Sherbert Sherbert (Short Story)

Rhea Seren Phillips

S

Humbert SHumbert

The cafĂŠ is loud; dammit, it is bursting her eardrums, blood thumping a distinct medley throughout her head. She closed her book with an anguished sigh, reached for her cup and cursed the bookmark that lay demurely by her froth-drenched non-recyclable receptacle. A biscuit, snapped in half and still in its clear plastic wrapper, remained ignored.

She exited the cafĂŠ, shoving open the door into a group of obnoxious tittering students and began to walk the short distance to the harrowingly dark and coarse outlet of an estuary. A pearlescent Egret waded in the water on the other side of the bank, the sun scintillating against the peach of its wet and glistening beak. The gwyn bird waded deeper, breaking spuming waves with its spindly legs that moved with a fragile gait. It stilled as a blaring of horns resounded from the busy road on the bridge above. She glanced up and cocked her head to the side, curiously searching for the cause of the conflict. She flinched when the infection on her left shoulder blade rived the muscles in her back, yanking them taut, and, just as swiftly, releasing them, causing an intense feeling of vertigo.

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Rhea Seren Phillips

She clumsily bent her knees, flexing her left leg forward as she fumbled to the ground. Once seated, the seat of her jeans steadily became damp and sand fleas flittered like anthracite over her fingers that had partially submerged themselves into the salacious sand, gripping the crumbling composition as if it were moss that she could interweave under and over her phalanges, before comfortingly ripping it away from its roots. She felt dead, physically defeated and decomposing, being relieved of herself in pieces; a fingertip, a toe, her flitch tangled in gorse thicket and enriching the rue flowering underneath. She regarded it from the periphery of her vision with indifference and wondered if metaphors could incur a litter fine.

An anticipated disbelief was her Achilles’ heel and it grounded her in their reality. She turned towards the shadow of the sun and welcomed its influence upon her eyes, molten flecks flitted across her vision, distorting the world, a paradigm shift into the thrilling and dangerous. Darkness curled at the edges and she hesitantly closed her eyes, intent on denying nature the privilege of dismissing her from focus as if a parent disciplining a naughty child; like a naught child. The thought gave her pause and she curled her hands into fists, shaking the sand from between the cracks and raised them to knead pulsating temples, before watching as her right hand slipped down to the bridge of her nose. Her fingers had taken on a garnet hue and she fruitlessly blew on the sour flesh before returning them to their sandy oubliette.

She had left her coffee, book and bookmark in the café. She sighed and looked over at the source of her disappointment. Chatter could be seen through the raining condensation besmirching the glass. She’ll have to go back…eventually but not quite yet; ten more minutes. The Egret tilted its head and elevated a scaled leg, bowing its joints as if a blameless puppet being controlled by skeletal and fraying string. Everything was so free here.

She was sorry that she had been so difficult to live with recently. They didn’t deserve it. The intrusive grit hummed against her skin as the salted stench of polluted wetland embraced her and made its desolation her comfort blanket. She maladroitly removed her shoes, each foot urging the frigid canvas off, creating dimples within the sand where they depressed. She hadn’t come here for warmth. It made sense to find companionship in the cool brackish air of the soot-stained landscape that coughed around her. She was reminded of a wearisome grandfather who beat his children but had only allowed himself an idle quip as she had fed 2

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his pigeons and scattered them across the smoky and barren landscape of the Welsh countryside. Three generations had watched as predatory birds picked the pigeons off like grain, silhouetted against a setting sun.

Memory is fickle. Books are stable. They are always there when needed and they are bad liars. Anamnesis can be vehement, and, also, frighteningly absent; vivid and lucid, it can distort over fleeting time, yet, once reclaimed it is forever in doubt. She wondered at the stranger that let blood flow around her body, tickling her fingers with icy dominance. This entity didn’t want her to live; no, it didn’t like her…she was a basal underneath a gangling drop. The entity gave this monolith relationship a distance filled with trepidation that foreshadowed the shivers of her feet.

The battle of Catreath is still raging; the clash of swords nictate as lightening pierces the plangent tension beneath her jawbone. She held tighter onto the honeysuckled silence by massaging her jaw, mutilating it back into place. The Egret flinched away from an unknown danger, skirting the edges until it ceased at a seemingly safe quagmire. It began to hunt once more, its alabaster feathers ruffled and irritated by the sibilant babble of the wind.

She groped onto its image. The abrasive exhausted tang of modernity steadying her for the inevitable regression. The warriors are silent. Snagged in their petulant quiescence, a pearl belonging to the corrugated oyster. It had been disfigured into maturity. Not a soul could be blamed for not looking for the tarnish in its complexion.

The varmint had dug his fingers into the flesh of the gonad where the pearl quixotically slumbered. Raffish, uncouth and unpolished. Phalanges crackled as they clawed and lacerated the pearl’s sack. It was a strange distance…this is a strange distance. The stomach’s rugae tittered with shame even after the memory had evaporated. A stillness of an awkward embrace encircled in safe feminine arms were the black dog of nightmares. The gossamer lithograph from finger pads, encrusted with the tangerine powder of crisps, lips still besmirched with sour apple…soured apple.

Pixelated figures fought under the guidance of minute hands still grappling with the controls.

Rigidly overwrought, broad chest to feeble back as pubescent legs girdled the diminutive form in its entirety. She felt the moisture of humiliated contempt surge across her skin as if a 3

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shiver. The response is easy to confuse. She knew the truth behind it, and it made her anxious. She hadn’t even thought to fight for herself. She abraded an ankle bone against a roughened grain of a stone. The Egret opened its wings, hollow bones creaking as it shuddered the wind underneath until its body crooned into the air, an ashen fish drowning in its mouth.

Rhea Seren Phillips is a PhD student at Swansea University (2016-2020). She is researching how the Welsh metrical tradition in English could be used to challenge preconceptions on a modern Welsh cultural identity.

Her poetry has appeared in Molly Bloom, Tears in the Fence, Edge of Necessary: Welsh Innovative Poetry 1966-2018 (Boiled String and Aquifer Press), Poetry Wales, Parallel Cymru, Envoi, The Lonely Crowd, The Luxembourg Review, Black Bough among others. Rhea runs a website dedicated to the promotion of the Welsh metrical tradition in English (https://grandiloquentwretch.wordpress.com/).

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