Cath Corri :On the ward; in the regions of a neighbourhood?
The ward is a long ward full of chaotic things like beds and curtains and tea-trolleys. They have put me in a side room with blackened-out windows. Every four hours that horrid nurse comes in, asks for my arm and injects a straw-coloured liquid into the tube that extends from it. I have never taken drugs in my life, but this liquid helps me to see my mother more clearly. It makes me fuzzy at first, but when I screw my eyes up, open them and focus on the walls I can see her coming through them towards me, hair flowing and fins fluttering.ffice ffice" />
‘Oh there you are’, she says.
‘I love you mother’, I say.
‘I love you too’, she replies.
Whenever I look into her face - really look into her face - tears fall from my eyes. There is water, water, everywhere and not a drop to drink!
Through the silence of my own anatomy, from deep within my inadequacy I am able to speak about her death. I have been given a quest to follow and it starts from here: point zero, in sleep! It has been forty days and forty nights since her leaving and I can’t remember being awake at all, although I can feel the starched sheets of hospital linen wrapped around my legs trapping me in like a mummy lying tattered in an old tomb out on the sands. Nurses are busying themselves around me and a rotten clinic smell, like the odour of chrysanthemums, pervades my senses. As I watch intently for a glimmer of kindness from them I imagine my mother dying in their care, lonely and sad. I am sad too because they cannot understand me when I say that in her leaving I can see a look of each generation gone by, as well as the breadth and scope of my own physical and intellectual life, through the eyes of a gaze that is not mine. You see, her death has reminded me of who I am. Oh yes, my friend, since that fateful millennium night I have been thinking through my own mortality in order to find her.
I am going through a healing process, but Mr doctor woman does not believe me. I have told her many times that through the experience of my mother’s death I can see the interpretation of my ideas and the context of my life being revealed. They are being revealed through the language of indolence for I have laid myself to rest with her, safe at last in knowing that death is not a passive but an active thing full of gravity and importance. She is where I abide and so to is my father. The Mermaid and The Balladeer are showing me the way!
When I speak these words Mr doctor woman shakes her head.
‘Rest now’, she says, ‘you will soon feel better’.
What does she know?
Learning to walk again.
Heat and humidity are upon me every day in this place. It has taken me almost six weeks to recover myself, but I am now standing on my own two feet and I do not need anybody to hold me up. There are mirrors at every bedside in this ward – a device of a sort to make the patients see themselves as a consistent entity in the world, but they can’t fool me. My old self has gone with the Mermaid and the Balladeer into the night air and is travelling forward somewhere into the realms of a history that cannot be known. Every day I feel heavy, yet weightless, and a sensation of infinite wonderment is passing through me as if I am being used up forever by them - they are my salvation. Through the mirror, which I look into every single day, I can see that they are holding the large white door open for me and as I watch them, their souls and skin become visible to me again. Like narcissus I have developed an ego that is dangerously destructive, although I am not falling into the murky pool just yet! Each day that the Mermaid and the Balladeer are with me new air fills up my lungs like a spring fills up an unknown watercourse, for they have walked themselves out of their deaths and into paradise and I am with them.
My mother is the leader and is very gentle. She has a soft voice full of the joys of Spring. I have never heard her take the lords name in vain or be harsh with children.
The hospital and its bays of sickness.
The hospital is called St Mary’s of the Martyrs and it has large garden areas to the front and back of it. It looks like a temple to me, edged with parallel lines of colourful flowers that seem out of place. It is a tall building with big arched windows at its highest level, but most of the patients are confined to small wards guarded by thin corridors. Full of wings and sickbays it is a labyrinth; a place with open and closed spaces that hide life’s accidents and returns the damaged to altered worlds in which like my own also have to be rebuilt. I pay no attention to most of the staff as they go about their work and rest instead in the corner of my room that is off-set to the entrance of my designated ward area for it is my very own sickbay – a space in which I may render myself as off-colour as I wish to be whenever I want to be. Most of the time I keep myself to myself simply because I and find it hard to even look at another person without feeling physically sick. All that I keep thinking about is the time when my mother approached me on that wonderful millennium night and took hold of my hand with hers – a hand that was small and adept at making others feel safe. There is not one other person on this small bit of spit and sand that I am able to trust quite yet.
