Sarah Hayden
Companion creatures by gaslight: a Turnpikes paratext
Pumped cavities. No give remains, and no other place. Colours thicken; anything is too loud. Glass-marked glass holds imprints without index. This salt is strange, sweetened somehow, and misplaced. It licks it, urgently but sprung. Anything is too loud not to set coils ashiver. Language at the hem of the absolute. Questions turn instant angles, spilling across unanticipated surfaces. Bubbles burst in the shallows but with toes already wet there’s no stepping out and no sandy margin either. Anything is too loud not to pull, screeching, against the balloon skin so until the bars stick, slight brushes must semaphore. Comfort thin: puckering as hope.
on the night they met, he told her he had been falsely accused of rape and she was appalled not by, but for, him and shook her head at the perfidy of woman. worrying that a safe and happy childhood had left her looking naive, on arriving at university, she had set her default response to “openminded,” tolerant, flexible. a friend with commendable taste in music had brought him to the party and she was yet too young to have grown a space in her thinking for processing unimaginables. when the house went quiet, she slept where he did, right up close on someone’s parents’ guest-bed.
it would take ten years for her to remember the rape story. now, she wonders whether it was written into the script as a kind of a test.
The walk is all. All wrong. And the eyes too, their circuits antic. Thick hands mash things into ill-fitting communication, sweep a scurf from pocket towards tabletop. It drops beyond. Both lobes. In tympanic tensing, ineradicable etchings. At the least instigation, unendingly, it drops beyond all tenable quantification. Pins. Needles. Bluntnesses. There is no far enough beneath the table. A border materializes, undeclared, above the lintel. This pulses. On the other side, rigidity speaks an unintending answer. Aching to hear her intake, it drops beyond all reckoning. Hypoxic stasis: an impossibility of holding.
sometimes, she would have to be elsewhere and always this would become bewilderingly knotted. opportunities would present themselves, plans would be made for trips; but these proved ultimately impossible or were curtailed by catastrophe relayed through split lips, telephonically. bad news hurried after good. she became used to infelicitous coincidence, to being called suddenly, unavoidably away. terrible things were wont to happen in her (so-brief) absence.
shades of summers lived and studies pursued in alternative, unvisited dimensions grey out grids across the calendars of her twenties. even today, as dates are dragged into recall, fog floods the chamber and she can remember only that she was, on various occasions, to have been somewhere else.
A bed is moved, in accommodation. Moved again. In each new way, nights they are less knowable. Sometimes, light flails sudden and whenever this is now, then the whole/set transports at once and like never forever. Nights. Nights they are less knowable. Without seeing, it takes a swerve under. So close all aclatter. That here isn’t where it cannot be sure. It sniffs, turns and sleeps anew but smaller. Fitting. Pulling it all in. Sending down stilts, and the wherewithal to take readings. Interstitially, the days trip out bisected. Nights they are less knowable so dreaming is mostly in the sunslips. Its taut trachea: phonotropic rhythms.
in time, unremarkable activities were revealed to be much more complicated than she had ever presumed. quotidian incapacities multiplied. first, things she’d never thought herself particularly good at. later, the stuff that keeps you alive: cooking, knowing, talking to strangers. all this, she stopped doing. she learnt that her face was stranger, even, than she had supposed. she came to understand that warm-and-calm family differently. friendships twitched and jumped erratically. as the re-envisioning of givens encompassed the re-wiring of every everything, all the shapes in her head/world blurred around the edges. adrift amid sensory data and that refused to resolve, she stayed frantically awake, trying to make connections.
with the history she had, it would never have taken long to get to this, to being de-convinced. once evacuated of the presumption of her own sanity, she found she had been surrendered of everything else with it.
Motes radiate bristles. What happens here is happening everywhere. No gaps, no stasis and no sleep. Allatonceness without reflections. This. Clumsy syllables yarp their onsets out of paint. Objects shed their edges. Hooks catch. Grazings weep. Its shaking, like an aspen’s, is for always. When the world ends—every time—limits yield, objects shed their edges and the smell of plaster possesses warrens. What was slack but persuadable becomes a prairie-line. Cracking spines out of areoles, that catena conducts little vacuums. As objects shed their edges, cavitation is forestalled by the longest looking. Binary implosions: lifting emulsion.
eight years after an aggression was made a tool to check for resistance, after eight years of hollowing, she ran away in the night carrying the animal whose fear—written as trembling, as cowering, as loss of bladder control—was legible to her in a way that her own (so long misapprehended and swallowed) was not.
companionate escapees, they flinch in synch.
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“Companion creatures by gaslight” is extracted and adapted from Turnpikes (Bristol: Sad Press, 2017)