It used to make her mother’s voice slow and tongue heavy. Except that,” and Mona nodded her head towards the vial. should we give him something? Whiskey?” She set the needles down on the sideboard with a nervous clatter.
THE LITTLEST LIGHTHOUSE KEEPER SKIN
The skin all around it was puffed and red, and when Mona touched it–even with just her fingertips–the soldier twitched and cried out and ground his teeth together.īeatrice came with needles in her hands, vials in her pockets. The long bone below the knee was shattered it protruded in hard white angles, stuck fast into little pools of yellow infection. His forehead was warm to the touch, and the skin around his ruined leg was burning.
There was a damp impression all in the shape of his body. In the room, in the dark, the soldier was sweating into her pillows and her sheets, which had never known a man’s skin before. It was like when she climbed up to fix the light: just a task just another repair to be made. Her hands seemed to move with no particular intelligence to guide them. Walking down that long hallway with the hacksaw pillowed in her arms, Mona felt clear and hollow and purposeful. He was unconscious now, breathing deep and steady.
Mona had already crushed up the capsules that their mother had left behind and mixed them in with the thin broth she’d fed the soldier. “Get Mama’s sedatives and the leftover needles,” she told Beatrice, who shook her head and pressed her cold hands to the back of her neck as if holding herself down to the earth. She deposited the still-dripping hacksaw into a folded brown towel, gentle as a mother with a baby. “He’s gonna die,” she said slowly, as though Mona were dumb, as though she didn’t know. “Do you think that’ll be enough?” She pulled the tool out of the pot of bubbling water with a pair of metal kitchen tongs.īeatrice just stared at her, uncomprehending. “If they do,” she said, “I will be with you.” Her hand stretched out for his. His sister slipped down, a light little splash beside him. Mona’s son swam towards his sister until he could cling to the metal sides of the wreck, his little palms spreading out whitely. They stood in front of the blackened outlines of the lighthouse and pressed their flat hands over their eyes for shade. They bunched up under him, angular like a frog’s. His bare legs looked green through the water. “Look,” said her brother, bobbing easily on the surface.
Mona’s daughter licked her lips, tasted warm wet salt. The briny smell, the dusky organic odor of all the things that live in deep water it reminded the children of their mother. She stretched her little body out across the flattest part and let the sun dry her hair. Mona’s daughter liked to crawl up on to the top where part of the vast stern protruded. Mona’s son liked to swim down and stare through the gaps in the twisted metal underneath the water. It was slick with green algae in some places and rippled and scratchy where it had rusted. The wreck had been there much longer than the children had been alive. Around noon, when the sun came out again, Mona’s children discarded their shoes and their socks, their trousers and their smudged shirts, and swam out towards the drowned ship.
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