By Alison Theresa Gibson

Featured Art: Stephen Reichert, Untitled, 2014. Snow in alley, Baltimore. “Cirlce” series.

It was a cold Thursday in April and frozen leaves slipped along the ground. Easter was over, the southern hemisphere was descending into winter, we were hunkering down for the darker, colder months. I was walking around the lake, like I did most days, wondering if I should visit my mother that afternoon. My father had been dead for six weeks and I had only seen her once since the funeral. The sun was cold but golden. Currawongs sang their pyramid of song, the soundtrack to every morning of my life. 

The man was standing at the back of the toilet block. The ground was dirt around his feet. He was standing with his hands in his pockets, his eyes on the ground, but not on the dirt. He wasn’t contemplating the lack of grass. His eyes were on the body.  

She was on her stomach, legs splayed, greyed hair splayed, fingers splayed. She was splayed. He was standing. He was staring. The sun had risen fully and offered light but no heat. 

The graffitied brick of the toilet block had hidden the sound of my approaching footsteps. Frozen leaves were scattered at my feet and I didn’t move, afraid of their crunch.  

He crouched near one splayed foot. He ran a finger along the inside arch. When he whistled, the currawongs paused for a moment, then restarted with gusto. He looked into the branches of the surrounding trees and whistled again. Again, they called back. The splayed woman didn’t move.  

I inched my phone from my pocket and dialled triple-0 without looking. His finger was tracing the arch of her foot, his head was back, his whistle faltered.  

‘I’ve already called the police,’ he said. He could have been speaking to the splayed woman. ‘They’re on their way.’ He stood, his hands sliding back into his pockets. The currawongs’ calls were growing louder, more ferocious, like they were distressed by the absence of his whistle. ‘She’s been here all night,’ he said. 

‘How do you know?’ With a gust of wind, the metallic smell of bleached urine drifted from the toilet block.  

‘Dew,’ he said. ‘It lasts longer on skin than earth.’ He held his hand out to me. ‘Come see.’ There was a flash of blue lights and a police car crawled from behind the bank of trees. ‘Too late,’ he said. 

I asked my mother once if she believed pride was a sin. Pride comes before the fall, you see. That was said about Eve, who was blamed for all humanity’s sufferings. It never mattered that it was the Devil who tempted her. It never mattered that Adam was tempted, too. It never mattered that she paid with a curse of pain while he paid in sweat.  

When I queried my mother I said surely, pride is simply the consequence of hard work? Surely, we shouldn’t condemn the hard work that created achievements like Mozart’s Requiem? Or Crowded House’s Into Temptation? Or Madonna’s Like a Prayer? She was crouched in her rose garden, trying to create beauty and life from clay. She told me I should feel only dissatisfaction over my so-called achievements. I told her she was an idiot; she told me to leave her alone.   

I was one of her achievements, you see, and she was too busy dwelling in dissatisfaction. 

Eve had some mighty big power if her pride caused the fall of humanity, though. Did no one notice that? Would it not be possible, right even, for us to delight in the monstrous consequences of her actions? Would the history of men and women – and men’s hands holding women down – have been different if rather than cowering at her cursed punishment we had said, ‘Give me pain, it will make me stronger.’ 

Pain didn’t make my mother stronger. Pain cowered her. She carried it, as God condemned all women to do, with shame. My father saw it in her from the moment my brother’s dead body slithered from between her legs. Pain, shame, guilt. He never let her forget it, and she never let me forget that I was born alive. All my childish transgressions were compared to the angel who’d never lived.  

When my father was in the hospital, my mother spent her days in the chapel, praying for his immortal soul. He worked hard for his family, she said. He sweated through decades of toil to provide for us. He took Adam’s punishment for men and owned it. He deserved our prayers, she said.  

She was wrong about that, though. If women could bear an eternity of pain for Eve’s sin, then he should bear an eternity of pain for what he’d done. I knelt beside her and prayed for God to let the Devil take him.  

The splayed woman was on the news that evening. She was found by early-morning walkers, the news reporter said. Early-morning walkers, like I was strolling hand-in-hand with him, my supposed companion, when our sunrise romance was interrupted by a woman’s splayed body.  

The cameras had captured footage: the man with his hands in his pockets, his face to the sky. From a distance, it looked like he was distressed by the sight on the ground. It didn’t look like he was whistling to the birds.  

