Cycle

By Anna Taylor

Womb

People say things.
     ‘I got pregnant,’ Edie's sister-in-law tells her, ‘the first and only time we didn't use contraception.’ She clicks her thumb and middle finger together, briskly, as if demonstrating how the egg and sperm collided with a thwack, and then stayed like that, pressed together.
     Women at Edie's life drawing group appear to be on some kind of womb rotation — each of them at varying stages of impending motherhood. Every week one of them has to leave class to go to the bathroom. Morning sickness. The other bigger bellied, rosy cheeked women smile at her indulgently.
     ‘We've kind of got a problem, ’ George's co-worker tells her at a meet and greet. ‘I only have to look at Alycea and she gets pregnant.’ The problem being that she's now carrying child number five. He doesn't really look like it's a problem for him at all though, smiling at them, as he speaks, with a set of enormous but perfectly straight incisors.
     George places his hand in the small of Edie's back. She blinks rapidly.
     In the supermarket, on Friday afternoon, a woman has a baby slung over her shoulder, its tiny back curled like a snail's shell, one pink woollen bootie coming loose. Edie forgets to buy onions, and salt. She realises once she's only a block away but doesn't turn back.
     She walks slowly, two shopping bags in each hand, and instead of taking the seaside route she turns up the zigzag, its steep little track etched into the side of the hill.
     She is nearing the top when she sees it — a bundle of clothes, the gravity defying wheel of a crashed bicycle. At first she thinks: kids, prank. She does not want to run, for fear of looking a fool. But as she gets closer she sees that the clothes contain a body — a boy, no, a man — and she drops her shopping bags to the concrete, flies across the ground.
     His face is pressed to the metal of the bicycle frame, one hand to his throat, eyelids flickering. His skin has a varnished sheen to it.
     ‘Are you alright?’ she says. A ridiculous question.
     His eyelids open, close. Open, close. He moves his head a little towards her. He seems ageless— sixteen or forty, it's impossible to tell which. Cords stand out on his neck, and his hands are threaded with ropey veins.
     His mouth moves, but the words are indecipherable. Edie drops her head closer to his face. She can feel the faint smudge of his breath against her skin; can feel the tiny wind of each word forming.
     ‘You’re here,’ is what he says.

Insomnia

For five weeks George has been sleeping poorly, and it is in the afternoons that the weariness hits. Poorly may be an understatement — some nights he roams the house (getting up, going back to bed, getting up, going back to bed) until the milky grey light of dawn. The same bird starts up every morning — or so he imagines, its song identical from one day to the next. At first that chorus of reedy notes had made his heart pump with panic, all the veins in his body, it seemed, opening and closing in time, but now the fact that it is morning, and that he hasn't been to sleep, feels somehow sweetly inevitable — despite it all, the morning arrives, that bird singing its song.
     He pulls the curtains aside. Looks for the orange beak in the black branches of the tree.

George had jetlag when they first arrived, and hadn't slept then — but his body had quietly reset itself, understanding intuitively (as bodies surely should) that night was a time for sleeping. But something in him seems to have forgotten that now, as if a switch in the mechanics of his brain has come loose, and it whirs. Not on. Not off.
     That morning he had slept a little, perhaps from five to seven, and when he'd reached for Edie in the dim morning light, she had felt sweaty, but only faintly warm, like bread dough under a tea towel in the sun.
     ‘Have you slept at all?’ Her words slurring with sleepiness.
     ‘Maybe a little.’ These were the sorts of statements he used now, non- committal, mildly optimistic.
     ‘Were you awake to hear your bird?’
      ‘No.’
     She shifted around a bit, against him, against the sheets.
     ‘Well that's something,’ she said.
     She breathed heavily for a while, and then he felt her body start, the jerk of her
arm, her elbow knocking against his ribs. She brought her hand up to her face, as if checking to see if it was still attached to her wrist, and made a sound in her throat — the tiniest exclamation. He focused his eyes and saw it too — the red sheen of blood on her fingertips.

Water

Isaacs's body rises off the pavement and then sinks into the concrete — under it, it seems — with every breath in and every breath out again. He is aware of this, but only mildly, as if that is happening just a little way from him, at arm's length, the real work of his body — the thwack thwack of his heart — filling up all the space inside and around him. With his eyes closed he has managed to locate the cool smoothness of painted metal, and he lies with his cheek against the bicycle frame, the coldness of it overwhelmingly sweet, like water for a thirst.
     Someone needs to help me, says a voice in his head, but it probably isn't his — it is too forceful sounding; urgent.
     Do something to save yourself, the voice says. Definitely not him.

At first he thinks the slap of footsteps is inside his body, and it seems that perhaps he is dying — so many sounds, all at once. But then he hears a voice — not his, again — and he claws his eyes open from the inside, blinks into the white glare of the afternoon. He has known this face all his life, and here it is right in front of him.
     ‘You’re here,’ he says, feeling that if the muscles in his face could find a way to band together and form a smile, that's what they would do.
     She doesn't seem to hear him, or to understand. He works to form the words better, tries to get them sounding like they should. These are the things he notices then: the smell of her skin, settling in the air like the wall of fragrance around blossom; the cool of her fingers, pressed against the heat of his arm.

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