‘Lady English or Her Body Herself’

Matthew McCain is an author and fine artist with 3 of his novels reaching the top #10 on Amazon Kindle Unlimited. His paintings can be found all around the world from London to Alice Cooper’s Teen Youth Rock Center in Phoenix, Arizona. He’s currently represented by the Bilotta Gallery in Florida.

Lady English or Her Body Herself

It's almost rotting, it's so sweet. An end of July kind of heat brings the moisture and everything around welling to the surface. Skin beads in sweat and the fruits are sweating too, but Eden English is crying tears that would have poured in any weather. Sitting up in bed, her acrylic nails are digging just slightly into the skin above her eyes. There's a passing thought, the tears always seem to stop when the eyes are torn out of your face. It passes. And when she trembles she does so in silence.

There's a tapping on the window in the bedroom. The sheets and the blanket are rippling around Eden's kneeling body, she's an island alone and the bed is the ocean. There's another body beneath the surface, another breathing beneath the blanket, the sheet to the side. More tapping, and Eden brings her nails deeper into their press against her skin. The other's breathing steadily, he doesn't snore, and he doesn't tremble sitting up in bed when it's hot.

More tapping, it's slight and high pitched like a bug confused and flying continuously into the clear glass barrier that separates the outside from the heat and the light and the garbage inside. More tapping, it's a fine sound like the end of a needle beating and bouncing back from the glass. Eden English tears her hands away from her eyes then, the movement is ferocious but no blood is drawn. She turns, and in the cruel sudden churn of her movement the other sleeping mound almost wakes up. His breath draws inconsistently for a moment, but Eden English goes completely still and the stirring does stop. There's a finger in the window, visible only as a sprout rising and tapping from the bottom of the glass.

The single illuminated finger is all that there is, the 3 A.M. dark is so thorough that it swallows everything in the background to match its ubiquitous black. It's unmissable, steady at first then harder and faster when it seems to notice it's been noticed. Eden turns away, brings her hands back to her eyes and clutches her nails into the skin. She draws a bead of blood this time, but the tapping doesn't stop and the body stirs again by her side. He grunts, closer now than he's been to waking up, and the blood drips to fall in the path of the tears that stream on the English cheeks of the illustrious, the notorious Eden English.

It has to stop, and she whispers as much when she opens the window. He's smaller, below and reaching up just barely stretching from the tree he'd climbed. The finger is as far as he can reach, and he doesn't respond but draws his finger back down by his side. He gestures to the ground below, and raises his brow. Any sound is a threat, he knows that as well as she, and she complies to the ask of the gesture. She meets the man at the front of the house. He's covered in sap and smiling. "You're bleeding," He says.

“You have to go.”

“I felt young,” He’s blurting, words preplanned and emanating from a part of his brain that fossilized in a moment only ever revived when revisited. “Didn’t you? Didn’t you feel young?”

She looks away, eyes trailing off and to the left. She stares then at anything that isn’t the man, the grass in the slight night wind that tugs gently up and away from their roots. None will ever pull completely out of the ground, they're stuck and the movement is nothing but a tease to those that are anchoring them to the place they were born, the place where each blade will die. “I wasn’t young,” Eden scoffs an English snobbish kind of a scoff, “There’s no regret in the having of youth. Maybe it’s more likely I’ve never been young.”

“You were young.”

A light flashes on in Eden’s room. Just hardly visible from their place in the front yard, it lights a dim-white glow and beams flashing slightly for a moment before turning off, then on again, and off more permanently. Eden looks back down, back to the dark and the boy in the yard, “You have to go.”

“I will, you know I will,” He stops, but his hands are moving like gears working against one another, and anyone can tell that there’s more to say. Eden waits, watches while the boy’s ghostly night fingers work in twirls taking action like a five-way-thumb-war pitting one hand against its brother. “Tomorrow,” He says, it's a civil war, “You know I’m gone, you know I’m gone and I don’t have to say another word.” He waits again, wishing for something that will never come. Not in the front yard, not with the dim-white glow still lingering as a scald in her vision.