Foul play, the news reporter said. A domestic matter. Her husband was known to be violent but she stayed anyway. She stayed for decades even as his violence grew. She stayed, they repeated, and now look. An old woman, splayed. 

I wasn’t surprised when he, my supposed companion, rang my doorbell. I didn’t ask how he knew where I lived, I let him inside.  

‘I didn’t know who else I could talk to,’ he said. He stood with his hands in his pockets, staring at the photographs hanging above the couch.  

‘About what?’ 

‘The birds.’ 

He reached out and took one of the frames off the wall. It was my parents’ wedding photograph. A stoned archway outside a church, my father in a flared blue suit and spots of discolouration over my mother’s beaming face.  

‘What about the birds?’ 

‘Didn’t you hear them?’ 

My knees grew unsteady so I sat in the armchair. Pastry crumbs from the quiche I’d had for dinner were on the cushion, and they stuck to my legs. 

‘Of course. Currawongs are always like that.’ 

‘No,’ he shook his head. He sat on the couch, still holding the photograph of my parents’ wedding. ‘They were singing for her.’ 

‘For her?’ 

‘The splayed woman.’ He met my gaze for the first time. 

‘Why were they singing for her?’ My voice had become a whisper. 

‘You already know why.’ 

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t speak currawong song.’ 

He looked at the photograph of my parents, running a finger along the glass as though collecting dew.  

‘Why did you say currawongs are always like that?’ he asked. 

‘I’ve heard them every day of my life.’ 

‘While you lived with your parents as a child?’ He turned the photograph around to face me, as though maybe I’d forgotten who my parents were. 

‘Of course. They’re everywhere.’ 

‘No,’ he said. ‘They’re not.’ He stood over me, the photograph a flashing glass plate in front of me. ‘You should have been listening to them, the currawongs, this whole time.’ 

My dad was screaming as he died. There was a mix-up with the nurses’ rota and my mother and I stood by his bed while he screamed for morphine. His throat was ragged when the screaming stopped. A pink-flushed nurse hurried in, full of apologies. 

‘It’s okay,’ my mother said. Throughout the screaming she had rested one hand on his ankle.  

‘I’m not supposed to be here,’ the nurse was out of breath like she had run to save him. ‘But I could hear him outside.’ She fiddled with wires and the tube blocking his nostrils but he was quiet. 

‘It’s okay,’ my mother said again. She straightened the twisted blanket over his feet, and I thought she might be praying. A moment of pain before an eternity in heaven. Is that all she thought he deserved?  

The light caught her eyes and they flashed with the warmth of the newly living, and it all made sense. He was only screaming for minutes, but she would cherish that sound for eternity. 

I had hoped, expected even, that the death of my father would bring us closer together. I thought she would break free from the cursed pain that had held her tight for decades, and emerge triumphant, to find me ready and willing at her side. I thought we would stride into the future together, strong women carrying our scars proudly, ready to survive the next fight.  

The first time I visited her after the funeral, she sighed when she opened the door and saw me.  

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It’s you.’ Apparently while I had thought we were free of my father, she had thought she was free of me. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘Now that your father’s not here, you really don’t have to visit so often.’ 

‘But I brought lunch,’ I said, holding up the fragile cardboard that housed the quiche Lorraine from her favourite bakery. She sniffed, as though checking I hadn’t ordered the wrong thing. 

‘Fine,’ she said. 

When we sat at the table, our full plates in front of us, I automatically pressed my palms together and closed my eyes. There was the screech of a knife on ceramic and the sound of pastry crumbling under her teeth. I opened my eyes. She was chewing, a fleck of egg in the corner of her lips.   

‘No grace, today?’ I asked. 

‘He’s gone,’ she said. ‘What else is there to pray for?’ 

And just like that, she dropped the rusted shackles of all she had taught me. 

His fingers were long and thin along the frame of the photograph as he watched me, urging me to see what he saw. The pain in their future, evident through the happy smiles of newlyweds. He saw it, and he saw me, a child in the early morning sunshine, listening to the currawongs call their witness song.  

‘What did the currawongs tell us,’ he whispered, ‘about the splayed woman?’ 

‘Violence,’ I said, before I could stop myself. He nodded, his fingers tightening on the frame. ‘They’d seen—violence.’ 

‘Whose violence?’  

I reached up so I was gripping the frame, too. The glass glinted like a blind eye between us.  

‘A man’s,’ I said, my voice a whisper to match his.  