‘Come forward’, my mother keeps saying to me, ‘we will have to hurry for time is waiting for us’.
Time goes slowly when you are forced to wait but I know why she has been given especially to me for, in my waiting, like Lady Lazarus in my Jew linen nightdress, I am reborn again several times over, despite the fact that I have to stay in this place for a little time longer. You might be wondering why I ended up here – so too am I. I think it is because I have become different.
It’s so hard to keep yourself occupied in a place like this as if time is standing still and the outside world is far, far away. To fill in the gaps of my days I read the poetry of Sylvia Plath and the books of women long since passed over, but Mr doctor woman is looking at me with a strange look trying to find a way of making my mind focus on the here and now rather than stories of the past written by women that were mad. She does not look directly at me and does not make any attempt to make physical contact. She just peers into the great void she calls my mind and opens a hole in her face that looks vaguely like a mouth.
‘Your mother has gone Catherine, try to be strong’.
‘But I am strong. Can’t you see her here in the pages of this story that is filled with her words?’ I ask.
‘No, I can’t Catherine, she is dead’.
When she talks like this I tell Mr doctor woman that she is a stupid woman with black eyes, and even though her hair shines with light as if the snowdrops have marked her head with white speckles of glory, she is sometimes very dismissive and arrogant. If I were to describe her to you I would say that her lips are full and curl at the edge with a wickedness unseen ever before, but only when I try to tell her my stories. Perhaps she just doesn’t know how to listen, I think, and go back to sleep in order to escape any kind of human interaction.
The doctor is going around the ward; ward rounds are also life-saving like the table of life!
Mr dr woman has come to see all of her needy children. Her coat is really white and she can listen to your heart with a magic trumpet that she places over your heart. She has a file to write in, but you can not read a word she writes. Her medicine chest is full and she can heal you with the blink of an eye. Today I have decided that every time she tries to see me through eyes that are black and distant I will cup my face with my trembling hands and cry out loud and strong into the stifling air - Oh my God, Jesus is a woman. I have been saved, I am out of myself, I am alive! Usually she ignores me and walks with her arrogant walk, out of the ward and far into the thin corridors that mask her disappearance. When she comes back today to the table of life I will try it again, for I am having no joy in convincing Mr doctor woman that I am a prophet from the future. I can see her now at the nurse’s desk trying to ignore my presence, but that won’t work for I am persistently crazy and nothing will stop me. Without looking at me she starts to walk towards the next bed and it is then that I can hear myself ranting straight at her.
‘Oh my God, Jesus is a woman. I have been saved, I am out of myself, I am alive! I bellow.
Mr Doctor woman in her harsh black eyes is jumping now, right off the seat she has acquired at the next bed and into the air like a woman gone silly with power. She has lost her magic wand and she is flustered and unsure of what to do. She asks the nurse to restrain me. It’s batty Nurse. I can see her running towards me from the doorway of the ward so I throw my poetry book and all the other books I have by women, to the ground in defiance and sit and wait. As she places her fat hand firmly against my forehead and forces my head onto my pillow I shout at her too.
‘Do it’, I say, ‘it is the only way that you are going to stop me from travelling with them’.
She grips me with her right hand and plunges something into my forearm. They are all at it now, I think, as I feel my body become heavy, like a body touched by sleep paralysis. As I fade into dullness I can see Poppies in July. When I awake I am fused with their aroma, feeling mad with anger. How dare they try and make me silent and dull. I am being controlled and I don’t like it one little bit! I will get even with batty Nurse some other time, for now I have different matters on my mind and I have to fight this lethargy that is forced on me. Things aren’t going as I planned.
Solitary Confinement
Alone again – naturally!
