Only
one substance fascinates me more than gypsum, and that is chalk.
Calcium
carbonate, constructor of cliffs, home of fossils and the imprinted
remains of life aeons before our time. Put it on your hands and you
can swing from rings and bars. Put it in your hand and you can write
upon a blackboard and educate. Like the very word “literature”
itself, it seems to create a taste in my mouth.
I met a
woman made of chalk once. She was stately and very beautiful, but
when I tried to hold her she crumbled, when I tried to kiss her she
began to dissolve. Her skin was as white as porceline and smooth as
the air, but beneath all was chaotic in structure; like the universe
itself she was inconsistent. Sometimes she hurt to hold, and within
her was fossilised all her cares and woes; a record of her history
etched within her like rings in a tree.
She
liked the sea more than anything else, and when we visited, she would
wade in to the onrushing gunmetal grey tide and stand as proud as the
cliff faces behind her, she was white, the formations behind her
painted in iron red from where they were forced up from the ground to
where they met the sky. The cries of gulls and kittiwakes bounced
off them to where I was forced to bring wine out to her ten yards
out, for she didn't want to get her feet dry again. She wouldn't eat,
for she said everything would give her indigestion.
I
looked after her, but every day she grew weaker and less integral.
Every time she drank, it hurt, so she gave up fluids to go with the
absence of food. When she walked her skeletal structure decayed more
and more. She sat motionless at the kitchen dawn till dusk, jaw
calcifying.
Her
final words were her final wishes. I took her back to the sea, and
left her there staring out towards Europe. She was gone with the next
high tide.
I
returned the next morning, to find nothing but “Thank You”
written on the sand. For the next high tide to erase.
Copyright Bloody Mulberry 05/09/13
