By Regan Chern
Content Warning: self-harm, graphic elements
Flattened gold hoop—scratched and malleable—where dried flesh hangs, caught in the hook. I turn the earring over. I try to squeeze it back into shape. It becomes a larger hook—the shape of a baby’s finger, slightly extended, gripping hard onto my index. I drop the earring back into the bag. ‘Haley Reardon’s Effects’ is written across the plastic in a nurse’s blue scrawl. I put the bag into a duffel I’d brought to the hospital. Zip. Haley stirs at the sound; her eyes roll in their broken sockets. I reach for her hand. She’s a plum. Her burst veins stain the dermis, painting her purple and swollen. She attempts sounds. Broken glass. Tears gloss her eyes. I quickly up the morphine, the I.V. drips at a heightened metronome. Haley, thankfully, slows. Beneath the purple, I see the composite sketch of broken bones and empty veins—an abandoned city in my daughter. I take her right arm and lift her hand to my cheek. Her cold skin is almost permeable against my own, and I feel everything she carries. With wet eyes, I see myself, young, holding a Raggedy Ann. That doll held my daily frustrations, my secret wishes, my DNA in the drool. I set her shapeless arm down and bring the blue sheets up to her chin. ‘Keep her soul,’ I whisper to the body, ‘forever if you can.’
***
There was a moment when the car invaded Haley’s body. A mindless woman driving in a stolen vehicle. A police unit chases the woman. A thirteen-year-old girl, at a crosswalk after choir practice, flies ten metres. A hooped earring tears from its corbel. Haley meets bitumen and nearly every bone is pulverised. The police car halts. The stolen Commodore doesn’t; it crushes her femur.
A metallic scream rings in my ears as I arrive at the hospital. I find my daughter and all I can do is pause the image. I’m seconds away from losing her, so I hold her at the precipice. Stop, I demand of Time.
I bite my nails until morning comes. Dr Fields says she can go home. She won’t recover. There’s nothing they can do. ‘Please understand, Ms Reardon,’ she says, ‘your daughter will die. I’d urge you to not postpone the inevitable. Consequences are more punishing to those who defy them.’
‘Are you a parent?’ I ask.
‘I am.’
‘Then you’d do the same as me.’
I lay my cardigan over the bed’s footboard and grip its metal rails. There’s still breath in my lungs, I know there’s still breath in hers.
I draw her away from here. I take Haley home.
I fail to drag her up the steps to our front door. Instead, I lay her over my shoulder to bring her across the threshold. Carefully, I lay her scarred, purple head on the indigo pillow.
With a warm cloth, I wash the debris and dried blood away. I clean her hair and disguise the bald patches with braids, give her clean clothes and a prayer. There is a hope that these things will erase it all, but she is the rags of a thing I loved whole.
I try to clasp her right hand, but the fingers are gone, and in their place are soft nubs—these are Consequences catching up to me. She’ll always be going, I realise.
Consequences steal her body from right to left, like erasing a sentence. Her veins, writing history in her flesh, unlace their web. Her skin will slowly unfurl from itself. Going, going, gone.
I grab a roll of fabric and cut, sew, and embroider Haley a new set of fingers. I replace her forearm, bicep, shoulder as they are stolen day by day. The needle pricks my finger, and I spread my blood in the lining. I pray to alchemy. I surrender sweat and tears to the fibre; each droplet is an egg that holds the same prayer.
The replacement parts are joined to the nubs with a thin needle and a fine thread. Haley looks at me with wide, numb eyes.
‘I love you too,’ I answer.
Some days, Consequences give back her anatomy. And when my hope renews, Consequences take it away again. Most days, it takes more than it gives.
While she still has her head, I restore her torn ear with a bit of fabric, fluff, and thread. I try to open the flattened earring’s hoop, but the gold is too hard and brittle now. It is forever stuck as a baby’s finger, slightly extended.
I remove my own hoop and thread it through Haley’s ear. She gives a jagged smile, I think. I caress the valleys of her purple cheek and smile back. She feels almost warm.
Her head disappeared next. A cruel joke.
I find the remains on the navy pillow: a little ball of fabric and my earring. I fill her absence with a large doll’s head with Haley’s eyes, rendered in buttons. Its blank expression stirs me, calls me to bargain with Consequences: I’ll sacrifice my ear for her head.
I go to the grocery store and find a knife—new and sharp—to cleanly slice my ear off.
No anaesthesia. I know Consequences need pain.
I stand before the mirror, shaking, blade in my right hand, ear stretched in my left. In my mind, I repeat quickly. Quickly. Quickly.
The ear sits on the bathroom floor, amongst constellations of red stars. Blood thumps in the canal, beating hard and then falling out onto my shirt. It’s a metronome. Time. Time. Time, it sounds.
That clock is always moving, always taking.
I pick up the ear, and the sound quietens. The ear is another hoop, albeit oblong and flexible. I secure it to Haley’s doll head with a wooden button in the ear’s hole.
I let my blood drip onto the fabric forms and then smear each fat droplet. Each star is another prayer.
Her head doesn’t return. Instead, I find Consequences’ grin in my rotting ear, which has turned purple like Haley’s skin.
I know the end now as I always did: she’ll always be going.
She’s been going.
I think she hears me, her little finger wriggles in response to my voice. In my ear, I hum to her nursery rhymes, promises, strength.
I continue replacing the body parts as they disappear. Perhaps for the ritual of having done something.
She becomes a limb attached to most of a complete doll. Her button eyes, walnut brown, stare into a mosquito net canopy.
One night, I wake up and find myself watching the arm. Instinctively, I curl up next to it and hold it to my chest. Its faint radial pulse gestures to her heart held in an absent body. Her little finger—my baby’s finger—squeezes my index three times. She anchors it there.
‘I love you too.’ I feel Consequences final arrest of her. She is gone.
A mother holds her doll. They surrender to the black veil.
Author Bio:
Regan is in his final year of a BFA (Creative Writing) at QUT etc.… do you really need to know more than that? You could be reading my work instead, you know. It’s far better than any dry self-aggrandising drivel that I could’ve written for this bio.
If you’d like to contact me, do so through my Instagram: @regancchern