‘What do we do?’ He sank so he was on his knees in front of me. His eyes reflected my yellow walls.  

‘We find him?’ 

‘Exactly,’ he said. He pulled the frame from my fingers and rehung it on the wall. ‘I can help,’ he said, straightening the frame a millimetre. ‘But you heard the currawongs’ message. You know what they saw.’ He turned around and held out a hand to me. ‘You know what they need you to do.’  

I left my flat with him and we entered the darkness of the city. It was hours until the currawongs would call again, but we knew. He made me see that we knew.  

My street was unfamiliar in its shadows, like someone had slanted a light at a different angle and all the shapes morphed into something new. But he strode along and I followed.  

‘Do you know where he is?’ I asked, my steps skipping to keep up. Our footsteps barely made a sound in the silence.   

In the doorway of a large building my companion stopped and folded into the shadows. His eyes, blinking at me from the darkness, still had touches of yellow in them.  

‘That’s not the right question,’ he said. ‘The question isn’t where, it’s who?’ His voice was a whisper filled with urgency. ‘Who is he?’ 

A car with thumping bass drove past and I instinctively joined him in the shadows. 

‘I thought you knew?’ I said. ‘I thought that’s what—’ 

His hand covered my mouth. His skin was cold and damp, but not with sweat. The dew from the splayed woman had stayed on his skin all day.  

‘Tell me who he is, or,’ he stepped closer, his hand pressing harder against my mouth. ‘Tell me it doesn’t matter.’ 

‘What?’ I said, dumbly, speaking through his cold fingers.  

‘You heard the currawongs,’ he said, hissing. His hand tightened over my mouth then released me. ‘Come on,’ he said, his voice suddenly normal. 

For years, faith had been a shadowy companion to my mother. She had clung to its greasy strings in the hope that she could be saved, but Eve’s curse cut grooves into every facet of her life. It was only when she let it go that her own shape grew clearer. I held moments from my childhood to the light to see her kinks and hollows. A dead baby, a violent husband, a useless daughter. My father saw the curse in her, and she saw it in herself. She saw it in me, but she didn’t see that I was finding a new way to fill those grooves.  

The bakery was sold out of quiche Lorraine the second time I wanted to visit my mother, so I waited. I waited another week, and another one. The day I found the splayed woman, I knew I had to see her. 

‘Oh,’ she said, opening the door. ‘It’s you again.’ 

‘I made quiche because the bakery didn’t have any.’ 

The jerk of her head, inviting me in, seemed to cause her pain.  

We sat opposite each other at the table. She forgot to close her mouth as she chewed. She had eaten too many meals alone.  

‘How did my brother die?’ I asked. I knew the question wouldn’t shock her. The answer lived on the tip of her tongue. 

‘My body couldn’t support him. I had done something, someday, that sentenced him to a terrible fate.’ She cut herself another piece of quiche. ‘I prayed for forgiveness, but it was only when your father died that I knew I was forgiven.’ 

‘Because the pain stopped?’ 

‘Of course. I had paid for my sins.’ 

I ate the last bite of my quiche. The egg was slightly undercooked. 

‘I found a murdered woman by the lake this morning,’ I said after I’d swallowed. My mother wiped her mouth with a square of paper towel. ‘Do you think that death was her payment?’ 

‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘It depends on why she was murdered. If I was your father, I’d have a long list of sins she might be paying for.’ 

‘If you were God, you’d have an even longer one.’ 

There was a twitch of a smile in the corner of her mouth but she covered it with her paper towel. 

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m sure He knows what she had done.’ 

I cut myself another piece of quiche from the section with the extra thick pastry.  

‘I’m sure He does.’ 

My mother kept the leftover quiche, but she gave me a single piece to have for dinner that night. She had never shown me such generosity.   

‘There,’ he said. A young man was pulling a metal shutter down over the front window of a bottle-shop. It screeched but he didn’t flinch. He crouched and locked the door, then rattled it to test its security. He pulled a beanie over his hair, turned his collar up, and hurried away from us. 

Two blocks down the street and he stopped at a bus stop. He sat, sprawled, on the bench. We hovered nearby, our arms around each other, pretending to be returning from a night out.  

When the bus arrived, we sat a few rows behind him. He had headphones in and was closing his eyes then jerking awake, completely at ease on his own in a shadowy city. 

