When the pregnant girls first arrive at St. Eulalia’s Home for the Lost and Wayward, the nuns take them to see the Frozen Child. The Frozen Child, her feet locked in ice, her mouth wide and dark as an open grave.
Once I was small, held in another’s palm, running along life lines, diving into fate lines, skipping over heart lines, a horizon beyond eternity my only view.
You slip. Fall. Wonder what you’ve broken this time. You wait for some new pain to sound alongside the slow tolling that’s rang inside of you through years of pills in the morning and pills at noon and pills again at bedtime and of trying to explain the ones your daughter finds forgotten in the organizer when she stops in to check on you.
I feel like I’m dying lately and some days this motivates me to do everything I can before my time runs out and other days it motivates me to do absolutely nothing at all.
The winter that Dad left, taking Dougie with him, we all built an igloo. That morning, the garden was covered in a thick white glaze. Mum couldn’t sit still.