I have been moved to private quarters and the door has been locked. My mouth is always dry and parched and when I ask for a drink they pretend that they can’t hear me. My eyes too always feel cloudy, but they won’t stop me getting to my destiny. Every night batty nurse sits there watching me drift away, but I make sure that she can hear me as sleep takes its hold.
‘I don’t know where I am going mother, but I will follow you and my father wherever you wish to take me’, I whisper to myself.
Batty nurse smiles and turns the light out.
‘Bitch’, I say, and then all my words are gone again.
Another day brings another story to tell. I have decided for good that never again will batty nurse or Mr dr woman invade my space. I will tell my story of death and grief as I please. I will not write death in the way it is used to being written. It just isn’t something that I can do. Mr doctor woman said that I am too opaque. If that’s right, then let it be. How can I be responsible for her laziness? She will have to work at reading me and open my book instead of always trying to close it down, for I know secrets about myself that I have not told anybody yet. To help Mr doctor woman with her reading process I have told her that I will use headings to denote my frame of mind, some of which she has already missed, and that she must use them as a guide to where I have voyaged and will be voyaging in the future.
‘Grief’, I told her ‘does not travel in a linear way’.
‘And what good will your voyage do?’ she asked.
‘It will do me good’, I said.
Today I have stolen a lap-top from the nurse’s office. I will use it every day when she has gone. I am going to write a book. I will disguise it as not a book, but a book about books and how they can be read if they were a book.
Here we go – ellipsis is such a beautiful word!
Cath Corri: Epigrams
Using LANGUAGE TO WRITE and LIVE IN.
It’s in not knowing, that we speak of the things that we know.
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Readers are friends; close and sometimes removed – intimate and incestuous – they are always waiting to be found.
Vignette by Carmel Riley
Witches here too.
Going to bed when the chickens are in.
Catherine Corri : Vincent
The closeness of a family is not something that I am familiar with. My only experience of love is in the correspondence that I shared with my brother through some desolate and lonely years; years in which we have become old and departed, but never separated. In numerous letters, which I have in my possession, I would pose worried and aggressive questions about my financial situation to my brother, but his state of mind prevented any answers being given, let alone, in later years, any sort of financial support. At the age of thirty two the fact that I am no longer financially secure is shattering for me, for in the early days I could do whatever I pleased whenever I wanted to. You see, my brother would always send me money – thousands of pounds wrapped up in an old cloth would arrive at my home every three months. I did not ask where it came from, but instead dallied with the thought that he had earned it from his silly paintings. I very often had wanted my brother to spend the holidays with me, but he preferred to stay in ffice:smarttags" />Holland painting the end of a lonely life. fficeffice" />
Immolating himself in the fury of his work, I now know that he he soon became aware of the deceptive quiescence of his illness. He poured his desolation and loneliness into landscape pictures; cornfields whose ominous brushstrokes contained dynamic rhythms of colour and broad energy that articulate and move the senses but they were always over-arched by dominant stormy skies. I think my brother was mad, although in those days madness was looked upon as some sort of perverted genius and he was never treated or hospitalized in his moments of madness. He had an avid interest in the outdoor life simply because as children we were forbidden to leave the confines of the house – nature and the experience of nature consisted only of cultivated ornamented plants scattered about the house like a small reproduction of some kind of internal nirvana.
Later, when we were aged ten and thirteen and understood fully that paradise was elsewhere we were allowed small tours of the garden which were truly magnificent. It was during this time that my brother developed a taste for blossoming orchards and twisted, gnarled olive trees whose surfaces were no longer used exclusively to represent individual objects, but rather mirrored the internal mechanisms of his beautiful mind. Painting from memory, my brother always painted the face of his own despair never thinking for once that I might be in despair too. Attacks of hallucinations and aural delusions were, he explained to me, a consequence of external influences. Soon he started to paint long institutional corridors and iron barred windows – to be truthful he slaved away like a madman in an attempt to set me free from my debts and inadvertently caused me such pain.
