Free The Burial by Courtney Collins Page B

launch herself out of bed when she heard the door of her room open. Her skin bristled as she saw the silhouette of the old man moving towards her.
    She lay perfectly still as he stood squarely over her. And then her hand rose quietly in the dark and even her fist hitting his jaw was quiet and her legs swinging out. It was the sound of his head hitting the chair that finally made an awful crunching.
    She did not care what damage she had done. She shut the door behind her and moved into the kitchen, collecting from the cupboards and the drawers a knife, a gun, a packet of matches, apples, the old woman’s coat, the old woman’s boots. The feeling of escape was familiar and she did not care to feel it again and so soon.
    She set everything on a tablecloth and then bundled it up. She was tying it to her waist when she noticed the old woman standing in front of the fire.
    Go , the old woman said.
    Jessie pushed out into the yard and up to the stable. She mounted Houdini and rode him out. She rode up the steep slope and did not look back. She could not tear straight up the mountain in the dark so she zigzagged as far and as fast as she could. The bundle loosened on her waist and she wrestled with it as she rode, tying it tighter, prizing all of its stolen contents. She steered Houdini by his mane and felt a strength pulsing through her arms and across her chest, as if her body was remembering itself as she rode.
    As soon as the sun tipped the horizon she tore up the slope. It was only when she reached a solid ridge that she dared to look back down into the valley.
    There was no sign of any human presence and she could not see the old woman and the old man’s cottage or any other hut. Below were empty fields but for clusters of trees and the river. The river stretched south and wound its way across cleared paddocks, a measure of how far she had come.

THE EARTH, AS I can feel it, is pressed together at points and ruptured in parts. And so events seem to fold into each other, like burial and birth. It’s not like the smooth and undulating beauty of a ribbon streaming out. No. The earth buckles with the stories it holds of all those who have cried and all those who have croaked.
    The dying began in 1903 when my mother was nine and then it happened again in 1904 when she was ten. No dream or nightmare could have prepared her.
    Life until then was riding horses in and around The Woods and climbing trees and at night lying in her bed and sending out love from each side of the single chalk line that divided her. The horses were real and so were the trees but the chalk line was a thing in her head though she saw it clearly enough, running over her body and over the bed, and she slept knowing that equal parts of her were apportioned to the two people she loved most, her father and Mrs Peel.
    They lived in Mrs Peel’s house—Septimus, Aoife and the five children. As a single man, Septimus had boarded with the widow, Mrs Peel, and kept her gardens and set up his blacksmith business in her back shed. She welcomed Septimus’s burgeoning family and became like a grandmother to them, midwifing each one of them.
    Jessie did not know how, as adults, they divided their love between five children but she felt their devotion wholly: Mrs Peel performing all of the duties under the sun, seeming to overflow with a bottomless well of devotion, and Septimus working every day from his shed to feed and clothe them. Each afternoon he would take a break from his work to lead a procession into the forest, a procession of children running after imaginary creatures and collecting pine cones or taking turns at riding on their father’s shoulders.
    Through all of it, Aoife slept. Her room was a fortress and the children were forbidden from knocking on the door or entering. It seemed to Jessie that her mother had slept for most of her life and when she did appear, pale and tall and drifting around the kitchen, she was always groggy or