Seahorses Are Real Read Online Free

that connected her back to a world she was drifting away from further and further each day, swinging out into orbit; and only David’s arms, she sometimes felt, (he being the only one she trusted) could clutch her back.
    They read their books after that, drifting off into other worlds yet side by side beneath the red sleeping bag, shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh, heartbeat almost to heartbeat, nodding off now and then like an old married couple or stopping just to peek at where the other was at. This was Marly’s refuge, her retreat from a world that lay beyond the confines of their cramped little rundown flat, where the rats played and the green mould grew. She sat reading books amidst the refuse of her life, books she’d read as a child over and over, dear and familiar like a pair of old shoes, the woman who lived in a shoe. Trying to regain a part of herself she’d lost, a part that had burnt out, died. Striving to resurrect herself, ghostly, in those ridiculous too-tight shoes. Whittling time away to bone washed up on ancient beaches, to daylight dimmed in the eye of an ant. There was no need for any other, no world to let in here. If I could shoot the world to bits, she sometimes thought, we might just make it.

She wrote that night in her gratitude diary:

    Saw a ball like an old moon.
Slept ok.
Didn’t check cheek.
D told me about R. Newman.
I am alive.

    She always wrote ‘I am alive’ for number five, not because she was always grateful for being alive, but because she thought that if she didn’t, something worse might happen.

Three
    She had one of her nightmares that night. It started off pleasantly enough – they always did – with her and David skimming stones from the pebbly bank of a swollen river, the softly slanting rain dribbling down their noses and between their toes. The river was brown and swirling bric-a-brac, dead wood and submarinating trolleys; and on the sandy bank opposite was a little forked set of bird-prints, like arrows. (When you saw only one set of prints, came a voice in her head, that was when I carried you.) ‘Here’s a good flat one,’ said David. ‘Try that.’ And she flung the stone bouncing – once, twice, thrice – across to the sandy shore, like an India rubber or little superball. ‘What must we be to the fish,’ she decided, all knowing and omnipotent, ‘in their watery mirror but glowing ghosts or wide-awake trees’; and she spread her arms wide in an arc to encompass the small green field by the pebbly bank and said to David with great serenity or was it solemnity: ‘I shall grow vegetables here. It will be like a garden of Paradise. There will be birds and flowers and all beautiful things. All bright and beautiful things.’
    â€˜You’re a bright and beautiful thing,’ he replied, holding her, before turning into a small flat stone in her hands which she flung bouncing – once, twice, thrice – across to the sandy shore, like an India rubber or little superball.
    And then she turned, herself, into a short fat farmer from Idaho and said to herself (for she was both the short fat farmer as well as the painted lady hovering in front of his nose in search of cabbages): ‘you’ll grow no watermelons here no more. I used to grow 30lb Jack in the Beanstalk watermelons afore the river changed its malignant course.’
    And she saw, with her own eyes, that the top of the precious field, where she was to grow all the bright and beautiful things, had been nibbled away by the hungry river, great clods and chunks of earth – still growing grass and golden buttercups – sitting halfway down the animal’s throat; and the beach where they’d skimmed stones was really the great naked pebbly belly revealed as the beast swerved out again. ‘How disgusting,’ she said as the sweet-toothed Ivy sped down with the current on a little dead wood tree, her