All that I see now is an all-embracing, wild, blinding glow – the whole of nature in crazy convolutions in a raging frenzy against life. Until the last years of his life my brother had perfect eyesight – a meticulous attention to detail – now all that is gone and I am left fighting against his rage with nothing to my name and no gift to rely upon other than memory. When he hid all of his paintings in the cellar of his house he covered them over with old dust-sheets and they were not discovered by me until three months after his death. I have burned them all. In my madness, I am still writing to him, but he never replies. On my bedside table I have a vase of sunflowers and beside my bed an old battered chair.
‘Deformation as a definition of an object is a rare thing’ I can hear him say. ‘You can reduce to rubble yourself, go mad and commit sin, but love is enduring and money the root of all evil. The closeness of a family is not something that I am familiar with. I will write to you no more’.
Sensing another attack of madness he set a gun against his head and pulled the trigger.
Now I am alone and know how to look at myself at the end of a lonely life. In my existence and late fame I have betrayed my brother, my keeper and my friend by seeing nothing but ornamented plants scattered about my house like a small insignificant nirvana. I have nothing only letters to name him with and the memory of his wide brush-stroke applied to a pure white canvas tangled with his tales.
Catherine Corri: Demeter and the Pomegranate Seeds
As a child Demeter had promised to be sensible, but by the time the winged dragons had whirled her away to the sea-shore she was already calling for the sea-nymphs to come and play with her. Demeter knew that the sea-nymphs knew her and would keep her safe, and before long she could see their glistening faces and sea-green hair above the waterline calling her in. She waited for them to come to her, and did not think once of how her mother had told her to avoid dreaming of a magical land beside the seashore and stay at home instead to clean the house and cook bread for tea. Carrying beautiful shells, the sea-nymphs sat on the wet sand with Demeter threading a necklace together which they then hung around her neck. fficeffice" />
‘Stay here with us Demeter’, the sea-nymphs asked, but Demeter missed her mother and before the evening darkness fell she knew that she would have to go home.
All day her mother had been planting seeds in fields as large as you could ever imagine and had thought of Demeter often when the sky shone bright blue and the sun touched her skin with the tenderness of a child’s small hands. Nothing was growing these days and she worried how desolate the land had become with flowers dying and the grass and grain no longer coming to completion. There was a dark spell upon the land and she, a mother, could do nothing to banish it. Kneeling on the land she placed the last seed that she had on the ground when all of a sudden she was sure that she could hear Demeter calling her name. In a panic she threw her heavy and rusted trowel down and headed off home to find Demeter. When she reached the house there was no sign of Demeter. Pots and pans and clothes were strewn around the cottage and there was a distinct lack of the smell of bread cooking in the oven.
‘Now where can she be?’ Demeter’s mother cried. ‘Something has gone very wrong I must find my daughter’.
Knowing that Demeter loved the seashore she ran there as quickly as she could to find the faces of three wet sea-nymphs peeping over a wave.
‘Where is Demeter? Tell me you naughty sea-nymphs; have you enticed her under the sea again?’
Tossing their green ringlets impudently, the sea-nymphs told of how Demeter had left the shore to run along dry land and that they had not seen her since early in the day picking beautiful flowers from a large bush in the distance.
‘But there are no bushes growing in this land, you must be mistaken’.
‘Oh that can’t be true for we are sure she was picking flowers from a large bush and there was a man in a chariot with winged horses waiting on her’.
Lighting a torch, for it was now becoming dark, the sea-nymphs helped Demeter’s mother search the shore and all of the land for her daughter for hours and hours and after many days they still had not found Demeter and were becoming weary and tired. Having knocked on every door and searched through woods and fields nearby they returned to the shore once more and entered a cavern by the sea that the sea-nymphs knew was hid from human view.
‘The King has given her enchanted flowers’ the sea-nymphs said, ‘and taken her away for ever from this wasteland where nothing ever grows and the only sound to be heard the sound of the sea.’.
Stepping into the cavern Demeter’s mother and the sea-nymphs could see through a portal, a beautiful Kingdom and colours as myriad as a rainbow were set before their eyes as they walked slowly towards a light.
‘He has drowsed her with the aroma of poppies and taken her away from me with his magic,’ Demeter’s mother said in a low and sad voice. ‘Am I never to find her again?’