“It won’t work—”

Verbally, he jumps, on and all over the K in her word. “I’ll be back,” He starts, “Time will pass and mine will come. There’s always a return, we don’t just escape the places we come from.” He clears his throat, swallowing the lack of conviction back in his throat. He steps almost imperceptibly back, his bare tree-climbing feet shuffling cold in the dew of the night. He’s moving away from her, coaxing, it seems, an unconscious approach.

Eden English doesn’t shuffle, she stands straight digging her slippered heels into the mud. She’s not cold, but she crosses her arms and shakes like she’s loosening something at or around her shoulders.

“Turn around,” She says, “Turn and walk and leave me to my shame.”

If still uncertain, there’s a definite finality to the tone of her voice. She closes her mouth, and even in the proceeding silence there is no room to speak. She looks back up, and she yearns for the overripe heat, the dense fogged air of the room she’d just left. Life outside is a cold, cold thing in the night. Chilled to the bone, she ceases her quiver, so he complies and turns away.

Back inside, the boy-shaped lump speaks unseen from beneath his pile of blankets. “Who was that?” He asks, and Eden twists her wedding ring around a notch it’s created in her finger.

“An old friend,” She smiles, and slides in, adding her shape to the lump between the sheet and the blanket.

“An old friend climbing a tree to tap on our glass?”

The lump shifts, and Eden turns to face the blanket shape of his face. She sighs, “He’s leaving in the morning; just stopped by to say his goodbyes.”

“Where’s he going?”

Eden English sits up in the bed that she shares. She hesitates for a moment, and everything around her goes hot. The world is boiling over, bubbles rising popping at the brim of what’s bearable. Dense air had seemed so sweet from the outside looking in, but things that entice from afar have a way of constricting, of suffocating the ones that manage to find their way close. She thinks to the outside, to the shivering air and the boy’s bare leave-dying feet in the grass. He’s turning blue, but the freeze is a thing of beauty when existing enveloped by the heat.

“I don’t know,” She says, and shallow-thick air steals the conviction from her voice. “There isn’t a place in the world that would welcome him. I think we might’ve been his last try, here.”

The lump sticks his head out through the top of his covers then, he inspects the woman for a long time, and when he rolls over he says: “Let him in.”

“What?”

Facedown now, the lump’s voice is muffled as it emanates only audible through the fluff of the pillow. “He’s got nowhere to go, let him in.”

So she does; she gets up and walks out and trails the other boy for a while down the street before getting his attention. He’s shocked at first, even yelps a little when she calls after his name. Under a streetlight, everything around the two of them is golden. A beam of the brightest day within the night, he looks at her and cocks his head to the side when she tells him to follow. Open-mouthed, he lingers for a moment while she turns and leads him back in the direction of the house. She leaves their golden oasis, and he follows her willingly back into the dark.

Inside, everything is calmer, more settled than it was the last time he’d seen it. There are no broken glasses, no leftover food and liquor spilling from the countertops. It is no bachelor pad, and nobody’s left tonight. He walks, not a comfort but a desperate wanderer willing to break any bond for the sake of a bed. The other boy is there, he saw him lumpified when straining to tap on the window before. He starts to sweat, to shake watching as the glorious Eden English leads him up the stairs.

The lump is silent when they enter the bedroom. Not even snoring, he breathes the unasleep rhythm of a parent-fearing child hiding in a game of hide-and-seek. For a moment it seems that he’s preparing to jump out, to surprise, but Eden gets into bed and the boy follows and there is no surprise.

She looks at him, swapping glances between his eyes and the lump that’s breathing by his hip. She nods, and he knows. He gets under the covers and only then does she smile. She pulls the sheet, the blanket up over his face. He is silent, a lump like the other. There’s a moment of the purest, most sanctified silence you’ve ever heard. He almost sleeps, but she rocks her weight forward on the bed, and the crying comes back.

Tim Donahue began his writing career at Western Washington University in 2023 when he released his debut novel, “The James Gang” with Central Park South Publishing on June 2nd of that year. Donahue has worked for the past three years at Wavelength, a journalistic publication at Western Washington University, and in his free time he enjoys fly fishing, riding his bike, and repairing used books.