Emerald took her cup of coffee out onto the verandah in time to see the inky night morph into day. She wrapped her fingers around her cup and watched the rising sun light sparks under raindrops on bare branches. As a child she had marvelled at the tiny flares in each  frozen drop, believing they were diamonds left by fairies in the night. She smiled at the memory and walked forward for a closer look. She didn’t see the frost coating the steps of her verandah. Within seconds she was sliding on her back all the way down, landing with a thud on the brick path.

Pain shot up both legs. Her first instinct was to call out for Maurice. Her lovely, kind, caring Maurice. Then she remembered. She lay still for a moment and closed her eyes. This, like so many things now, she would have to manage herself. She  turned onto her hands and knees and reached for the verandah post to pull herself up.

Two weeks later her ankle gave way and she fell again, this time knocking her knees on the concrete drive. The pain travelled to her hip joint. It flared up and down her whole leg in fierce bursts as she limped up the path. Time to ring the doctor. Then she remembered the Medical Centre in the nearest town was closed on the weekends and she would have to wait until Monday to ring for an appointment. The only alternative was to drive fifty kilometres to the hospital’s Emergency Department in the city, but she was too sore to drive.

On Monday she rang the Medical Centre. When someone eventually answered the phone she was told she could have an appointment in three days.

She parked in front of the Medical Centre and on her way in stopped to read all the notices covering the front door. There was the notice reminding patients the Medical Centre was closed on weekends. When she’d driven Maurice to the Emergency Department in the city five years ago they’d sat in the crowded waiting room for six hours, ignored by the receptionist. She’d seen an elderly couple stagger in. After an hour the woman tried to stand  then collapsed onto the floor. She crawled on her hands and knees to the bathroom. The receptionist didn’t look up. No one offered to help. Emerald walked over to the reception desk and knocked on the window. The receptionist raised her eyes from her computer. Emerald told her a doctor was needed for the woman on the floor. The receptionist replied curtly that all the doctors were busy and everyone had to wait until their numbers were called. She turned back to her computer.

On the Medical Centre door Emerald read notices that informed patients they must not enter if they felt ill. They must go home and ring their doctor from there. The notices had been up since the time Covid had descended on the country. She hobbled through the door into the waiting room. More notices around the reception desk. Payment must be made on the day of consultation or there would be a surcharge. If an appointment ran over the allotted ten minutes there would be a surcharge on the fee. Emerald thought of her old GP from thirty years ago. He had once scolded her for not ringing him immediately when she’d been ill and told her that if she ever felt so ill again, even if it was in the middle of the night, she must ring him and he would come to her home and check on her. All that was gone now. Medical care was a business like any other. Since the government had reduced subsidies, patients were simply a source of revenue. Numbers to be ticked off a list.

The doctor who ushered her into his room was new to the Medical Centre. He was one of a steady procession of doctors from other countries helping to fill the shortage of medical personnel in this country by staying a few months in time for the skiing season. The current doctor typed on his computer with his back to Emerald while she explained what had happened when she slid on the ice. He told her she had probably torn a ligament in her leg and he would refer her to the Physiotherapy Clinic through Accident Compensation so she wouldn’t have to pay. He handed her a prescription.

At the Physiotherapy Clinic the walls were full of notices too, warning about the penalties if payment wasn’t made on the day of consultation. Warnings about being charged the full amount if a cancellation wasn’t given two days in advance.

The physio was attentive and helpful. He told Emerald she didn’t have a torn ligament, what she had was sciatica. Her fall had resulted in her muscles and spine compressing and trapping a nerve. He massaged the sore bits and gave her some exercises to do at home and assured her the condition was treatable. He advised her not to take the medication the GP had prescribed as it would give her a stomach ulcer. He told her to come back in three days for a check-up.

As Emerald was leaving the room and heading for the exit the receptionist called her back and said she had forgotten to pay. ‘I thought Accident Compensation was covering it,’ said Emerald. ‘No, they cover part but there’s a surcharge that you must pay.’ Emerald paid and limped out the door past all the notices warning of dire consequences for overdue payment and cancelled appointments.

The fog of the last three days was lifting outside although the sky was bleak.

