Free Pond: Stories by Claire-Louise Bennett

depended upon the provision of warmth and nourishment and so practically all of her time was taken up with essential tasks like chopping wood, planting potatoes, milking the cow, repairing broken places and things, haymaking, finding berries—those kinds of tasks—and at some point I thought perhaps everything would be absolutely fine and she would just keep going. But this idea was only a brief fantasy really because in fact all the things she relied upon were finite and once they expired there would be no way of replacingor substituting them. Once all the bullets had been spent there would be no more deer meat, once the cow had died there would be no more milk and butter, once the candles were gone there would be no more light, and, once the matches were all burnt out, well there would be nothing really. And that is why she sat down with the remaining boxes, one afternoon, and counted all the matches out, carefully, one by one.
    Paper, too, was also in limited supply, and in fact it seems she ran out of paper before any of the aforementioned necessities were used up and so the record of her experience ends before things get really severe and insurmountable for her. I think it rather shrewd of the author to leave a question over the precise circumstances of the woman’s dying for the reason that it seems to me the woman’s death wouldn’t just have been about starving from hunger or freezing from cold, that probably it was about something much more, which cannot very well be put into such straightforward equations. Since her death is not dealt with in the book the only place it can occur is in my head, and I feel as though something is still haunting me or even that I am still haunting something, which means the book carries on beyond where it ends, and no doubt this was the author’s absolute wish. It makes sense to suppose that since the underpinning of her existence had been totally reconfigured then death too would itself be an unexampled event; this was the proposition that slowly turned over and over in my thoughts as I stood on one leg in the bathroom yesterday evening, neatly clipping toenails into the sink. What exactly, I wondered, would death entail for her and how on earth could anyone even try to represent it? The walls and mirrors and the window were wet with condensation, and I was feeling really pampered and refreshed and quite safe when the images began to arrive. Firstof all I saw her melting quickly like the snow in cartoons, and then I saw her snapped up by the air and propelled as vapour fast through the spaces between the evergreen trees, then I heard her take a breath and hold it until it blasted her into little lines of fractured hoarfrost, then I heard her lie down on the real snow and the snow creaked and the blood that progressed through it shone red all around her settled body, then I saw the crows rise up from out the highest branches and the deer lifted their chins and their eyes were completely black. I turned on the cold tap and watched the water swish away my surplus and I opened the window and didn’t move. If we have lost the knack of living, I thought, it is a safe bet to presume we have forfeited the magic of dying.
    Clearly, my predicament with the cooker is not quite as dire as those redoubling aggravations that confronted the last woman left in the world, at the same time, once the final control knob splits and becomes useless, I will have no way at all of turning on any part of my mini-kitchen and so every known method of cooking food will be unavailable from that moment on. I have never had too much difficulty foreseeing impending setbacks and I have quite often identified the steps by which an oncoming obstacle might be avoided, yet it is a very rare occasion indeed when I’ve channelled any of this awareness into direct action and thereby altered the course of events so that they might progress more favourably. However, as I said, inspired perhaps by the book I’d just