Free Walking to the Moon by Kate Cole-Adams

to homes. Perhaps this fire was not even noted or reported on.
    The road disappears behind me as I round the first bend, and continues ahead in a shallow, steady incline. As I walk, my hip bones rub through my skin against the strap of the pack. I am losing my plumpness. And for all the years of hoping for this lessening, I now feel less than, unsatisfactory. After about ten minutes I stop and take off my pack, sit down on the edge of the road. For a moment all I can hear is myself, my breath, already pushing a little at my chest, and my heart.
    â€˜Jess, wake up.’ It is a whisper, just a whisper, and I cannot tell who is speaking.
    I wonder now about the specialist from town. It annoys me, the way he talked about my coma. ‘Your coma,’ he said. My coma: as if I were responsible for it, as if it belonged to me, rather than the other way around. As if, too, there were a clear line between what was me and what was it: my coma; as if we were separate.
    â€˜Tell me about your coma,’ said the specialist’s colleague (he was fiftyish and handsome, with a complacent, boyish face and dry patches at the corners of his mouth where he had forgotten to moisturise); and then, when I continued to stare at him, unresponsive, he tried a different approach. ‘Let me recast the question,’ he said. ‘How, when you woke up, did you know that you were awake?’ He looked pleased with himself.
    â€˜I was awake because I wasn’t asleep,’ I said evenly, before Hil arrived and made them leave.
    We both knew it was not an answer; I could see him writing on his clipboard as he walked to the door, but what was I supposed to say? A coma has an inside and an outside, and whichever side you find yourself on, even fleetingly, you cannot grasp the other? I was awake because I was on the outside of the coma and I couldn’t get back. Even if I’d wanted to. Even though I’d wanted to.
    I could hardly tell him that. He would have been delighted.
    Besides which, it was only partly true. A better question might have been, what did my coma feel like, or how did I feel about my coma. And even then I could not have told him. It changes all the time. But when I think about my coma now, what comes to me, or what rises in me, or around me, is a feeling that I cannot name, which might be grief or might be joy, or fullness, or emptiness. I can taste it now, pooled in the back of my throat. An exquisite tender ache. Everything else is the casing. Muscle, rock, shell. Everything else is just layers.
    That is how I feel about my coma.
    Ten-twenty-five and already everything feels wrong: the blackened trees; my legs, pasty where they protrude from the shorts, hairs half-grown and spiky, calves already pink despite the sun block. Thin-skinned, Michael said, a blusher. As a child, an adolescent, the mottled tide rising up my neck, chin, cheeks, prickling my scalp. Even the tiniest of slights. Even a thought. And everyone then able to see for themselves. In winter I prefer high-necked jumpers. And even in summer, even in this heat, I like to be covered. I hide my chest and the base of my throat. My heart settles gradually, and with it my breathing. I open my water bottle and swallow.
    You can turn back: I say the words so I can hear them in my head. I can turn back. I can catch a cab back to the station. And from there a train. In two hours I can be home. (But where is home?) I can ring Hil. She will meet me at Central. I can take it from there, make a plan; we can talk it through, think it over, I can sleep on it. Whatever. I squat a little way from the path and watch the piss spurt, feel the strain in my thighs, the new grass sharp against my buttocks. Black trees and thin blue sky. I pull the pack on and continue.
    Underneath the stick trees the black ground is striped with brilliant green, blades and locks and tresses of green, grasses so fine you could thread them through a needle, and wider-leaved, saw-edged