Emerald glanced at her watch and saw she had just enough time to drive the fifty kilometres into town for her appointment at the ear clinic for her hearing test. Halfway there she had to stop for roadworks. She looked at her watch again and hoped that the snotty receptionist wasn’t on duty today. She was.

Miss Snot looked up from her computer, mouth pulled tight like a cat’s bum and told Emerald her appointment was cancelled and she would have to reschedule. Emerald tried several times to explain about the physio and the roadworks and the fact she lived fifty kilometres away. The receptionist handed her a card with the new appointment time set for next week and went back to her computer.

Emerald drove home through rain so heavy it ricocheted off the roads and made lakes in the grass verges. It was still raining when she parked her car in the garage and walked up the path to her front door. Her leg felt less painful now. She thought of the physio with gratitude.  As she reached in her bag for her key she noticed a large spider web in a corner of the porch, the delicate intricacy of its threads illuminated by a flash of sunlight behind the looming black clouds, transforming the web into  gold lace. Emerald stood watching it for a long time before turning her key in the lock. 

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Sandra Arnold is an award-winning writer with seven published books: Her new novella-in-flash The Bones of the Story, Impspired Books, UK; A short story collection, Where the Wind Blows, Truth Serum Press, Australia. Her novel The Ash, the Well and the Bluebell, Mākaro Press, NZ is also published in Bulgaria by Aviana Burgas; A flash fiction collection, Soul Etchings, Retreat West Books, UK;  A non-fiction book Sing no Sad Songs, Canterbury University Press, NZ; Two earlier novels, Tomorrow’s Empire, Horizon Press, NZ; A Distraction of Opposites, Hazard Press, NZ.  Her short fiction has been published and anthologised internationally and has received nominations for The Best Small Fictions, Best Microfictions and The Pushcart Prize. She has held writing residencies in The Robert Lord Cottage, Dunedin and the Seresin/Landfall/ University of Otago Press, Waterfall Bay. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from  Central Queensland University, Australia.

www.sandraarnold.co.nz

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“Are you washed in the Blood of the Lamb?”

He was putting those words on the wall, was Old Frankie, called old although he was only forty-two; he was putting the words on the stone wall trying for precision but falling short. They were slapdash black-paint words now, not running and dripping, but alternately thin and crooked or rounded and porcine. He was copying as best he could from the paper Reverend had given him; he was bent below the stained-glass window of the knight wrapped up in ribbons; it was a Saturday, it was August 23rd 188-, and he was all to-aching. 

The Reverend had made them sing the song, the Blood of the Lamb song where the words came from, the hymn, on each of the last four Sundays. He was very fond of it already. He received hymn books and correspondence from other men of the cloth in the Americas and he had got the words and the tune from one of them. They had sent it as an example of the sort of hard material that the hard evangelists were preaching to the people; the Reverend of St Boltoph’s liked it because he was hard too, a fire-and-brimestone man, a man of two centuries prior. He was for Cromwell and no Christmas still; he was for scaring the wits out the parishioners; he was for telling them the Devil stalked the hills around them and was waiting for them to come up; he was for letting them in on the secret that they were sinning every moment they weren’t in his church, that Chasteborough people sinned obliviously in the alehouse, in the fields, over their dinner table, crouched on the chamber pot, tending to their vegetable plots and stroking their children’s hair. No hope for the wicked, is what he would say, not the dyed-in-the-bone wicked. 

Old Frankie rounded out the second ‘o’ in blood and stood back to see if all had gone well enough. No; the first ‘o’ had almost no opening in the middle and was narrow like the trail left by a cartwheel; the second ‘o’ could let through the massed Onward forces of the Christian Soldiers. He sighed. If you want a job doing well… but then, Reverend would never deign to twist himself all up against the cold grey ground of the church and be overpowered and stifled by the musty smell of the kneeling cushions. His faith made him walk on beams, sunbeams, gilded beams; he was meant for better things, or so you gathered from his talk.

What made it all the worse was that this was dishonest labour besides. Old Frankie had got plenty of lamb’s blood on him from helping out with both the birthing season and the slaughtering; none of that had seemed to come from the Lord or do him much good- it just stank. He was still a sinner and still someone thought of as being a bit behind the rest of the men he toiled with in most respects; that’s why he was unmarried still, and that bit at him, and that’s why they called him Old, because he walked and talked slow.

