The Moving Finger

Note on Sensitive Content: This story touches on themes of mental health, personal trauma, substance abuse, and suicide. This is not intended for shock value or to recklacely produce drama, but to express the importance of healthy relationships, support, and forgiveness of self.

On the ceiling, there was a circle of peeling plaster. It was crusted and cracked, careworn and forgotten.

If she really thought about it, Letthe would come to the reasonable conclusion that there had once been a vent there, that it had been filled in haphazardly, and the shoddy work was beginning to show, but the point is, she didn’t.

Letthe didn’t think, she just remembered.

So, Letthe noticed the peeling circle of plaster and didn’t think about what it was, or where it came from, or how it had come to be, and then she poisoned herself just a little bit more.

If she thought about it, Letthe might have realised that the memories themselves were at the core of the sadness she was trying to obliterate. She would be happier, wouldn’t she, if she chose to forget instead? Wouldn’t she prefer to live in the world? Really live? Not this, slumping against the kitchen wall, draped in an old sweatshirt, covered in grime and dirty hand prints, throat burning with the sickly sweet stink of cheap whiskey and prescription pills.

There were those who drank to drown their sorrows. Letthe drank to drown in them.

When she had friends, they would tell her, as though they were handing her a secret that philosophers had been keeping under wraps for millennia, “You just need to learn to take the good with the bad, you know?”

They should have tried maladaptive schema. Her therapists, when she’d been desperate enough to waste her time in therapy, had loved that one. More clinical, less cliché, and no more insightful.

The problem is it assumes everyone gets the same crumb ratio. Letthe’s a historic ratio was roughly one happy crumb to one bullshit biscuit.

If you asked her why she chose to think this way, to live this way, she would say, without having to think about it, “The Devil you know…”

If you could go back in time, and erase one thing from your past, what would it be?

I once brought a torn page of an adult magazine on a school camp. A teacher found it when someone stole my bag and left it in a tree.

How else could they know whose bag it was if they didn’t look inside, past the wallet sitting on top with my ID inside, past all the clothes, down to the very bottom of the bag, in the toe of my sneaker sitting in a small case of their own, with its own little zipper.

The torn page was tame, but the school was catholic. I should have been expelled. Luckily, the right teacher found it, and Mr. H took the ridiculous circumstances into account. I walked away with a one-week suspension.

In that week, I remodeled our living room with my dad. We selected slate tiles over McDonald’s in a quiet mid-week food court, and I learned to use a tile saw.

A tile saw uses a steady flow of liquid for lubrication as it gouges deep wounds into the brittle stone tiles. I took the pieces it left behind and stuck them together to build a feature wall.

It’s hard to know if I would choose to leave the torn page from an adult magazine at home if I could. I’ve never been more embarrassed and the silence of that first night back from camp was worse than every beating I’d ever received in my whole life up to that point.

I was an unwelcome stranger, standing where their little boy used to be.

Frankly, it ended my childhood.

Then again, that feature wall still stands, and in spite of everything, building it was one of the last good memories I have of my dad.

Flecks of plaster drifted like dandruff down upon Letthe’s shoulders. She brushed them off, taking another heavy drag from the glass of brown in her left hand, then a heavier pull from the hand-rolled unfiltered cigarette in her right. The alcohol went down one pipe, the tarry smoke went down another and, staring up into that decaying circle of plaster, Letthe fell into remembering.

She had also once brought something on a school camp she wasn’t meant to. We’re alike in that way.

She was eleven, pulled back in time, to a grey-skied morning in the dying days of winter where she would be asked to kayak the whole day down a long river. It was cold and windy. Her teachers and the instructors stared out at the white caps rushing and barreling over the water’s surface, and sharing covert looks with each other, knowing they had no business dragging these children out into it.

Letthe had brought her pet mouse, Angelina, to keep her company in the night, camping along the shore.

It had taken effort and cunning, running back into the house as her parents rushed her out the house, running late to make the drop off at the bus. As the car started reversing out the driveway, her mum turned around to find Letthe shivering in the backseat without a jumper.

