The Library of Bernadette Tavernin - The God of Small Things

That afternoon, Ammu travelled upwards through a dream in which a cheerful man with one arm held her close by the light of an oil lamp. He had no other arm with which to fight the shadows that flickered around him on the floor.
Shadows that only he could see.
Ridges of muscle on his stomach rose under his skin like divisions on a slab of chocolate.
He held her close, by the light of an oil lamp, and he shone as though he had been polished with a high-wax body polish.
He could do only one thing at a time.
If he held her, he couldn't kiss her. If he kissed her, he couldn't see her. If he saw her, he couldn't feel her.
She could have touched his body lightly with her fingers, and felt his smooth skin turn to gooseflesh. She could have let her fingers stray to the base of his flat stomach. Carelessly, over those burnished chocolate ridges. And left patterned trails of bumpy gooseflesh on his body, like flat chalk on a blackboard, like a swathe of breeze in a paddyfield, like jet streaks in a blue church-sky. She could so easily have done that, but she didn't. He could have touched her too. But he didn't, because in the gloom beyond the oil lamp, in the shadows, there were metal folding chairs arranged in a ring and on the chairs there were people, with slanting rhinestone sunglasses, watching. They all held polished violins under their chins, the bows poised at identical angles. They all had their legs crossed, left over right, and all their left legs were shivering.
Some of them had newspapers. Some didn't. Some of them blew spit-bubbles. Some didn't. But they all had the flickering reflection of an oil lamp on each lens.
Beyond the circle of folding chairs was a beach littered with broken blue glass bottles. The silent waves brought new blue bottles to be broken, and dragged the old ones away in the undertow. There were jagged sounds of glass on glass. On a rock, out at sea, in a shaft of purple light, there was a mahogany and wicker rocking chair. Smashed.
The sea was black, the spume vomit green.
Fish fed on shattered glass.
Night's elbows rested on the water, and falling stars glanced off its brittle shards.
Moths lit up the sky. There wasn't a moon.
He could swim, with his one arm. She with her two.
His skin was salty. Hers too.
He left no footprints in sand, no ripples in water, no image in mirrors.
She could have touched him with her fingers, but she didn't. They just stood together.
Still.
Skin to skin.
A powdery, coloured breeze lifted her hair and blew it like a rippled shawl around his armless shoulder, that ended abruptly, like a cliff.

A thin red cow with a protruding pelvic bone appeared and swam straight out to sea without wetting her horns, without looking back.

Ammu flew through her dream on heavy, shuddering wings, and stopped to rest, just under the skin of it.
She had pressed roses from the blue cross-stitch counterpane on her cheek.
She sensed her children's faces hanging over her dream, like two dark, worried moons, waiting to be let in.
"D'you think she's dying?" she heard rahel whisper to Estha.
"It's an afternoon-mare," Estha-the-Accurate replied. "She dreams a lot."

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	Part of the Library of Bernadette Tavernin - © 1999