‘Or with the odour of a white Lily,’ the sea-nymphs added, hiding behind a craggy rock so as not to be seen.
The Kingdom was magnificent full of fauna and flora and food and jewels and as they ascended a lofty flight of white marble stairs they could see Demeter sitting on a throne with diamonds in her hair and a royal household of princes and princesses all about her waiting to do her bidding. Her mother cried softly at the sight of her daughter, and thought of ways that she could be with Demeter without causing alarm or frightening the sea-nymphs who did not like leaving the sea for the very reason that they had never been to the royal Kingdom before, but had heard that the King was a very powerful man and that he did not like sea-nymphs, not one little bit.
All of a sudden, from a distance, Demeter’s mother could see the King talking to Demeter and offering her food.
‘I have no appetite in the world unless it was a slice of bread of my mother’s own baking, or a little ripe fruit from her garden,’ she could hear Demeter telling the King.
‘That is impossible,’ the King bellowed. ‘Nothing grows outside of this Kingdom in which I am the King. That is why I have saved you, for you are my daughter too and I will not see you dull and dreary without food or magic, or without dreams as many and as splendid as you wish to have.’
Sending his servants to find fruits of all kinds from his Kingdom, the King was sure that he could tempt Demeter to eat from his table, but she was stubborn and wanted to be with her mother again.
He wanted to find her something sumptuous to eat, but as it was, the only fruit to be found was a pomegranate and it was so dried up that it was not worth eating.
Since there was nothing else, the King dressed the fruit up on a silver platter and carried it to Demeter leaving her to look at the fruit and hoping that she would take it. Demeter looked at the fruit with eagerness for she had not eaten for several days and wondered how it might taste.
‘At least I could smell it,’ said Demeter and lifted it to her nose, but then it somehow found its way into her mouth. Just as she was to bite down on the fruit the King and his servant Quick-Silver entered the room in a hurry talking of liberty and poor old souls that also had nothing to eat. Before they could see that she had been tempted, Demeter quickly took the pomegranate from her mouth and hid it behind her back.
‘My little Demeter, Quick-Silver tells me that I have caused many people sadness by bringing you to my Kingdom and many great misfortunes have befall innocent people by my detaining you here, and I know you think my palace dreary and dusky. I must have a heart made of iron for it is weeks since you have tasted food. You are free to go, my daughter. Quick-Silver will lead you home, to your mother and the land that you know’.
Jumping from her thrown, Demeter left the palace quickly for she was eager to see her mother again, but was warned by the King not to say anything about the fruit that was set on a silver platter for her.
Passing through the Kingdom and out of the great gateway, Demeter emerged with Quick-Silver upon the surface of the earth. Everywhere there was flowers blooming and growing and with every step of Demeter’s foot violets gushed up along the wayside. All along the land and in all the fields visible to the eye, grass and grain began to sprout luxurious and in abundance making up for months of barrenness.
Demeter’s mother had been steps ahead of her on her journey home, for as soon as she heard of her daughter’s freedom she made her way out of the King’s Kingdom carrying an enchanted torch that burned in her hand all the way to the front door4 of their cottage in the woods. But, as she walked towards the doorway of their little cottage Demeter’s mother noticed now that the flame had gone out.
‘What does this mean’, she said, ‘this torch is an enchanted torch and should burn forever? Did you taste any food while you were in the King’s palace?’ her mother asked.
‘Yes,’ Demeter replied. ‘They brought me a pomegranate this morning and I was tempted to bite it, and the instant I tasted it the King and Quick-Silver came to me and told me that I was freed. I did not swallow a morsel, but six of the pomegranate seeds remained in my mouth’
‘You silly girl, and all this splendour for your dreaming of magic and Kings, and palaces and flowers - those six seeds mean that you must spend half of the year with me and half of the year with that mischievous King, your head will be filled with nothing more that fairies and nymphs and sea-shells and diamonds. Whatever am I to do?’
Kissing her mother, Demeter placed the six pomegranate seeds on the kitchen table and sat down ton eat.
