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The Ribs Opened Out by Anastasia Joyce

A piece of strange fiction about the unravelling world seen through grief. Set somewhere in the hills of County Kerry.

They should turn around and go home. Lena was sure of it, and the certainty smacked into her as a wall of powerful nausea. She had to wrestle down the urge to vomit it out, to hack up a desperate plea to turn around in a pile of milky sick, and deposit it at her wife’s feet. She glanced at her wife hoping perhaps she had felt the same sudden wave, but Jess’s gaze was fixed on the road, beyond the furious sweep of the windscreen wipers, and her tightly clenched jaw invited a continuation of silence. In the backseat, her son was staring out the window, his eyes so wide and glazed that Lena wasn’t sure if he was looking at the soggy country squatting and salivating over their car, or into an internal abyss.  

If she could, Lena would have done as her son was doing: sat and sunk into the nothingness with dark vacant eyes. But Lena did not have that luxury. She squeezed her eyes shut and swallowed back the rising bile of dread.  

When they arrived, the cottage was sweet, as it was in the pictures, basic, but comfortable. Lena tried to engage her son in making the fire. But he just sat beside her dutifully until the fire was lit, and then he asked if he could go outside. Lena frowned, it was pretty horrible outside. Maybe they should wait until tomorrow, and see if it clears up. He stared at her, still and silent, and his alienness radiated suddenly towards Lena, she did not know this boy: this was not her son.  

The seconds passed and Lena could not unstick her tongue. Eventually he turned his face towards the fire, away from her, and feeling the panic of disconnection, Lena scrambled to close the gap. If he really wanted to go it was ok! She just needed to find his boots in all the mess, but yes they could go out and explore. 

The unpacking had not developed further than unceremoniously dumping the contents of the car into the hall. Lena rummaged in the bags and fished her son’s boots out from underneath a jacket, grabbed her own, and the two of them stood in the back doorway looking down the garden. 

“Can I go by myself?” 

Lena heard her son speak, but did not see his mouth move. She looked at the rain-flattened grass turning to mulch on the disappointing slope of land behind the cottage, and not seeing any immediate threats she nodded yes, grateful for the reprieve from the miserable weather. He squelched seriously down the grassy hill, and Lena closed the door on his small form. She pressed her weight against it to feel the satisfaction of it sealing shut. Although she didn’t want to admit it, Lena was grateful that her son was on the other side of that door, that she was enclosed within these walls away from him. 

Jess was standing at the sink washing the clean dishes from the cupboard, and looking out into the garden. The plastic bristles of the little pink brush in Jess’s hand scraped against the silence and the white plates in the sink, and Lena felt trapped by the door, between the child and the garden, and this cottage and her wife; unable to move towards either of them.  

She wanted to say:  

“Yesterday, a man walked past me carrying a baby on his chest. It was wearing one of those puffy jumpsuits, red with a print of white suns and moons. The baby kicked its legs like it was testing its weightlessness, little hands grasping the air, and eyes so wide they looked like the sun prints on his jumpsuit. When they had walked out of sight I thought I might split right down the middle and peel open, and my organs would spill out onto the pavement.”  

She wanted to say: 

“The hoover in the hallway at home makes me feel insane, and when I hear the birds in the morning I think about their bodies shattered on the road, a mist of feathers and gore and tiny open eye sockets starting to cook in the warm air.” 

She wanted to say something true, that might make it feel as if there weren’t every reason in the world to back away from the edge of the abyss that had opened between them. 

She said: “It’s nice here. I think this will be good.”  

Jess didn’t respond. She didn’t seem to hear, hands partially submerged, and scrabbling for some unidentifiable mulch trapped in the plug; her face shifted into a grimace as she scooped the slime of it gracelessly up and tossed it in the bin under the sink. She glanced out the window again, then stopped, and without looking at Lena said calmly: “he’s gone you know.” 

“What?”  

“He’s gone, Lena.”  

Lena remembered that there was a little stream in the pictures of the bottom of the garden, she thought maybe he fell, she thought maybe he was drowning, and she wrenched open the kitchen door and ran out in her socks, breathing in the water and not noticing the mash of mud rising between her toes. She choked on her own breath and the mix of saliva and rainwater as she ran, and found she couldn’t shout out her son’s name, it was lost somewhere inside her mouth. Sliding to the bottom of the sloping garden she threw herself half into the stream leaning over to see if perhaps he was there, had fallen, had been submerged, expecting to see his face floating below the surface of the water. 

She searched until she accepted the finality in her wife’s voice. 

Her son is gone. 

She walks back up the path as if in a dream, past her wife still standing at the kitchen sink, and up the stairs. Dredging the mud and filth through the house, her hair dripping dark droplets onto the green carpet, as though she were leaving a blood trail behind her. She reaches the bedroom, and collapses onto the bed in her damp filthy clothes, her muddied hair splayed across the pillow. 

