Chapter 9 — The Flow43
@solena.rising
“They buried me in clay today, loves. Warm from the earth, heavy as a held breath, and I lay there and let it draw the old water out of me. We armor up, don’t we.
We spend years sealing ourselves shut so nothing can reach in.
But the clay doesn’t ask. It just holds you until you remember you were allowed to be held all along.
I came up lighter than I’ve been in years. Tides.”
We were still at the lunch table when the call came to be buried.
A card went round with the coffee, seafoam ink on the same heavy stock as everything else they put in your hands. The Flow, it said. Two o’clock. Wear nothing you’d miss. Coral drifted past with a tray and turned it into a sentence a person could actually use.
“Clay today,” she said, beaming down at the pair of us. “Bring me the body you’re tired of. We’ll send a better one home.”
My mother set her phone face down for that. She hadn’t done it for me in two days.
I had spent the back half of lunch with an alarm going off in a building only I could hear, and the cure on offer, apparently, was to take my clothes off in a field and be packed in hot mud by strangers. I want to be clear that I knew how it sounded.
I had said the word to myself an hour ago on a sunlit lawn, the real one, the one with robes in it, and the island’s answer had come back inside the hour. Don’t think. Come and be warm.
I went. That’s the part I keep having to write down. Nobody made me. I picked up my towel and I went.
The Flow happened in a clearing I hadn’t been shown, which was its own small lesson, because I’d started to believe I’d seen the whole island and the island kept opening new rooms. This one lay in a fold of the hill behind the bath house, screened from the sea by a stand of thin trees, ringed with the pale flags, private the way a place is private when the privacy is the entire idea.
Arranged around a central fire were the tables. A dozen of them, broad and low and padded, the kind you’d get a massage on if the spa had been founded by someone with infinite conviction and no budget for proper legs, each one paired with a deep clay pot on a tripod beside it.
Over the fire a cauldron the size of a bathtub steamed and ticked, and two of the weathered staff worked it with wooden paddles, ladling slow gray ropes of clay out into the pots, where the stuff sat steaming, the color of wet ash.
The whole clearing smelled of it, a thick mineral reek of wet stone and iron and rained-on ground, heavy enough to sit at the back of the throat.
“The surface world washes,” said Coral, walking between the tables while we gathered at the edge in our towels.
“Washes and washes and never once goes deep enough to get the old water out. The grief water. The held water. The water that’s gone stale in you because you sealed it off and never let a living soul reach it.
The Flow reaches it. The clay finds every place you’ve closed and it draws.
But it can’t draw through cotton, tides.
And it can’t reach where a hand won’t put it. ”
She dipped two fingers into the nearest pot, lifted them gray to the knuckle, and let it fall back in a long rope. Then she smiled around the ring of us, serene and somehow vacant.
“So you’ll go down to as little as you’re brave in,” she said, “and you’ll do each other. The places you can’t reach on yourself are the ones that have been waiting the longest.”
There was a rustle around the clearing, the particular noise of forty people deciding to be brave in front of each other at once.
Towels came down. The linen couple folded theirs in half first, naturally.
Whitecap went to his shorts and stood there enormous and unbothered.
Pearl kept her eyes fixed on the middle distance like a woman wading into cold surf, which she more or less was.
My mother put her thumbs in the waist of her skirt and looked at me, once, a flat little check-in glance, the one that on better days meant you good?
, and then she undressed in front of me with the brisk competence of a woman who got changed for a living and was not about to make a moment of it.
Down to a pale bralette and briefs the color of the inside of a shell.
I had seen most of it already, the sea had seen to that, but seen and watched her take off are different counties and my body knew the border.
I looked at the cauldron. I looked at the flags.
I took off my own shirt and trousers and stood there in the afternoon in my shorts, being a professional, being a son, being a man with somewhere else to put his eyes and nowhere to put them.
We took a table near the edge, and I lay back on it the way Coral mimed, and my mother dug both hands into the pot beside us and started in on me. The first load landed warm on my sternum, heavier than it had any right to be, and she spread it down me in a long slow sheet.
It was hot. Not bath hot, blood hot, the temperature of the inside of something, and it had weight, settling over me an inch thick and pressing gently all along me at once, like being held down by something that wished me well.
The smell of it came up thick around my face.
She worked it over my chest and down my arms, palms flat and warm and businesslike, and I lay there and took it.
Neither of us said anything. We hadn’t really said anything since the lawn, since you want it and maybe I want to come back different, and the silence had come down into the clay with us and settled between her hands.
Her thumbs found the muscle below my collarbone and pressed, harder than the job asked for, and I understood I was being told something in the only language we had left that didn’t risk an audience.
Off across the clearing Whitecap let out a deep involuntary church-organ groan under his partner’s hands, and somebody laughed, and the laugh got swallowed in the steam.
“This is the most relaxed I have ever been against my will,” Don said, from a table somewhere to my right, to no one, and let his head go back and said nothing further.
And as it went on the clay did to the whole clearing what it was doing to me, which was erase people.
One by one the bodies on the tables stopped being bodies anybody owned.
The differences went under it, the tan lines and the tattoos and the brands, until all down the rows there were only gray shapes steaming in the afternoon, slick and featureless and identical, like something half-finished, like the island had ordered people and they hadn’t dried yet.
You could not have told the influencer from the accountant. You could not, three feet away, have entirely told my own mother, except that I would have known her in any medium they could have dipped her in, and that was its own quiet alarm.
Then we swapped, and she lay back on the table for me the way I had for her, and I started at her shoulders.
I worked the clay along her collarbones and down, the way she’d done me.
I told myself it was paint. I told myself it was the job, the same job I’d done a hundred times with a reflector and a soft box, make the subject look good and feel nothing, and it held for about as long as it took to reach the first soft rise of her, where her breath went shallow under my hands, and the job died quietly and something else stood up in its place.
And then I did a thing I am still turning over, which was that I kept going, and I got worse about it on purpose.
The exercise, I had just realized, was a license.
Every inch of her was on the worksheet. The assignment said leave nothing dry, which meant I could put my hands anywhere I wanted and call it diligence, and the second I understood that I stopped being careful.
I spread the clay up her sides with my whole flat hands, slow, slower than the job could possibly need, my thumbs riding the soft curve where her ribs gave way to the sides of her breasts, close enough that she’d have had to be carved from something not to feel where I kept almost going.
She was not carved from anything. Her breath dragged out of her, unsteady, and she made a small sound and turned it, too late, into a cough.
I did the dip of her waist. I did the give of her stomach, and felt it tighten under my palm, felt her hold very still the way you hold still when the only thing you have left is not moving.
And then I stopped stopping short. I took the clay down to her ankles and worked back up, both hands wrapping each calf, her knees, the long muscles of her thighs, slower the higher I climbed, and where I would have lifted away at the hem I let my thumbs follow the soft inner line of her all the way up, into the heat coming off her in waves, until the edge of my hand pressed the warm seam of her through the thin wet cotton, and her hips rose half an inch off the table before she could call them back.
That breath she didn’t cough. I went back to wherever her breath snagged, again and again, and watched the brand I’d seen her wear like a second skin slide off her face a degree at a time, until what was left on the table under my gray hands was just Deb, shallow-breathing and wide open, hanging on.
She held the brand on as long as she could manage.
I watched it slip a degree at a time. And the part I have not fully explained to myself even now is how much I liked it, being the one doing instead of the one being done to, the hand instead of the held, standing there gray to the elbows quietly taking my mother apart under a license the island itself had pressed into my hands, and finding, God help me, that I was in no hurry to give it back.
Coral arrived the way she always arrived, which was suddenly and from no direction at all.