Claire-Louise Bennett: Pond: Stories

She closed the earth over the green papers, packing it down with her fists, more of a kneading action than a pummelling so that she became quite entranced. Entranced by the movement, by the impressions her knuckles made, and by the way she felt when she pressed down. Love can be surprising. She couldn’t locate where that idea had come from, it didn’t originate from anywhere inside her. But it pleased her, and she leaned right into her fists and pushed hard against the ground. Love can be surprising, she said, enjoying an unforeseen light-heartedness. And then, modifying the mantra slightly, she put her skin, eyes, and lips close to her curled and muddied fingers and whispered into them: ‘Love must be surprising.’

She swung her boots by the laces and hit them off the wall, loosening neat wedges of dirt. Her mother opened an upstairs window with a gloved hand and called down to her, but she ignored her mother, loathed the boots, and flickered soundlessly round to the back of the house, her mother’s voice chiming like uncertain fragments touching one against another in the breeze.

A red apple sat up on the lawn. Her brother stood at a distance from it, clattering garden snails together in his left hand which he lobbed one by one with his right, underarm, into the sky, with the aim of hitting them off the apple on their spiralling descent. He threw a snail at his sister. She peered up at it twisting through the air, issued a mordant ow sound as it landed several feet away, and dropped her eyes to fix on the well-trained apple. The stupid apple. Leave it, he said. She stayed still and continued to frown at the apple. The stupid, stupid, apple.

She only imagined swooping down upon the apple, snatching it up in a vexed hand and hurling it against the side of the house. She only imagined the sound of its pips rattling, and the awful flat sound it makes when it hits the wall and falls apart. She only imagined these things but conceded, nonetheless, that her imaginings had to become more cautious, more subtle, perhaps, now that the blank card had come.

After a short time there was a shift — the apple held her in its fluent green gaze as all thoughts and awarenesses in her began to softly trickle out across the garden. The windowpane flinched beneath its white sash. And then, of course, it was time for them both to go indoors and wash their hands.

Morning stands on its high swing and waits, shunting the dirt back and forth beneath its nails with a bare piece of card.