A Congenital Life: Part 1 of 5

“A Congenital Life” is a fictional story from the collection called Holidays: Stories by Darcy Rhyno

Just a few years from now, Judith will be sitting on a patio in Jamaica composing an email to her daughter, Emily, on her laptop and look up to see a girl in the middle distance, the kind of girl who regulates her menstrual cycle with The Pill before she goes on vacation. The white girl will be consoling herself down on the beach with a strutting montel – a Jamaican playboy – on one arm, a sinewy, chocolate indulgence wrapped in nothing more than flip flops and shorts. Judith will close her eyes for a moment and imagine the sea emptying behind the couple, then raging back to swallow them. She will remember the pretty receptionist she once employed who recommended this very resort and who quit coming here to join a bowling team because, as she put it, she’d grown bored of painless relationships like those she could buy in Jamaica. Like the girl on the beach, Judith will be in Jamaica in search of pleasure, though not of the montel variety. She will swim in the ocean and partake—in moderation—of the free alcohol and bake in the Caribbean sun. She will do her best to ignore her conscience, nagging her about privilege and race at this gated resort so she can enjoy small talk at the bar, lounge on the patio and wish upon the warm breeze brushing her cheek for many more holidays just like this one in a long retirement hopelessly pitted against that inexorable ticking down of the clock.

She will wonder how the two on the beach will say goodbye—like new lovers in a cheesy romance novel, drifting apart until their fingers can no longer reach, or like old friends, each familiar yet mildly irritated with what the other wants. Or like partners in a business deal. A pang of longing for any kind of goodbye will prick her for a moment, but she will dismiss it as phantom pain as from an amputated limb, and she will ignore it until it dissipates. The couple will walk through a flood of sunlight tripping over the water as if someone has just opened a furnace door for them to step inside where their troubled lives will disintegrate. The blaze will force Judith’s eyes closed so everything she sees is for a moment black and white, the silhouette of the burning couple imprinted on her retina, bringing to mind her own bright kitchen. Following the image of a disembodied finger through her mind, she will trace the scars left by her final months with Richard in their house without pain. She will move her head to match the pace of the strolling lovers and wonder how it was possible that she and Richard would run out of things to say to each other, even those things said to hurt.

Judith will flutter her eyes open and find she has anticipated exactly the pace of the temporary couple on the beach, now beyond the glare of the tropical sun, and she will know that Emily did not keep her promise to call on her father when she was in town because she resents his unwillingness to leave his work as the Deputy Minister in a major department even for a few days so he can visit her and her kids or even ask, just ask about her underpaid work in the cramped and run-down offices of a small social justice NGO with an interest in community-based cooperatives, especially those run by women, as catalysts for the alleviation of poverty and the symptoms suffered by those afflicted. The woman at the water’s edge will be wearing a bikini the colour of the sea behind her and of the large flowers printed on the wrap around her waist and of the eyes of a boy Judith met only twice, a boy who showed her the futility of her life’s work and the limits of human compassion before he disappeared. She will watch as the curve of the shore swallows the couple on the beach, then return to her laptop and the email she is composing to Emily. Instead of finishing it, she will open Explorer and type “Carson Taylor” into a search engine and discover a short newspaper report on the unusual death of an unusual young man predeceased by his mother, a man who, according to eye witnesses, doused himself with gasoline and struck a match before wheeling his chair into the sea.

~ End part 1 of 5 ~

Photo Credit

Angle Wings by Leo Fourdraine (with permission)

“A Congenital Life” is a story in the collection called Holidays: Stories by Darcy Rhyno
To purchase the collection, visit darcyrhyno.com

Recent Darcy Rhyno Articles:

• Kindness Goes Viral
• The Children Are Dying
• Mother Canada Could Die
• A Mother of a Monument
• The Detox Myth: How Celebrity Culture Sells Us What We Don’t Need