After a while, she asked him, "Do you like the feeling of being alive?"
His brow furrowed. "What is 'the feeling of being alive'?"
"You know, how, there's this sort of feeling of aliveness, that permeates everything, that you're aware of feeling, while you're alive."
"As opposed to dead?"
She nodded.
He reflected, then said, "That's stupid. There is no 'feeling of being alive.' There's feeling hot or cold or nervous or whatever. But no particular feeling of being alive."
"There is," she insisted, "You just haven't noticed it, I guess, because it's a constant. The same as we don't notice the taste of water."
"Water has no taste. Not in itself." He turned back to his book now, "It tastes of things - dirt, or metals, or whatever. But water has no taste."
She sighed a long breath, but hearing it he fixed her again with admonishing eyes as he warned her: "And nor does air."

"Darling," he said. He spoke slowly, using that calm transfixed voice, talking almost like a transcript, a metre as measured and toneless as if it had been type-set, as he refused to look at her, talking almost to the table as if finalising the phrasing of a dull and cluttered piece of legislation, rather than talking to this woman at his side, this girl, this would-be wife. "Darling," he repeated, locking the word into place. "It will be easy. I will make it very easy for you. It isn't difficult at first, and if anything happens, I will do the right thing by you. I am a doctor. Either I will marry you, or I will perform the abortion myself."
She stared at him - her heart beating quickly now, her eyes wide and tremulous and wondering. She wished he'd look at her. "But which, darling?" she asked him, "Which?" The word 'darling' sounded funny the way she said it, as of the word were too big or too heavy for her, sounding like the uncertain mumbling of a little girl wearing her mother's high-heeled shoes.
"We," he said - it was the royal plural, and he repeated it, locking it into place - "We will decide that when the time comes."
Now he looked at her. He had that reassuring stony look in his eyes, like granite, she thought, so that nothing he said could possibly be doubted. For some reason it reminded her of the sword in the stone from the Arthur legend.
She loved the Arthur legend, and when she was a child, she used to dress up as Merlin, or more often, as Guinevere. He really was like that stone sometimes: trying to pull words out of him could be like heaving at that implacable hilt, exhausting yourself at the labour only a chosen boy could perform. He made her feel like a girl. She liked the feeling, the girl-feeling.
"I think," she said after a moment, hoping he'd approve, "I think it would be nicer to be married, don't you? Than to have an abortion."
"We will decide that when the time comes," he said again, in that legislative toneless tone. "You are forgetting darling. I am a qualified obstetrician."
He looked at her, steady, reminding her. She smiled.

Fictional:

They stood at the back door now, and at last he was looking out onto the back garden. He had always wondered. Now he saw.

It was an ordinary square suburban plot, a small middle-size. But there were no plants, features, nothing. It was just a plot of dust-brown earth, pitted everywhere with holes. Holes dug into it roughly, holes dug all over it and none of them filled in, though some of them caving back in upon themselves, but most of them still sitting empty and shallow and open like two dozen or so gaping blind mouths.

“What?” he demanded, incredulous, “What is this? This is the garden? Why the holes?”

“We’ve been digging them for ten years,” the woman answered, with a half-shrug, pushing back an iron coil of hair. “My brother’s pretty sure we buried some treasure out the back here when we were kids, and we’ve been trying to find it, dig it up again.”

“What sort of treasure?” he shook his head, his eyes all round blue wonderment. “I don’t understand. Gold?”

She might have laughed, then, but she didn’t. “No,” she said. “Textas, and so forth. Maybe a comic book. Blue feathers. From a featherduster.”

“But it’s just dust,” he said, looking at the dust. He turned back to her. He realised in that moment just how old she looked. “Did you find anything?”

“Nothing,” she said. Then her lips sort of frowned – not her face, just her lips. “Well, that’s not quite true. One time we found a dog.”

a little girl playing sadly with a wet sandbucket in the family cremation dust.

**

parents back from trip down to Mark Forehead, Eden.
The car smells like dog that's been cured into ham. They took the dogs.
silent treatment at arbitrary point in post return supermarket visit.
had been spending time too rapidly, dont know why so fast, watching TV at night i suppose.
friday night dinner party. went to woolley past midnight. creepiest fucking building at night you ever saw. supposed to be haunted by Christopher Brennan.
Did i even mention we got another dog?

