SHE THOUGHT SHE COULD FLY

A young woman seeking something with the aid of chemicals.

Lorna felt the rough skin of Matt’s hand as he touched her. It was a comfort to her because there was nothing else, anywhere, that reminded her what life was, and she was incapable of movement and even of wanting to move. There really wasn’t much of her left.

But Matt’s hands, both of them, had a familiar calloused texture that she had hated back in the living day, and now something in the mush of her brain she liked it.

They were familiar. That was enough for them to be.

With closed eyes, she sighed, and died. Her heart kept beating, it had to with all the wires seeing that it did, but the essential Lorna passed away.

It was as easy as that. Stepping from one state of being to a state of not being.

When she had been in the state of being she had been at home, and Matt came back from work. She loved it when his working day was over because he lit up a great deal of her life when all she had was a demanding baby to feed and change. And that was something she appreciated, having her life lit up. An echo of those days still persisted.

She hadn’t seen him since whahe thought of as the accident, of course, and if she heard his voice she would never recognise it because no sounds never once penetrated the silence of her world to help her to be reminded of its cadences.

But she knew his touch. On her cheek, gentle like a moth landing in the night, but rough like it always was.

Or rather, she had known his touch. She knew nothing now that she was dead. She didn’t even know that her heart would no longer labour as she lay on her bed were it not for technology and wires. So she slept. Or almost slept, the kind of inactive and unemotional sleep that characterises death.. It wasn’t exactly sleeping because somehow she was aware those hands and the familiar roughness of their skin.

There had been a time before the accident, but she hadn’t known this Matt back then even though they’d been to the Register Office and got wed. They’d been togetther through thick and thin, she’d promised that the bad years were over. She was going to make sure of that. And privately she’d decided on one last trip to her own magic kingdom and that would be that. A final flight, and life.

She called him Matt now because that’s what he felt like, what Matt always did, when he gently moved a finger on her cheek, against the smoothness of her twenty year-old skin. He might have touched her elsewhere like before her flight, but she wouldn’t have known.

She hadn’t got much in the way of senses anywhere below her neck, though she didn’t know it like she no longer knew anything. The accident had seen to that.

Or was it an accident? Maybe it was deliberate, on her part. She’d wanted to fly like a bird and when she’d tried it hadn’t worked properly. Maybe because birds have wings and she didn’t.

What she’d done was take a handful of pills and change the world, make it mould itself into a different, more exciting shape. And the colours of everything had become beautiful, sharp where they should be sharp and delicate where they should be muted. The birds, those she was going to join and fly with, had sung to her as she sat naked on the window sill of her bedroom on the first floor, and suddenly the twittering and tweeting had assumed the shape of words.

They had told her, loud and clear, that they loved her, and when they had looked through intelligent beady eyes at hers she had known the depth of that love. She had felt it like a swimmer feels the water of a warm lagoon on her skin. At least, that’s what she thought though she had never actually swum anywhere and never in a blue lagoon. City girls don’t if the nearest baths are too far away, but she did have imagination, didn’t she? She could know things with her fancies, couldn’t she?

“Come and fly with me,” urged a sparrow, “and soar with me,” added a rook. “Come and dive with me,” called a swift, so she did.

She launched herself from the window sill and felt the mystery and magic of flight, and then she hit the concrete path beneath the windows, and knew very little more.

She was waiting for the thrills of flight, but the only thrill she experienced was Matt’s finger as he stroked her skin.

“You stupid b***h,” maybe he said, but she couldn’t hear him so she’d never know for sure. “Doing something as idiotic as that! Doped up, and you’re supposed to be getting clean!”

He’d stopped stroking her cheek and she wanted him to start doing it again. But he didn’t. He just told her what he thought of a junkie mother who thought she could fly. Then he went, and for an eternity she was alone until he returned

She lay there motionless, of course, with pipes and wires doing things for her, monitoring her, keeping her going. Without them the death she had slipped into would be assured.

She didn’t know it, but somehow she felt the freedom of bird flight as she lay there. She knew, or at least the tiniest part of her flittering consciousness believed, that she was on the cusp of something momentous. She had no idea what that might be. She had forgotten all about birds and flight and all the wonderful colours had long since dimmed to monochrome and then nothing, not even black, and the sounds had been silenced.

Matt touched her skin again. Her cheek.

“It’s just here,” she said, “as far as I can make out the only square inch on her body that displays any sense at all. I can feel it almost moving under my finger.”

The doctor nodded. “All the signs are that her brain’s been dead this past few days and the scan proves it,” he said thoughtfully. “Her family is quite prepared. I spoke to her husband, and he’s distraught but knows she won’t pull out of it.”

“Then he can come in and say goodbye to her,” said Matt quietly, though she wasn’t called Matt anywhere outside of what remained of Lorna’s brain, she was Sue and she was a proper nurse and her fingers were far from calloused. But she did stroke the cool cheek of a dying Lorna. It seemed the decent thing to do.

Matt, the real Matt, came back to look at her. He wanted to cry. He wanted to make love to her one last time, to feel the warmth of her body as close to him as close can be.

But, “Okay,” he whispered, nodding.

And Lorna was finally switched off.

© Peter Rogerson 15.08.21

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