‘Have some bread mother. Things are not too bad, for I am home and I can wash and clean and bake for you. Let’s just be thankful that the King is not to keep me the whole year round’.
Great Fibs! by two very sharp students today! Thankyou!
Books can read themselves.
5 out of 200 plants are alive.
Children are really monkeys.
Cars have feelings too.
Emily's Jewels by Cath Corri
Emily’s Jewels.fficeffice" />
people say she’s crazy she’s got red diamonds on the sole of her shoes – now ain’t that just the way to calm your walking blues – to have red diamonds on the soles of your shoes?
Emily’s shoes are red and the diamonds on the soles of her shoes are shining iridescently crimson, bringing warmth and comfort our way. Her shoes are instantly recognizable as hers. There are no other shoes in this world with red diamonds on their soles. Red diamonds are extremely rare.
When she claimed paradise as her own nirvana and made it a space in which she became the moon-queen, larger than life and overwhelmingly present, she placed an unrelenting glow around us! Each diamond, you see, is a symbol of Emily’s life’s philosophies. There are seven diamonds in all. They symbolize Emily as, a Woman, a Daughter, a Mother, a Sister, a Friend, a Thinker, and a Leader. Emily is a life-force; a woman of strength and wisdom.
Although you may never have seen the light that shone from those red diamonds on the soles of her shoes, I know that you have felt the energy that Emily emitted in each and every step that she took throughout her life– an energy as vast and as roomy as a tidal wave that swept over us all making us different and new and better people. Her words were always moving things - never still and grounded - because Emily had the power and significance to change people – she was unutterably giving in that way – blessed with a capacity to talk straight talk and find her way around all of our worlds in how she used her words and how they used her. Emily lived in the creases and hollows of words and believed in them. It is in remembering her words that we will all find our residence and the meaning of home.
Emily was deeply philosophical.
Emily always thought of women and their children – of how to be a woman and give love, and of how these things mattered if life was to be navigated and tread upon with attention to detail. She thought often of all the places and times in which women lived and of how the good and bad things in their lives often made them strangers and exiles yet powerful and central to being able to walk in their own shoes no matter how shabby and worn. She knew that it is a person’s soul that gives them the light of life, and not merely their material being.
When you feel her breeze against your skin it means that she is thinking of you, for she is thoughtful and kind and always and forever will be a messenger of life. When she stood upon this little bit of spit and sand and stone that we call the earth she knew that paradise was hers, both in the here and now as well as the ever after. Emily knew how to live with soul! That’s why she is wearing red diamonds on the soles of her feet – they are a sign of the light of her soul and the power of her speech and of the imagination in its’ most profound moments of knowing and in its deepest moments of collapse.
Within the vibrancy and the depths of her character she knows that ‘he’ makes the sign of a tea-spoon while she makes the sign of a wave - the poor boy combs his hair and puts on aftershave - to compensate for his ordinary shoes!
She is walking around us now and her red shoes are alight from the glow of the red diamonds that are on the soles of her shoes …………………… no journey has en end only a beginning she told me once. When the moon is shining you will see my face in the shadows of its afterglow …… and see my red lips, tinged by the red diamonds I am wearing on the soles of my shoes and the moonlight’s pink and silver white hues …… enchantingly beautiful ….. just like me.
My jewels will show you where my footsteps are on a dark night when you lost and alone. See, there they are …….. dancing through the night into the break of a new day, fantastically bringing me to life! There I go ………..
Joe: Fishing with Dad
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The suns rays blitzed our reddening bodies: leaving us with glowing arms and foreheads. The rods, each cast out, were quivering with the strong undercurrent dragging our weights across the dusty, craggy sea floor. Rarely, a large splash would echo throughout McLeod’s Bay: a 40lb Kingfish snapping at a garfish, guilty of being in the Kingfish’ territory. The lifeless pilchard which hung on my black magic hook attracted the gleaming red body of the Snapper. Suddenly, the line cracked into action, my rod giving a sudden jolt of life. I battled with the fish. For every time I would reel, it would take the same line back out. I twisted the tension, so as the line would not slip, and slowly began to reel in. I brought the gleaming fish to the surface. Blood was crashing throughout my system; my heart was smashing against my rib cage; my knees were trembling-
The fish made a sudden dart for the rock pools which silently watched beneath our pier. I saw the flashing body head into a dark underwater cave, my line tighter than ever. Suddenly, my dream shattered. The line softened- the tension gone. I pulled my rod up slowly reeling in. Blood rushing to my head. The hook and weight was gone. My heart sank. My first bite in 5 hours.