Letthe ran back inside, taking Angelina out of her cage and hiding her in the hood, and had to ignore the constant scratching and nibbling all to school, then from school to the campgrounds on the bus.

She knew she couldn’t keep Angelina with her while she kayaked. What if Angelina tried to swim away? Letthe hid her in a small bag near the top of her dry sack instead.

A dry sack works by folding the top down three times and clipping the sides together to create a water-resistant seal.

Letthe folded hers twice, leaving space for Angelina.

The Instructor brought them together beside the bus before they left the main camp to head to the river. He told them that, instead of putting their own bags in the bus, they would be putting someone else’s in. This step, he told them, would insure that no one’s belongings would be left behind.

Incidentally, this is how my bag ended up in the tree.

Letthe felt helpless. She did her job and took a nearby bag and placed it gently into the luggage compartment of the bus, and then watched in horror as Patrick Walding raised his hand to alert the instructor that the bag he’d taken had not been folded right.

The kayaking instructor waded through the crowd, took Letthe’s bag, unclipped it, then folded it, roughly, one more time, compacting the sack as much as he could, before clipping it back together.

The instructor congratulated Patrick for being so perceptive and Letthe told herself she had only imagined the crunch, or the squeak when Patrick tossed the dry sack roughly into the luggage compartment.

Letthe remembered the guilt she felt when, later, her kayak capsized and her dry sack fell beneath the waves, never to be found. She remembered the embarrassment of crying inconsolably all the way back to camp, and then, non-stop, until a kind teacher drove her back home, alone, on the bus.

Letthe’s mum sat beside her on the couch that night, in the lounge, in front of the feature wall, where Letthe had been since the moment she’d gotten home. “Someone heard you crying from upstairs, Honey. Sweet Angelina and just couldn’t bare it.”

Letthe remembered the surreal sensation of the mouse’s tiny claws prickling the skin of her palm as her mother placed Angelina into her hands.

Her mum found the cage, with it’s lid open, the mouse having escaped that morning. She’d planned for it to serve as a lesson in responsibility, until the teacher called to tell her Letthe would be coming home. She could hear Letthe in the background, and left immediately for the pet store.

Letthe remembered hesitating, staring at the white mouse, identical to Angelina, but for the tip of its tail. “Poor Angelina,” she said. “I’m here now.”

It was the truth and it was utterly the wrong thing to say.

They never told her what had happened to the real Angelina. Neither did Letthe. There was no taking it back. There was no taking any of it back.

She spent the next three and a half years loving that mouse as best she could, calling it Angelina when her parents were around, and Jacqueline when they weren’t, and feeling sick to her stomach the whole time.

She wondered whether, however she had died, Angelina had thought it was Letthe doing it, doing it on purpose, killing her.

Constantly, Letthe envisioned Angelina feeling the world close in around her, compacting, until her tiny body could no longer hold itself in, until she burst, or her panic as the cold water slowly filled the sack that was only water-resistant.

But that wasn’t how it went this time.

This time, Letthe looked down between her legs and saw her dry-sack, still on board, still done up wrong. The waves were less choppy, and the wind, warmer than she remembered, was at her back, gently pushing her forward.

She made camp that night, sneaking bits of sandy spaghetti bolognese behind her head to Angelina sitting happily in her hood.

She went home with the rest of the class, sitting on her own, not alone, enjoying the constant scratching and nibbling.

When she reached her room, Jacqueline was waiting for her. Letthe lowered Angelina into the tank and watched with delight as the two immediately fell into play.

When Letthe fessed up to her parents, her dad said, smiling, “Well, if they’re happy,” and the left it at that, and forgot the whole thing happened.

And Letthe really tried to do the same.

At first it was easy. She watched them play, rolling around in the ribbons of news paper at the bottom of the tank, cuddling for warmth, then lying with only their tails touching, as the warm days of spring took over.

