Miranda

by Noah Kingfisher

Her sleeplessness was a small rental cottage in a town by the sea. 

Weeks went by in which she did not dream.

  

She wore a large hat and sunglasses that kept the bruises on her face in the shadows.  

The sun did not set. Children played in the sand outside the cottage. They were not her children, and she did not know their names. They asked her if she had a boat, a big white boat with a kitchen and a cocktail bar and a pool. They asked her if she had a boat with a hair salon and a horse and a princess.

  

“Go home,” she told them when they broke a flowerpot.

“We have no home,” they said. 

She swept up the shards while they watched her, then they watched her pick up the shrivelled geranium and put it in a bag like a small fetus. 

“You have to be careful,” she told them. 

  

“Why do you move so slowly?” they asked her. 

“I’m tired,” she replied. “I want to sleep.”

“Sleep!” they shouted. “It’s easy! Close your eyes.” She closed her eyes. A girl clapped her hands, and a boy ran his hands through her hair. “Now you are sleeping. Now you can rest.”

  

They brought her dead starfish, shells, and buckets of shrimp. She found paper flowers fluttering on the garden table in the fierce easterly gale; tulips and marigolds glued to chopsticks. The stems broke. The petals sang like mosquitoes. She felt like the mistress of a sea-god. There was an absurd solemness to the offerings. 

  

There were jellyfish, enormous and pale in the warm shallows. She saw them float towards the small, colourful specks of swimmers like slow canon balls. She observed their luminous drift from the prow of a terrible, high cliff. She wanted to glide towards the jellyfish in a great baldaquin bed. Portuguese men o’ war! She did not want to swim. She wanted to surface among these objects of calamity. 

  

She went to the supermarket and bought a big fish. The fish melted in the sink, and after a day or two it stank. She chipped at it with a large steak knife to break it up. It did not look like a fish, and she felt sorry for the animal she had whittled down to a sad lump. She dumped a full ashtray on top of the fish, then poured the rest of the wine over it. It felt right. She added toothpaste and ketchup and mustard and mayonnaise. She put it in a box and tossed it into the sea. She thought of chopping off her fingers and putting the fingers in the sand like candles. 

  

There was a tidal rock, a wet granite shelf from which fishermen cast long, tired lines and waited; she went there to wait with them. It was spectacularly dull. When a line rose jewelled and dancing from the water she cheered. That was the closest she came to swimming in the water. The men looked at her. They were friendly but a little frightened of her. They had no faces that she could tell apart. They were ageless glimmers, bell bronze cymbals in the sun. They did not approach. She was venomous, maybe. 

  

On some days the lethargy was not so quick to strike. It lay idle on the quayside like a cobra, a coiled rope drying in the sun.  

She laughed at the pranks of the children in the garden. They dressed up in old clothes and said they were ghosts. She gave them lemonade.

“It’s sour!” They yelled. “It’s too sweet!” 

“I thought you were dead,” she said. 

“We are dead!” they shouted. 

  

She was glad they came to the cottage and sat in the garden. They were crazy. It was hot, and nobody slept anymore. They told each other harmless little lies about the town and the mouse in Mr Trombone’s head. Mr Trombone had shot himself in the head.  

When the curtains lit up orange and toast in the morning with the cresting sun, she knew it was the appointed hour. She called her husband. She told him she would not come home. 
There were tiny people whispering in her gargantuan ear through the telephone. She hauled them in so they would not march towards him and cross the awful wilderness of the land between them. 

  

She did not drink. She showered and sobered up. The town of sleeplessness shrank. It became a corset. The children sat quietly in a corner. 

“Bite me,” she asked a boy, but he didn’t. 

She panicked and wrestled against the undertow, the pull of daylight—or was it night, finally, succour, running to, to the help of, au secours. 

  

It was time. Mayday. Mayday. It rang and rang like a bell. Something buoyant and shrill. 
As a child she thought it was the name of an atoll, a small ring surrounded by water, with water at the heart of a great isolation. Now she knew. 

© 2021 Noah Kingfisher

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Noah Kingfisher is a writer and currently lives in Glasgow, Scotland.