John Keats By Cath Goodwin
I haven't always read books myself, but I have read poetry and liked it. John Keats is my favourite poet. He died when he was young of T.B. When I am in despair I read his works and ponder on the meaning of life again. Since my mother's death the voyage has been hard but I am getting there with a little help from my friends, some dead poets and some dead women writers and this is what I think. le="">Death as poetry ..... Are there so violent passions in celestial minds? I guess so! I imagine myself as a Romantic person, a poet myself filled to the brim with melancholy - a pantheist drowning in the image of flowers and martyrs, fairies and angels. What's wrong with that? It helps me. 
Death is a man's gaze looking down on a woman's body. By Cath Goodwin
It is 1957.  Once upon a long time ago a tall man with a broad Irish accent is stood at the head of his wife's bed. On the window-sill sits a small grey dove and small gusts of air are attempting to cool the room with their little outbursts of movement. Three men, all doctors, are attending the man's wife. She is distressed. She is twenty-six weeks pregnant and there is a small face trying to emerge from her body far too earlier than expected. On the bedside cabinet, there is a card and flowers. The flowers are red gladioli and they are beautiful. The verse in the card reads, 'With Love, get Better Soon'. It is signed by a man named James. The picture on the card is a bird, white and large and in full flight. There is a dragon-fly resting on the curtains that surround this scene. Somebody, with a very small voice, is telling a fireside tale: It is warm where I am and I am surrounded by red and silver balloons. Where I am feels still and quiet but I can feel a storm approaching. Something is pushing me towards dry land. I am inside a cave and there is water everywhere, and I am thirsty but there is not a drop to drink. I can hear thunder and noises that I am too weak to distinguish. I do not want to drown. I can see bright lights and my eyes are hurting. Colours of green and white are flooding my eyes and I can feel myself drifting outwards towards a tight black edifice. My face is entering an unknown place and my skin feels mutable. I can't breathe! I can see my birth and I am struggling. Men with pit-helmits on are looking at me from the peripheries of my cave. Their faces are out of shape and large. I can see lots of movement. White sheets are being thrown across my mother's body as they are asking her to push. Mother does not own her body. It has been taken away from her. It belongs to the men in white coats. Her skin is stretching and moving creating a storm. There is an assault taking place on the elastic and malleable edges of her skin. Caves of ice are surrounding me and I am cold and wet. She has become a rite of passage for me, but I can't find my way out. The storm is upon her and she is trying to keep me safe. She is too weak to fight it and she is frightened. Why will the men in white coats not leave her alone? They are shining lights from their head upon her skin and the room is green and black. Her waters have broken and she can hear me crying as she lets go of herself. James is holding her hand and comforting her. She can feel my skin touching hers and knows that she is no longer one, but two. The men take me and place her on her breast. I can't find anything to drink! Everything is black. James, the man who is crying, is asked to leave the room. When he re-enters it he is not alone. A nurse and a doctor are with him. His baby has been taken away from his wife, and is lying in a cold crib in the corner of the room. As he approaches his wife's bed, he is immobile with fear. She is quiet and still and a faint mist of what looks like marine spray is covering her face and hair. She is a statue made of stone. In the corner of the room, Catherine lies still and quiet waiting for her mother. Paddles are attached to her small and frail body and the red light monster that usually bleep, bleep, bleeps has been switched off. They have both entered the caves of ice. In Catherine's hand, there is a small pearl button from her mother's night-gown. James takes a picture of them both. Mother and child are dead. 
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