Chapter 25
SCREAMING HAS NEVER BEEN PROOF OF LIFE
Horns - Bryce Fox
Kookaburra
The soil is honest. It doesn’t lie, it doesn’t posture, it doesn’t pretend it’s neutral while it takes everything you are and decides whether to keep it. You give it something; it gives you something back. Bargain struck. No clipboard required.
I push my fingers into the raised bed and feel the crumble and cling, the damp cool of it sliding under my nails. Worms, grit, tiny white roots like threads of spit.
My lower back complains – maybe from the work, maybe from the parasite – but pain is familiar enough that I don’t pause.
The morning has that thin, watery sunlight that only shows up when it’s been raining for three days straight; the path is slick, the roses are sulking, the lavender looks like it tried to drown itself out of sheer boredom. You and me both, Lav.
The breeze brings the smell of salt if you stand very still. I don’t. I keep moving, kneeling, reaching, breaking the earth open in neat wounds and tucking things into them. It’s the closest thing to prayer I can stomach.
“Gentle hands,” Doctor Callaway says without looking up from her clipboard. “We’re not punishing the soil.”
I smirk into the bed and press harder, just to feel it push back. “Punishment implies guilt. Dirt is beyond such pedestrian morality.”
“Mmm,” she says, which is her version of a laugh, except it isn’t.
Her hair is scraped into a severe knot today, the kind that broadcasts discipline and migraines.
Pale blouse, dark slacks, clipboard like a shield.
She’s standing at what she would call a ‘safe observational distance’ and what I would call ‘close enough to catch arterial spray’.
The irony pleases me. I keep my head down and hum under my breath.
She recognises the tune. She always does. “Must we?”
“If I don’t sing to them, they sulk.” I pat the soil over a row of seedlings and flatten it with the heel of my hand. “Besides, they like the laughter.”
“Kookaburras don’t live here, Kayla.”
“Neither do I,” I say sweetly, and blow a speck of dirt off my knuckle.
We have a routine now. They love routines.
It makes them feel like captors with stickers for effort.
I show up when they unlock my door. I shower, because the room smells like bleach and impatience and I don’t see why I should add to that.
I eat what they give me and I smile when it’s awful.
I walk beside Doctor Callaway out to the garden with the second orderly trailing behind us and another by the gate.
I breathe the air like I’m grateful for it.
I kneel. I work. For an hour. Two, if I’m good.
I have been very, very good.
“You’re improving,” Doctor Callaway says, and I would roll my eyes if I wasn’t busy adjusting a trellis. The vine is fragile and smug. I like it. “Your affect is calmer. Less provocative. Your sleep has stabilised.”
“If you say one more positive thing about me, I’ll blush.” I push my hair off my forehead with the back of my wrist and leave a smear of soil there on purpose. “Any chance of moving past the kiddie gloves? You know, to real tools. Things with teeth.”
“We’ll discuss it,” she says.
I look up at her through my lashes. “Discussing isn’t the same as doing.”
“I know,” she says, and for a second I like her. She lies less than before. Less than others. Maybe that’s why she’s always so tired around the eyes.
There are tools, of course. They’re here because they ‘trust’ me.
I can see them under the tarp: rake, spade, hedge trimmer with a long jaw, the orange hulk of the wood chipper crouched like an animal that’s learned to pretend it sleeps.
We used it last time. It roared and I felt its voice in my bones.
Doctor Callaway watched me feed it branches until it sang right.
She didn’t flinch then, either. Points for consistency.
Orderly One is on gate duty, bored enough to yawn without covering his mouth.
Orderly Two is the new one – squarer, red hands, a buzzcut that suggests he bullied smaller boys at school and talks about it like it was summer sport.
He’s close enough to smell like cut grass and stale coffee, and when he hands me the gloves, his fingers travel half an inch too far along my wrist.
I let it slide. Once.
“Thanks,” I say. I don’t put the gloves on.
We trim. We weed. We relocate three slugs from the strawberries to the compost with a ceremony I entirely invent to annoy Doctor Callaway.
The sun lifts its face and decides to try being brave.
A bee elects the rosemary. I do not think about the island, about men fraying into violence, about a pair of hands I liked because they never shook.
“Hydrangea?” I ask.
Doctor Callaway glances up. “What about them?”
