Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

“I think it’s too wet,” he says.

“You useless, useless little bitch,” she says.

“I’m sorry.”

“ Sorry . You’re sorry? You have to be a hell of a lot more than sorry.” Turtle thinks, he doesn’t know how to do this and he needs you. If you cannot see that, you are useless to him and to yourself. If you cannot tell him, cannot explain it to him. She lies shivering in the sand.

“Listen,” she says. “Jacob, you have to do this. No choice, Jacob.”

“I’m trying,” he says.

“‘I’m trying,’” she bleats back at him.

What am I doing? she thinks nightmarishly.

“Do you suck this badly at your entire life, or is it only the important things?”

“I think, like you said, it may be too wet.”

She thinks, he’s right. Of course he’s right. She thinks, you need to coach him. She says, “Your tools aren’t the problem. Being a useless piece of shit—that’s the problem.”

“Turtle. I got to tell you, it doesn’t look like it’s going to work. It’s not just that the wet keeps it from making coals. It’s like, because the wood is wet, it crumbles before you can get enough friction.”

“It sounds,” she says, “like you’re gonna have to stop fucking it up.”

She thinks, what is wrong with you? She lies on the cold sand and responses come to her and she throttles them down, thinking, you have to do this and you have to do this carefully. She thinks, this one is on you, it really is on you, you have to tell him something and it has to be the right thing and it might save your life. She says, “One time, my daddy had me do pull-ups off the rafter and he—” Her voice fails her, hitches, she doesn’t know what to say, can’t believe she’s saying he—what? She doesn’t know herself. She says, “He put that knife between my legs. So that if I fell from the rafter—” Again, she doesn’t know, if she fell from the rafter what . “And he— He—” There is a horror, almost a disbelief in the telling, like she can’t believe she’s doing it, as if she can’t believe it’s even possible to talk about it. “And he, he asked me to do pull-ups, and I did them. You reach a point where the next pull-up hurts so bad . You’d think you could do pull-ups until you just couldn’t anymore. You wouldn’t have to make yourself do pull-ups. Because, well, there’s a knife between your legs. But that’s not how it is. Every pull-up is still a choice, and to do them, it takes discipline and it takes courage. You think, I don’t have to do this pull-up. You want to give up. And you start thinking maybe it’s a good idea, because the pain of holding on to the rafter becomes greater than the threat of death. Because then it wouldn’t hurt anymore. Because holding steady is—is— There is this bad, really bad , sense of uncertainty, an uncertainty so painful, so asshole-clenching, that it becomes— It’s an awful thing to say, but it’s easier to let go and be split in fucking half than it is to try and hold on, suffering and not knowing what is going to happen. That’s courage. Taking your own fucking life in your own fucking hands when that is the hardest thing you can do. No one thinks of it. Everybody thinks they’d do the right thing, but that’s not true. They don’t understand how scary it is. How hard it is. No one understands unless they’ve been there. We’re there now, Jacob, and you’re gonna do the right thing despite the fear and despite the hurt.”

He is listening to her, sawing carefully back and forth, the bow turning the spindle.

“Hold on to it,” she says.

He is silent, breathing in time to the steady working of the bow, back and forth. She can hear from his breathing how exhausted he is. His right hand works forward and back while his left bears steadily down on the handboard. She watches him for a long time. She is cut loose, adrift in her mind. She thinks, stay awake. Stay awake. She feels staked to the sand. The waves rise and retreat on the beach, and despite herself, and despite the cold eating into her bones, she falls asleep, and wakes feeling herself half dead, the moon cresting the island, the light crept up from the waterline like a pale tide, crept over her, and not yet climbed onto Jacob, who crouches in the dark. The knife, stuck in the sand, casts a long shadow. She can hear, above the ocean’s swish and grind, a kind of panting susurration in Jacob’s breathing, and she realizes that he is whispering, come on, come on , over and over, and that the raggedness of his intonation matches his breathing and matches the working of the bow. An orange glow expands and retreats with the working of the spindle and lights him from beneath, his whole body bent with the power of his will. Blood drips from the points of his hair, and the blood-slick hollows and panes of his face catch the cinder’s nascent light. Turtle, looking deep into these shadowed features, finds a color, a red that is as dark as black, like the afterimage of a color. She has never seen another person this way, and has no words for it. It’s as if he has quenched down within himself every doubt, filled his mind only with the possibility of fire, the spindle smoking in the socket, and glowing orange powder falling from the socket’s notch into the tinder. Turtle’s guts seize with anticipation.

Then, with a crack, the wooden bow breaks and Jacob’s susurration changes to a no, no, no, and he throws aside the broken bow and takes the spindle in two open palms and rolls it, forward and back, breathing but not saying, come on baby, come on baby, and then she sees what he sees: the tinder has begun to smolder. He tosses the spindle aside, takes up a wad of smoldering grass and lint and he turns it over, raising it into the cold air of the cove. The glow ekes across the sand, enclosing the both of them in its burbling red light, Jacob in the privacy of utter preoccupation, stooped over the tinder and blowing it into life, and Turtle lying with her hands trapped in her armpits. There is a moment where she knows that the tinder will catch and quicken to flame, and she opens her mouth in painful excitement, thinking, oh my god, oh my god, and then, in the wet ocean air, the tinder bleeds out to dull orange, the coals attenuated along the lint, smoking and going white, and then the fire dies. Jacob holds the dead tinder cupped in his hands, rocked back onto his butt in astonishment, and she draws him toward herself and takes him in her arms, and she sinks her good fingers into his flesh, digging into him, and he allows her to hold him, and they wait out the cold night this way.

Turtle wakes with water beaded on her eyelashes. She blinks it away and sits up from her wallow of cold sand. Her back throbs, swollen and sick-feeling. Her hands are scabbed to her shirt. Everything is swallowed in fog. She can hear the waves netting the cobbles in and hauling them out again, and she can make out the dark line of the tide and nothing else. There is no sun, only a diffuse gray light, the sand slick and black except for the sand dollars. The dew condenses on the leaning cliff face above them and drips steadily around them. Turtle’s hair is wet with it.

She climbs up to the island’s top. The weeds are frosted with dew. She lays herself facedown in the dewy grass and it wets her skin. Shivering and shaking, she brings her dry mouth to the grass stalks and sucks the moisture from the blades. The water is delicious. She rolls over onto her back in the cold wet grass. “Jacob!” she croaks. “Jacob!” Her voice will not carry, so she crawls to the island’s edge and croaks down at him until he wakes, looking wildly around before he looks up. She grins for him. Blood from her lips runs down her chin.