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| image by Martina Hoogland Ivanow |
But Coral does not know the demesne of the new house. She knows not where the local swimming pool is. All she’s aware of are the rows upon rows of cluttered streets with terraced houses and gardens big enough only for brazen foxes and the silhouettes of cats to slink between rose bushes and ivy-ridden tree stumps. Submerged in the bath, breath held tight and everything silent but her panicked heart, Coral’s thoughts are dominated by water. She (Coral, born of a water-birth in the month ruled by Pisces) remembers these times when she swam with the fluidity of fish in a pool that she had all to herself. She feels keenly that she cannot swim like that in a bathtub. Her leg muscles are tight and achy from lack of exercise, and she feels like her body is growing in on itself, almost like the cartilage around her ears have done. Like a rubber band that hasn’t been stretched for a long time. In the bathtub, in the lulling silence of her underwater world, Coral thinks of the lilypads on the bottom of the baby pool, and how hard she used to try to stay down with her legs crossed. I wish I could be there again, she thinks. And I would stay sitting down at the bottom and no air in my body would force me to float up. I’m not so very sure I would want to surface. What a perfect way to die…
Nothing transports her from life and misery quite like water. It conducts her cells like electricity. She can travel miles at the speed of lightening when she’s in water.
And slowly, and slowly, she forgets what wakefulness is, and she doesn’t surface from this underwater dream...
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