“They’ll go pink if you keep feeding them that,” I say, nodding at the fertilizer bag. “If you want blue flowers, you need aluminium. Acidic soil.”
She makes a note. She makes so many notes. I imagine them as feathers stitched to my back. I imagine them as knives. It helps me smile at her when she is being particularly clinical.
New boy sidles closer as I demonstrate how to loosen the soil around the roots without breaking the tender thread at the base. His shadow falls over my hands. He breathes through his mouth.
“You’re a natural,” he says. Too familiar. His tone says good girl. His hand says possessive. It lands on my shoulder for exactly one second. Warm. Heavy. Wrong by design.
I hold very still. The earth makes the tiniest sound as it settles into the space that motion would have created.
“That’s strike one,” I say lightly, without looking up. “The first touch was a warning. But there won’t be a strike two.”
Doctor Callaway’s head tilts. Her pen pauses in that way of hers that suggests an impulse to intervene strangled by an addiction to data.
She says nothing. We are performing a test in which she measures how far she can push me into civil society without losing a limb, and I measure how long she can pretend she isn’t inching me toward a cliff to see if I’ll jump.
I am winning. She thinks she is, too. It keeps things polite.
New boy laughs. He doesn’t hear the tone. Men like him never do.
“You’re funny,” he says.
“I’m inconvenient,” I correct.
We ferry broken branches to the chipper.
I run my hand along the orange casing like it’s a dog I’ve taught clever tricks.
Its black mouth yawns; the teeth are quiet for now.
The tarp folds back like skin. I feed it twigs and feel the tremor travel up my wrists the moment the blades decide they have something worth eating.
It is a good sound. Imagine thunder with intention.
Doctor Callaway watches with that particular blankness administrators wear to public apologies and funerals.
She is an instrument finely tuned to not reacting.
I place things into the machine one by one, nice and slow, just to see if she breathes differently on the wordless beat between grind and silence.
She doesn’t. I do. The rhythm is better than music because it never lies.
We are almost finished when it happens. The sun has shifted; the shadow of the supplies shed has slid across the beds like a big clock hand. I have dirt up both forearms and in one eyebrow, and when I catch sight of myself in the greenhouse reflection, I grin. I look domesticated. It’s obscene.
The new boy sidles again. The day has made him bold or stupid. He hands me the shears and, when I reach, he lets them linger. His fingers stroke the inside of my wrist, up, into the soft place where my pulse lives, like a secret handshake no one taught him that should never be attempted.
Strike two.
“Hands,” I say, still cheerful. “Off.”
He smiles in a way I’ve seen men practice in bathroom mirrors. “Relax. I’m just being friendly.”
“That’s the trouble,” I say, and turn my head to look at him properly.
His eyes are the blank brown of cheap chocolate, melted and reset.
There’s a nick across his jawline where he tried to shave too fast. His throat is thick.
There is a damp patch under one arm he doesn’t know about.
I store everything. I could take him apart in three motions if they’d let me.
I want to see if anyone will stop me.
He touches my hip.
Doctor Callaway says my name mildly, once. “Kayla.”
I stop smiling. That’s all. The world keeps doing everything it was doing; a bee lands on the rosemary again; the gate creaks as the wind decides to be unhelpful.
But inside my head, someone turns off the lights and flips a breaker.
The hum becomes a line of pure noise. I put the shears down on the path very gently so nobody loses a finger by accident.
“You really shouldn’t have done that,” I tell him.
He thinks I’m flirting. He knows nothing about the native predators in this habitat.
He winks.
Winks.
Christ.
I move.
There’s this myth men tell themselves about women like me – that we enjoy the dance, the back-and-forth, the flirt and flinch. We don’t. Dance implies we agreed on music.
No.
This is carpentry. I measure once, cut clean, sand the edges if I’m in a generous mood.
I’m not in a generous mood.
My left hand gets his collar. My right hand takes the back of his belt.
He’s heavier than me but leverage is a kind of love and I always knew how to make gravity cheat on its principles.
He yelps when his feet leave the earth and forgets how to pretend he’s in charge.
I walk him three quick steps to the chipper and it’s all forward momentum and his animal noise.
He scrabbles at my wrists. Boys always forget you can’t peel hands off you if they’ve decided you’re furniture and the room is already on fire.
“Kayla,” Doctor Callaway says, louder this time. “Stop.”