We followed him off the bus. The night had grown darker away from the city-centre lights and all the trees were quiet. His footsteps were uneven on the footpath, like he was tired from toiling, like my father. We were behind him, our footsteps too light for him to hear over the buzzing in his headphones.  

A ringing cut through the silence. His phone. He answered, his voice loud. ‘I’ll be there soon!’ he shouted, unaware of his voice filling the dark, quiet space. My companion slid his hand into mine and tugged me back into the shadows. 

‘Not him,’ he whispered.   

We slipped into a park, the grey ghosts of trees around us, our hands still entwined. The dew from his skin had slipped onto mine until I couldn’t tell whose it was anymore. We waited, but I knew we wouldn’t be waiting for long. 

‘There.’ I didn’t need him to point out the figure walking on the distant path. I nodded and we quickened our step.  

He was stooped, his head bare to the cold, and his hands deep in his pockets. There were no headphones to hide our steps but the path was like cotton beneath our feet, absorbing our sound. He pulled a spindly stick off a low-hanging tree and thwacked the ground with it. Once, twice. The stick shattered. 

‘He splayed the woman,’ my companion said. ‘He must be splayed.’ 

The man pulled a hand from his pocket and rubbed at his nose. He coughed, a raw, wet sound, and I hesitated.  

‘But did he?’ I whispered.  

My companion gripped my arm, his fingers like pincers. 

‘Does it matter?’ His breath was cold on my cheek. ‘You heard the currawongs. You’ve heard them every day of your life.’  

For decades my mother’s pain had had nowhere to go but deep inside her belly, a double helix of shame passed down from Eve. In that moment, with the cold night closing in around us, I refused to accept my curse. I felt it in me, surging through my muscles. I sprang forward. His neck was thicker than my hands, but it didn’t matter. I had millennia of pain on my side. I squeezed until his limbs were motionless.  

I stepped back.  

One of his shoes had twisted off and his bare foot stretched against the grass.  

I wanted to stay and smell the dew as it settled over his splayed limbs. I wanted to dwell in satisfaction over what my life had prepared me to do. 

‘Hurry,’ my companion said. ‘There are more.’   

Perhaps the splayed man would be found by some early morning walkers, strolling hand in hand as the currawongs sang their pyramid of calls.      

Pride comes before the fall, they say, but what if we’ve already fallen? Why would we be good if we’re already cursed? 

I slept late. My companion had drifted into the darkness and I wasn’t sure if I would see him again. My pain had settled into its grooves. It wasn’t a husky shadow like my mother’s, mine was wrought iron, heavy and jangling for all to hear.  

My doorbell rang at eleven o’clock. My mother was holding a fragile cardboard box. 

‘I don’t think I can eat any more quiche,’ I said.  

‘It’s a custard danish,’ she said. ‘I was passing the bakery and saw it was on special. I don’t eat custard so I bought it for you.’ She was already inching away.  

‘Thanks, I love custard,’ I said. She pushed the box into my hands and retreated. ‘I’ll see you later!’ I called out but she didn’t respond. 

I sat in my armchair and bit into the danish. The pastry fell in flakes. My hunger was intense, like I might never be full again.  

As I ate I contemplated what to do with my day. My daily walk around the lake, of course, although it was too late to hear the currawongs. I didn’t need to hear them this morning though, as it was only my violence that would colour their witness song. I had changed their nature, perhaps just for a day, perhaps for longer. I would have to see.  

I put my empty plate on the floor. My parents were looking down at me from their wedding photograph. I could see the smudge of a fingerprint on the glass. Tomorrow, I’d have to walk early again. I knew what I was listening for now. Those currawongs I’ve heard every day of my life, singing their pyramid of song.  

---

Alison Theresa Gibson grew up in Canberra, Australia and now lives in the UK. She completed her Masters in Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham in 2021 and is now undertaking her PhD there.

Stephen Reichert (American, b. 1975), Baltimore City, Maryland, is a multidisciplinary artist with recent solo shows at Hancock Solar Gallery, Co_Lab, Baltimore City Hall, and Sotheby’s Roland Park Gallery; a current show at The Fox Building; and group shows at Ellington-White Contemporary, The Peale Museum, American Visionary Art Museum, Arts Fort Worth, University of Maryland, National Art League, Cerulean Arts Gallery, Abington Art Center, Sebastopol Center for the Arts and many others. He is the editor of the poetry magazine Smartish Pace. Reichert is represented by K. Hamill Fine Art & Design.