𝐄𝐦𝐦𝐚 𝐁𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐦 • To You, From The Pacific Winds 🌬

I

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          Early in my eighteenth year, I killed Salome Durham. She took my bare hands in hers, so assured, and immediately tendrils of decay snaked over her skin, rooted into her flesh.

          She would've screamed, but the rot spread quicker -- it had already destroyed her neck. Maybe she could've lived had she not thrashed around so wildly, but she did, however hysterically I screamed for her to keep still. But I'm making up useless what-ifs again.

          Then there was all that damn blood. It gushed, soaked through the sheets and puddled on the floor. I tied a hopeless tourniquet around her arm, shouted encouragements at her greying face like a madman. Everything was dyed a rusty red. A dozen rolls of gauze, a musty army blanket, myself.

          When she stopped, she was dead. Her body was grey, but darkened with each second. Where we touched, her flesh sloughed and shrivelled apart like graphite dust. A frothy, foul liquid seeped from her skin and soaked the gurney.

          I vomited until my throat gave out. Two days' worth of carefully rationed bread and canned caboc reduced into yellow sludge on the blood-slick tile.

          Long ago, I hid away a rucksack upstairs beneath my bed, bulging with canned sardines, a bag of wheat and the wherewithal for a one-way trip to Penrice, in the exact case of something like this. I could've fled, but I should've known I wouldn't.

          Instead I sat there, for God knows how long, cried and retched and wheezed like a lost toddler. I didn't bother closing the clinic's door. Twice I stumbled towards Salome's bedside - the first time to see again what I'd done, the second time around to take her blackened body in my arms and grovel.

          Sorry. Sorry. Oh my God.

          I could see an ever-greying sky from our horrible embrace, poor Oxwich threatened with yet another storm. Outside, pansies and begonias bowed against the awning like eavesdroppers. Gusts of springtime breeze soothed my fevered face, a weak reprieve from the blinding stench.

          Francis Belby was the one who found us. What a scene it must've been for him. His love had disintegrated, her body like a boulder of charcoal in my arms. A swarm of spring gnats had begun to flirt with what remained of her.

          Francis hit the ground with a massive thump and he screamed, he screamed all sorts of things. Everything I remember hearing that day was muddled, but Francis Belby's grief-torn voice rings clear even today.

          What have you done? What have you done to her?

          Oxwich was a small village, and so its townsfolk gathered to his tantrum like ants to a sugar cube. The Heavens also condemned me, thunder and torrential rain heralding their arrival, pounding the roof like little bullets.

          Francis Belby gained the composure to crush my back with his foot, so I could only listen as the angry people tore our little clinic apart. The shattering of my father's ceramic bird collection, the crash and twang of our long-detuned piano down the stairs. My name was shouted amid curses, Salome Durham's amid prayers.

          They hoisted me up, carrying me like I was already dead. I behaved like I was. I trusted the process would be swift and merciful. The human body was forgiving, after all, designed to soothe the soul it contained. It knew to stop perceiving, being, when the world became too much to withstand. A blow to the sternum, a bullet lodged in my brainstem, and I'd be away.

          Then everybody screamed and I fell on gravel.

          I shut down in an instant. The last things I saw were many pairs of boots running away, and a thin stream of blood, tracing the contours of rained-on gravel.

❦

          When I woke, I was shivering in a boat, flat on my back.

          All I could see was grey. A column of swirling haze stretched acres high from where I laid. Seagulls circled pand squawked above, mere blurs in the mantle of silver fog. The boat swayed softly beneath me, a fatherly cradle. Now and again, seawater sprayed the side of my face.

          I sat bolt upright, head hot and pounding.

          This was quite far off Oxwich Bay, I could tell. There was no sign of land behind. In place of meek little flounders capering on the surface, there were great flashes of silver now and then, tell tales of all sorts of fish foreign to the shallows.

          The perpetrator sat on the oar -- a woman. She panted as she rowed through the black waters, body heaving from the water's mass. She had a flowery smock-dress on, several sizes too big for her petite figure. Her sooty hair hung in an oily curtain, gaunt and witchlike.

          From here, she looked like a demonic apparition of Salome Durham, wading down river Styx to send me to Hell herself.

          Something told me we weren't heading for a sunshine circus.

          I crept towards the woman; elbows poised to bash her head. In hindsight, she most certainly noticed the wobble of the boat. She whirled and flung a fistful of bronze powder at my face.

          I had never seen a narcotic so glittery, but whatever it was, it was powerful. I was asleep long before I fell.