But soon, she couldn’t help but hear a crunch, whenever she looked at Angelina, and she couldn’t look at Jacqueline without a sense of soul-wrenching guilt.

This wasn’t right. She knew it as intensely as she longed for it to be right, but it wasn’t.

For weeks, she tried not to think about it. She’d watch them play. She’d do her homework. She’d eat dinner with her parents, and she’d tell them about her day, always leaving out this unshiftable certainty that this was all wrong. For weeks, and for months.

For three and a half years, Letthe tried to love her mice, tried to love her life the way it was, her parents who loved her, who didn’t drift from her as sorrow infested her like so many termites, eating away at the solid structure of herself, who didn’t drift apart from each other under the strain of it, who didn’t fight tooth and nail over who would have her, as they did the house she had loved so much.

Letthe knew what she had done, though it had never really happened. She had crushed Angelina to death, or drowned her, whichever it was, because Angelina would never have left the cage if not for her.

Letthe had watched the bright yellow dry-sack vanish beneath the waves, had cried inconsolably, had lived with secret guilt as it consumed her, had lived through a crumbling family, and dropping out of school, drifting from city to city, bed to bed, sometimes the couch, or the floor, sometimes not even that, and a thousand-thousand worse things.

She remembered forcing herself to remember what she had done, eating bullshit biscuit after bullshit biscuit, and reminding herself of the kind of person you had to be to allow all of this to happen to you.

That was who she was. She could no more change that than suck the ink like snake’s venom from the tattoo on her forearm.

I have a tattoo written in ink across my forearm. Letthe and I, we’re alike in that way.

I think it’s from a poem. It’s only one line and I don’t know who wrote it, and, honestly, I’m not sure I want to.

I came upon it on the forearm of a girl I met once beneath a tree at a quarter to two at night in small inner-city park. Her hair was short, but twisted. It hung in front of her face, down-turned, beautiful, serene.

She was pale and she wore clothes that might have kept her warm on spring evening, but this was the dead of night, in the dying days of winter.

I’m not sure what I was doing there. Sometimes, I think I was there just to find her. Unable to help. Too late to save. Just to find her.

Someone had run off with the needle that had taken her, probably the same someone who had given it to her in the first place.

I don’t blame them for running away.

I do hope they regret it.

Her arm hung out-turned at her side. Liquid dribbled from the hole in her skin where she had tried to cut away brittle parts of herself and in the soft flesh of her slender arm were the words I now wear upon my skin too.

In this way, at least, I managed to save some part of her.

“I will love myself despite the ease with which I lean towards the opposite.”

On the ceiling, there is a circle of peeling plaster. It had once been a vent, but the previous owner had remodeled. It was cracked around the edges, flakes falling in a slow, gentle drift to the floor.

In spite of this, it held. It holds.

In fact, it wasn’t plaster peeling away at all, just paint. The most surface layer.

The owner had only a tile saw to cut with and it seemed to have done a good enough job. They’d started with a square piece of plasterboard and they had ended up with a circle. It fit, even if it was a bit damp.

On the floor, covered in a feather-light layer of paint, not plaster, Letthe lay slumped, careworn and forgotten, against the kitchen wall.

She is a one-woman army, outfitted with blended whiskey, hand-rolled unfiltered cigarettes, and the spent cartridges of medicine, granted in good faith to suspend her sadness. She is too strong to forgive herself for everything she’s done.

Letthe has been lying on the kitchen floor for only a few hours, but the layer of drifting paint seems to have been building up for a lifetime.

Beneath it, the tattoo reads:

“The moving finger writes: and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.”

But Letthe does cry.

She cries and, desperately, she thinks, despite the ease with which she leans towards the opposite, ‘I forgive myself for the things I couldn’t be.’

‘Maybe I’ve built myself into a wall of jagged, gouged-out off cuts, from the pieces of myself that I was meant to let fall away, but I held on.’

‘It’s a feature wall,’ she thinks, last of all, and fades.