The hard chords he was hammering are hammering on now through her head, so that her head aches with the chords she was hearing and still hears over and over in reverberative memory, inescapable, ringing out more the more she tries to repress them, and her blood is full of ceaseless vibration like the long strings inside the piano tingling endlessly once struck, so that she feels almost about to snap, or scream, or sing, and the minutes do not seem to pass because she does not stop vibrating, and the seconds and minutes and then the hours only seem to be caught up into her ceaseless reverberation.
The pantyhose are beside her on the bed.
The pantyhose look strangled, dead, and yet black and livid with some hot dark bile of anti-life that makes them treacherous even in death. Their fabric is black, flaccid – but their very flaccidity reminds the onlooker that they were formerly taut, as if their very fabric has been taught tautness and is inherently taut and tight even when stretched, relaxed, flaccid and empty like this, beside her on the bed. And she looks down at her own legs, her gaze sliding in slow terror down over her hard knees down her shins down to her ankles down to her naked feet, and she thinks in horror of the pantyhose, of pulling on the pantyhose, of the pantyhose that she will have to pull on any minute – she thinks in horror of pulling them on up over her knees, an act as unnatural as a snake trying to crawl back into its own shed skin. And the ceaseless terror of those hammering chords in her head remind her that downstairs he will be assembling his evening things on the table, reminds her that he will smell of aftershave already and soon he will expect her to come down, and she looks at the pantyhose and she knows they are expecting her too, that any moment now they will be in her hands and she will be feeding herself into them, feeding her feet into their panting pantyhose mouths, a long suicide of stretching that black sateen fabric up her skin, making the tights taut once more, turning her legs from tan to black—not the black of rot or bile or death but the black of glamour, of night, which she knows in her heart to be as vile as bile after all, but far less easy to recognise, like the handshake of a very clever prostitute. And that third chord he kept playing, the one it seemed he couldn’t get past, the one he kept coming up against and that kept coming up against her, the one it seemed he was going to keep hammering until he got it right but that he knew and she knew and they both knew from prior experience that he would never get just right, that he would never even adequately approximate, is hammering now in her head, just the one chord now as she finds that she has taken up the pantyhose and that already she has pointed her toes and already she has started to pull them on and already she can feel that unnatural swallowing of flesh into the tautening tightening black as if choosing death not because that was what she wished to choose but because there were no other choices or all other choices were invisible, or because that one choice was invincible. And it seems sudden when she finds herself pulling the waistband to the crook of her waist where soon his arm will be and finds herself straightening the gusset between her thighs and finds herself standing splayfooted before the mirror, wearing the pantyhose, or rather, being worn by the pantyhose, ridden by the pantyhose, covered ineradicably by the pantyhose, swallowed in their tight taut sheen, and completed by them. And now that she is enclosed in that tight ungiving space she finds the chords can no longer vibrate, and then there is just a single sostenuto note and then there is nothing, just an empty space where the notes were, where perhaps they should still be, and there is her face in the mirror. And she wishes suddenly that there were some sort of covering for the face, some sort of tight black space into which the face could be jammed and tightly tied off never to be seen again except perhaps tossed about in some irrelevant interstellar football match beaten about and burst as a balloon in that ever increasing evening distance of weightless dark light where things like sex and handbags and the price of cocktails have no more meaning than the bright numb acupuncture of the stars in the impossible sky of bile black. And her eyes fix on her eyes in the mirror and she wishes her face away but instead her face reacts as if she actually controls it, as if her own thoughts bear some sort of unbearable relation to her expression, and she finds herself almost dancing in the tights and yet not moving, not yet, not with the chords all gone, and instead she finds her face just scrunching scrunching, scrunching up not with tears, not yet, because she finds she can’t cry just yet, and then the moments toll (time is moving again now, without the chords) the moments pile up around her and still she is not crying, and then she starts to make a noise like crying, a low chortling sob sound just like crying, but she isn’t crying, she is merely providing the space (in noise) where the tears should fall, but the tears do not come, the tears do not come, they do not hotly leak, and she keeps thinking something will happen – the tights will ladder and rip the seams out of life, or he will call her downstairs, something to make her stop just standing waiting for the tears to come, but nothing happens, he doesn’t call, and the pantyhose are intact and complete and the pantyhose are all over her and she is panting now with trying to cry and knowing that noone is going to stop her trying and that she will have to find it in herself to stop herself but knowing already that she doesn’t have the strength to stop this impotent sobbing anymore than she has the strength to cry because between them the chords and the pantyhose have already annulled her.
And then she does stop.
Because out of the black blue nothing, it comes to her.
That single thought that stops everything, that makes everything elide over into a single black featureless field, a plane of plain black, impenetrable explicable and even-gliding and godlessly tolerable.
That single thought, those two simple words, those essential elements:
Hand and bone.
She stands, calm now, and she can’t stop thinking it.
Hand and bone. Hand and bone.
Hand and bone.
Hand and bone.