that betrays her lack of rest. The dark orb teeters on the edge of her hardened index finger, shimmers and falls, the first drop of a spring storm of blood, heavy and thick, syrupy but sugarless.

Later she dreams of a massive bull, scarlet eyes enraged and widened, the size of billiard balls, haunches tensed, ready to explode into the dusty streets and crash, charge and trample through the china-delicate bodies too sluggish and bewildered to predict the next slight pivot on those piston legs.

The dream turns to one of birthing, the strained faces of the midwives as the sheets turn black in the half-light, a vessel emptying, the sheets claiming the bright colour even as it leeches from the cheeks of the dying mother. And in a burst of crimson, a child slips into the world like a ruby plucked from an underground pool.

A sound disturbs her fitful sleep, and she thinks in a crazy jumble of whiskey-sodden street Santas, office workers clad in Valentine’s uniforms the day before the disappointments of a hundred dates gone wrong, and of roses bruised and collapsing in makeshift vases. In the darkness she hears the scattering of the insects and the flutter of bat’s wings, and takes comfort in these, her blood brothers, her midnight companions.

******
On the clear white sand, next to a ruined castle perched on a crumbling volcano, a beach ball sits. The summer sun bounces off the vinyl, and creates primary-coloured reflections into the small footprints. Innocence trapped in sea-soaked hollows, the tide washing against the impermanence of shoreline holidays. A coke can curls into the listless surf, and a lone oyster catcher tap-dances across the dunes, splayed rufous feet accessorizing the coffin-bearer black of the feathered body.