‘Come back to me, Jacob. Back to our shared shore. Back to our little island.’
The shore is the world above the lightless soil―a soil that swallows my husband four days out of seven. The island is our cottage: Primal. Divine. Crumbling.
When he’s away, in the stomach of the mine, I purposely keep myself busy.
Inside the sterile donor centre, I queasily thumb through a copy of The Northern Miner, as a half quart of blood oozes from a vein.
I try to do my part, whenever I’m able. There’s a sense of obligation, when Jacob is below.
Bright, beautiful creation is waiting on the sunlight side of the manmade wall. A cith amongst the rays birthing rainbows over hills. Geese gossiping in the sky during long-haul flights. Ghost pipes cracking through earth in search of the light.
‘How do you stand it, Jacob?’ I want to shriek.
I miss the outside, instantly. I miss him more. I miss him more than all.
“You look ghostly, Yvette. Let’s stop.”
“No, don’t stop. But he’s underground. I worry, you know.”
“Oh I know. Believe me I know.”
“I’m so sorry, Roshelle. I didn’t think.”
“That’s okay. You’re all done. Cookies are in their usual tin, and the date squares are homemade.”
I try to catch her gaze, but she is staring down, now, and hurrying away, and I hope it’s towards another donor, and not just away.
I drowsily plough through the white, shiny floor, ‘be a pillow, plastic chair,’ I wish, and I fall.
After a 15 minute rest, a cup of joe and a couple of squares, I’m ready to go.
I wave goodbye to Roshelle, not knowing if I should hide my earlier faux pas behind a smile, or leave her in no doubt of my earnest remorse by folding away my mouth. I accidentally opt for something in between, nervously biting my lower lip in her direction, rushing, red-faced into the spring air.
The sun is controlled by the dimmer switch of time, its light gradually turned up hour by hour. Now, at 1pm, it glows like a naked, blazing lightbulb from the sky’s blue ceiling.
The world feels ethereal, until I think about the death of Roshelle’s husband down the mine, 11 months before, and her screams that could crack mirrors, that could decimate suns.
Thankfully, the flowers’ clenched fists are blossoming into fully spread hands, waving at passers-by in the breeze, and beckoning over the newly roaming bees to their golden cores, and the symbiosis lifts me.
In the store, Delphine is peeling vegetables from the shelves for supper, they rattle in the wheeled cage, as she trundles over.
Delphine’s husband, Elijah, is Jacob’s twin and a fellow miner.
When the brothers first descended down into the planet’s eerie basement, I knew Delphine’s fear, because it was my own.
“Do you wish they’d listened when we begged them, all those years ago?” I ask, edgily scouring a temple with the side of an index finger.
Delphine stops dead.
“What’s wrong?” she asks, desperately searching for clues in the furrows of my face.
“I don’t know, Delphine,” I lie.
“It’s their birthday tomorrow. You always get anxious on their birthday. So do I.”
If only it was just on their birthdays, I think.
But the tragedy that exploded on the twins’ 19th birthday had certainly been the catalyst that grew my dread from a sapling, into a full-grown redwood.
Before the accident, there had been three brothers in Jacob’s family, and there still were. But only he and Elijah remained on Earth, Caleb having perished inside its flesh, aged 22. Still, the siblings he left behind journeyed down. They said they felt closest to Caleb inside the mine.
I leave the store’s lifeless walls behind me, but I can’t go home. So I return to the beginning; past the shrubbed, gushing dell, ascending skyward, to the carefree world of Yvette and Jacob, aged 16; the grassed, lofty mounds gaily swaying to the blustery notes of the wind.
The mine’s heavy anchor, lifting.
I stay above for hours. But Jacob is never far from my mind, and for him, I hasten home, and I climb beneath the artificial rain.
Fresh from the serene, gentle water, I dress. But an impending doom strips me straight to the bone when such miners as the quivering winter firs, wobble up my path; iced by night’s veil, and by the hands that don’t follow.
“There’s been a rock burst,” Edmond whimpers, his face collapsing like the avalanche of stone his words have forced me to imagine. “Elijah and the rest were still looking for Jacob when we ran to find you.”
“HASN’T THERE BEEN ENOUGH DEATH???” I echo out, wild as a yip-howl, and as my breath travels further from my mouth, it enters an ancient stream of sorrow, which seeps beneath the earth, and I taste the coal dust, like death’s ashes. Smell the metallic wounds and the unbridled terror. Feel the lack of unspoilt air in my furnaced lungs. Hear the sound of destruction still thundering through the silence.
There is nothing before me but darkness.
And I think of him, alone, in a state of hibernation, my Jacob, wondering if he’ll ever wake, or if the sleep will be eternal.
Tumbling towards the ravenous mouth, I see Elijah’s sobbing back, his body cradling motionless flesh, and my chest sinks to a depth no mine has ever reached.
I creep towards change, through survival, or death, and like a waking animal, Jacob stirs.
“It just sheared my leg, Yvette, I was so lucky,” he gravels up, in shock. Then, in grief, he whispers, “Grayden took the full hit.”
Crushing him, tenderly, I know we cannot last.
I would try―with all my heart―to unlove him, when I left. I would fight, with every fibre, not to mourn our little island. “Take me with you!” he would cry, but the mine would only grip him tighter.
*****
Amy Akiko is an educator, artist and writer from South London. Her writing predominately gravitates towards the themes of love and nature, and has appeared in East of the Web, The Tiger Moth Review, Cosmic Daffodil, Isele Magazine and elsewhere.
