less visible than a ghost

Less visible than a ghost

The wind is whispering in the sheoak grove. I can see the sea, which is not really a sea but rather a narrow stretch of briny water that stretches for 90 miles. It has a mouth but no anus. My mother poured the ashes of her cremated husband into that water; and twenty years later Idid the same with hers. Surprising really that her ashes flowed so freely from the plastic box she had been stored in; so soaked she was after twenty years of drinking that her ashes should have been a quagmire. I hope she is floating about in a liquid purgatory, hopelessly searching for her long-dead husband.
I hope she never finds him.

However.

I am standing on the shoreline of that water and I am 14 years old.
I am lonely and restless and wanting something else but I do not know what that something is. It is getting dark and cold and I am not wanting to spend another night sitting about with the two women I am stuck here with, in a shack that holds the ghost of a dead man and laughter and drinking and fun. There is no fun to be had with those two women and I want to be with people who are my own age.
But time with people my age is not satisfying either.
I do not fit in.
I fit here on this shoreline as the sun sets, wind whipping my hair against my face. Some of the things I knew have gone…
…The tadpole pool, once deeper than anything else in my whole world and bottomed with quicksand, has dried up and is overgrown with rushes and weeds.
…The Chinaman’s well on Landlock seems to have disappeared.
…The cliffs have shrunk in size and are not the perilous adventure they once were.

Nor are there are horses here anymore. Once, the stock yards were full of horses that little girl’s dreams are made of. Black, grey, chestnut, brown and a pinto, all different sizes and shapes. They appeared like a miracle and disappeared like a miracle, but not before they had woken us from our sleep one night as they milled around the shack, cracking the paddy melons, eyes glowing red in the dark, coats flashing in the torchlight as they spun in a herd to gallop away over the hill.
I was entranced. All my dreams had come true. The horses had come to see me. They had heard my calls.
The next morning I went in search of them and after walking for hours, eventually I found them grazing in a gully.
They saw me and bolted.
I didn’t so much want to ride them or own them.
I wanted to be one of them.
I wanted to gallop away from the frightful beast that my mother was, gallop in the sun across the grass, rest in the sheoak groves sheltered from the unforgiving sun, skitter across the shallows to escape the insects.
But the beast that my mother has become has me captured and I cannot not escape.

I turn away from the two women and head toward Landlock. It is becoming increasingly dark. Perhaps there will be someone in a Landlock shack who is my age, and perhaps that person will be a boy. But even if there was a boy I would be too shy to talk to him. I would watch him from a distance like a wild horse, checking my escape routes, sniffing for his scent carried upon the wind. It is of no use being a shy girl who has nothing to say, and useless being an imaginary horse who cannot say anything.
The shacks are empty and deserted, the air is cold, smelling only of the briney water and sand dunes. No humans, no boys, no horses.
There is the smallest amount of light left, just enough to get me started on my way back to the two women and the candlelight and the inevitable lamb chop dinner. I trot and canter for a while until there is no longer enough light to see the pot holes and dips along the dry dirt tracks. I toss my mane and snort through my nose as I jostle into the horse next to me, feel its warm side touching mine. But when I finally get to the top of the hill and look into the gully at the shack, the other horse turns away from me and heads out to the open grassland where it will be safe for the night, stealing its warmth away from me to share with another horse.
Resigned to my fate and aloneness I walk down the hill, human again, lonely girl again, towards the two women who have not wondered where I have been for hours.

If I didn’t come back would they notice?

But I can’t think that because I fear too much that the answer may be no and this makes tears well in my eyes.
That thought gets me every time and it is too late to stop the tears from forming. I wait outside and breathe and dry my eyes in the night wind. I think about the nets that will need untangling tomorrow after the wind has wound them around themselves for a night, how the pelicans will chop apart the entangled fish we were going to eat. Think about how cold it will be at daybreak as we set out to pull in those nets, how numb my toes will be with no heating to defrost them upon our return.
Think about how unfair it is that my brother is liked enough by other people that he is taken out to spear flounder when the moon is right but I am not asked. I am not even seen by those people when they come for my brother, they see only him and the in him is the ghost of our father, their friend, smiling through my brother’s smile, speaking through my brother’s mouth, learning from them to do the things that our father had taught them to do. They hope that my brother will be the replacement for our father, their friend, who they cannot bear to have lost.
I know enough to know this is a ridiculous notion. Those people try for years to bend him into being our father until eventually he deserts them completely and sees them for the sorry fools they are. As a man he despises them and wipes away their memory, wipes them off on his pant legs like he does with fish guts and dirt and blood.
I hear them say “What a pity their mother didn’t die. She is a hopeless case.”
Well they may be right but that’s nothing to be saying within earshot of that woman’s daughter, now is it? Did those people really think it was acceptable to say such a thing? But as I am invisible to them perhaps they did not know I was close. How could I be less visible than the ghost of a dead man?
My tears have dried, wiped onto the sleeve if my duffle coat. It is safe to go in but when I do the two women seem not to notice for some minutes. It is terrible so be this young and so ignored, you never quite comprehend what it is that you’ve done wrong, there is not the strength gained with age to deal with this treatment. It causes me to worry and panic until after years I become numbed to it; withdrawn and silent I am unable to cope when attention is directed to me, but forever longing for just one person to notice that I am special and clever and within me lay all the treasures that a human could ever want another human to have.
No fish to eat. No chops. We can have cheese and fritz jaffles and the two women add that revolting canned bean mix to their dinner. Should eat beans they are good for you but I don’t give a shit. I don’t have to eat no beans, for I am an invisible horse.