Lena wakes in the middle of the night, to the dark silence and a slight dampness to the sheets. Her wife is not in the room. She gets up, and unsure where any of the light switches are, traverses the unfamiliar corridor in the darkness, running her fingers along the wall to navigate, and finding a door she opens it. A toilet. She closes it and keeps going down the corridor moving to the other wall until her fingers find the door to the second bedroom. She opens it, and sees the outline of her wife curled up asleep on the single bed. Her arm is wrapped around another form, a small figure, her son, curled peacefully against Jess’s ribs. Lena closes the door quietly and returns to her room. She strips off her mud stiffened clothes and falls onto the clean sheets.  

The bed is still damp in the morning, bedding twisted around her legs, her torso bare and tacky with dried sweat. Her hair has left muddy patterns across the pillow.  

In the kitchen two bowls of cereal sit with a centimetre of milk in the bottom. Lena cradles a warm cup of coffee in her hands; no mention has been made of the previous night, and no comment on her dishevelled appearance. Her son asks if he can go into the garden. 

Lena opens her mouth, but her wife cuts in: “of course, sweetheart.”  

He hesitates and looks to Lena, but Lena sits silent, her tongue a metal weight in her mouth. She gives the tiniest incline of her head, but her son does not look away, just keeps staring at her, expectant. He leans forward on his toes as if he is going to reach out to her, touch her, and she feels her skin crawl with repulsion. But he doesn’t move towards her, and there is silence in the kitchen as Lena and Jess listen to him gathering his coat and his boots, and softly humming something to himself, snatches of tune reaching them, until the back door clicks shut. 

Lena tries again to open her mouth, to ask what happened, to ask when he came home, to say anything at all, but she is frozen in place, and her wife begins to chat brightly at her, clearing the plates from the table and prising the coffee mug, still warm and half full from her fingers. 

The boy stops asking for permission to go out after that morning, he just goes straight to the door, humming little snatches of his tune. At first Lena is pleased that he seems happier, but the more she hears the boy humming the more the sound unsettles her. She hears the familiar notes and each time he hums the same images come to her head. She sees beneath the red grasses of the hills that surround them, imagines the hill as held up by a tunnel of the sunken bones of a forgotten thing, a child sleeping in the smooth curve of white spine, nestled beneath the cavernous ribs, as the world above him rots. 

She bears the images that accompany her son as he hums his way through the kitchen until the relief arrives with the door swinging shut and sealing out the sound. But when the humming stops and there is no click of the door Lena raises her head, and sees the boy standing in the doorway looking at her. As their eyes meet he steps backwards into the rain, and the door swings shut behind him. She feels the danger like a knife to the head. A moment ago she’d felt heavy, limbs weighed down by bloated lethargy, but now the adrenaline stabbing down her spine sends her running out after him. He is standing halfway down the slope, waiting, his head twisted quizzically to one side, lips parted as though to ask what was wrong. 

Then in the same moment he was face down in the filth and dirt, lips moving incoherently, whispering into the earth, and gathering a coating of mud on his lips. His fingers scrabbled in the soft black sand with a ferocity that suggested he wanted to dig to the centre of the earth and scoop a handful of its molten core. 

Lena stood watching, unsure how much time had passed as he writhed in the dirt. He didn’t look at her again. She felt the screaming urge to run, to flee from this boy that was not her son, lying whispering to the earth, and her black-eyed, lying wife, who stood smirking out the kitchen window at her. 

She began to move and the ground was wet and sagged beneath her trainers, pulling her in before allowing her to bounce forward. A dark cloud shifts its weight and Lena is briefly blinded by the weak rays of light after days of murky greyness. She looks around and the garden is empty. She blinks the memory of her son writhing in the dirt out of her mind. She looks back towards the cottage and sees her wife outlined against the window. Lena keeps walking, pulling her trainers out of the gripping mud, and heads towards the ripped wire fence beyond the stream. She hauls her limbs through the awkward gap in the jagged fence, and strides on up the hill, the heavy coating of red tinged-grasses soaking her soft loose trousers. 

At the top of the hill Lena stops and takes in the saturated landscape around her. She laughs out loud, as she thinks of the squatting, drooling monster she had imagined as they first drove here. There are white and purple speckled crocuses in the short grass at the crest of the hill, and just beyond Lena can see there is a little gulley. She moves towards it, and the tune her son had been humming returns to her. Flashes of white curved spine and rotting dessicated landscapes. As she approaches, it’s clear there’s something there, lying semi-concealed by the long grasses. She moves slowly forward until the thing is revealed. She sees what she knew she would. A child, her child she is sure, curled, and foetal in the crook of the hillside, his body indented amongst the red grasses in the cold bright sun.