Heaviness

When things got burnt, they got lighter. This was a rule she had been told, because when things got burnt, they lost something of them, something of their essence that was given up to the air and spread like an invisible fog around the area on the one side of the river because the winds refused to carry it to the other side, refused even to wet it by flushing it as much as an inch across the water.

She was burning something, burning it lighter. The dress had been her robe for birthing, bleeding, marrying and mourning. Now it was itself dying, curling into specks as it lessened towards nothingness. The burnt flecks twisted and dragged like flames themselves, whirlwinding around her until the air in her vicinity grew denser as the dress released its substance and every breath was more difficult and every breath was tarred with the taste of the past that had gone burning, burning flimsier with every caustic slurp of the fire, and with every breath she became melted into the heaviness she had released until, when the fire subsided, she could not move.

When the dark came and went and she was found in the morning, protected from the cold by the inheritance of her heaviness, there was no wind and they could not move her. The accretions of the past were evidently not to be so peremptorily swept aside.

Four fishermen, runners up from the wrestling, still in their temporary states of disgrace, almost exhausted from their exertions but still just standing, hoisted her to the fish-stink of their shoulders, carted her to the river and let her float on the tide towards her parents’ house, grabbing the sole remaining hour before the tide turned. They moved as swiftly as they were able down the bank to outpace her, to outstrip her bulky progress, floating as easily as the weed-barge through the water hyacinth back to the small harbour of her parental homestead.

When they picked her up, every scrap of clothing impregnated with water, she was no heavier. It was as if it had been decided what her weight would henceforth be, and no event could lighten her or weigh her down any further.

Her father’s hands were no longer heavy enough to move her. She lay for a week, neither feeding nor excreting, on the floor, among the straying frogs and starving voles, sleeping and waking at exact intervals throughout the night and the day. Then she rose. It was as if she could no longer feel her heaviness, because a compensating strength had somehow eased into her body during the week of her immobility. Nobody else was around. She sat up, yawned, walked to the kitchen, lifted the loaf and the knife, sliced a portion off towards her chest and devoured every crumb of it, no more and no less daintily than before. She walked to the latrine-bush, squatted and poured forth a week’s worth of accrued poison. She stood up, feeling no lighter, and made her way to the river. Footprints as deep as skillets marked her passing.

From then on, her arrival was announced by a force field of compressed presence. They could feel her an hour before she became audible. They could hear her an hour before she became visible. Some hid from her, some confronted her, others ignored her. In the course of a day, she had transferred herself from obscurity to celebrity. The ground trembled, the cliffs wavered, the ears of corn hesitated in several directions.

But the branches of the thorn bushes did not get splayed away by the vibration, but rather bent towards her, as if attracted to the heaviness with which she was imbued. Birds around her grew exhausted by the adjacent density of the atmosphere. They were struggled, air-wrestled, to the ground.

She carried her increased weight with increased pride, like the signs that had been named “stigmata “ by the people across the river. Her agility had not been jeopardised, but her environment, pounded by her pressure, presented a sliding resistance that was an impediment to every step. She had not increased in size, but had outgrown her world.

It had to be exile, then. Exile was the allotment of her family; they had thrust an expertise in exile upon themselves by their actions. She embraced exile from the security of her newfound, heavy invulnerability. She took water, firewood, tinder-strikers, grain and a bake-stone with her to the desert. She walked the straight line, effortless and unsparing, towards the morning sun. There were no farewells required. There were none given.