He heard laughter from the tumulus across the way from the church, just beyond the low wall that marked the bounds of the holy lands; just beyond the broken old yew tree that threatened to drop a branch on a pew-filler’s head every Sunday; just beyond the gravestones of unusual names, of names that no-one seemed to be called by anymore. Frankie looked out to see who was laughing. He felt a pang of jealousy when he saw the source: it was Emily, Emily Sandwell, daughter of John Sandwell, sweet Emily Sandwell, Emily Sandwell of the darling smile, Emily Sandwell of the cherry cheek, Emily Sandwell who had grown from an ungainly child with big feet to angel-woman, to divinity, to Frankie’s vision of the mother of God, the impeccable blessed Virgin.

She had her long skirt pulled up to her knee on one side, showing a pale leg strong from both her workday tramping for her family and the Sunday afternoons she usually spent solitary walking regardless of the strain of her weekday labour, without concern for modesty or the thoughts of her companion Arthur Ranger, the wagon boy. Yes, yes- there was Arthur suddenly taking hold of her leg, almost toppling her over, and kissing up the irresistible goose-pimpled exposed skin, from pristine white ankle to cushioned red knee, not caring who knew or who saw. Emily threw her head back and laughed all the more; she touched his face; she let him for a few seconds kiss up inside what was not left bare by her hitching, deeper and deeper, then she pushed his head away and raised a finger mock-stern, like a schoolmarm secretly amused by the tearaway antics of her charges.

Old Frankie could tell by their casualness, by their easy amusement, by their lack of scruple, that they knew each other much more than leg-kissing; that the nighttime woods on the hill had not been left undisturbed by their clandestine footsteps and rustlings. He’d heard it was happening all over, this looseness; now, he knew it for sure, but he also suspected it had always been that way for everyone but himself- it just seemed that people forgot somewhere along the way, that they buried their own illicit memories deep enough in the soil that the plough could not turn them back over and bring them again to the light. 

Arthur Ranger bent over and got on all fours and the reason for Emily Sandwell hitching her skirt became clear- she stepped up upon his back and her head and shoulders were lost amongst the thick leaves and branches of the walnut tree. The tree grew well here, just on the edge of a crop of beeches that crowned the tumulus as they do other such miniature eminences up and down the isle, because the rise meant it was closer to the sun; because the ground opened in craters and holes that held the rainwater in deep puddles that were a constant threat to the wayfarer looking for a shortcut home from the crop; because the tree, allowed such a prominent position overlooking the church, was respected and even venerated like it was a sign of confirmation from the Lord of the rightness of the worship within, of the truth in the words on the wonder of creation that spilled forth so often from the good book. Not many came to pick the walnuts that grew here abundantly, preferring instead to take from the more modest growth of various other trees dotted about the town, but Arthur and Emily dared; Old Frankie saw that they had with them a basket, hidden from sight up to now, and Emily had reached down and picked it up to fill it.            

Arthur, one of the slimmer boys in the village, not solid like some of the farmhands, was a surprising source of strength and determination in his task- he held Emily all the while without buckling, without wavering, without complaint. He stayed like a table, as if his one humble purpose on earth was to allow maids to climb upon him, to use him like a stool or ladder. Maybe Old Frankie shouldn’t have been surprised, though- who would have been prepared to show anything but their strength to this angel; to let down the God-touched; to make perfection feel as if she were even slightly at fault?

Emily sang a song, distinct and different in every way from the song whose title he was painting on the wall as a warning and a reminder. It was lilting but knotty in the way she sang it; she drew out the phrases she liked in long trilling notes and rushed over others to reach those she preferred. She knew the lyric well and was trying to live up to it, to reach its promise, to fulfil its dreaming, to give it flesh and realness:

“It’s of a brisk young farmer, a-ploughing of his land,
He called unto his horses, and he bid them there to stand.
As he sit down upon his plough, all for a song to sing,
His voice was so melodious, it made the valleys ring.

It’s of this fair young damsel, a-nutting in the wood.
His voice was so melodious, it charmed her where she stood.
She could no longer stay,
And what few nuts she had, poor girl, she threw them all away.

She stepped up to young Johnny, as he sat on his plough
Said she, “Young man I really feel, oh I can’t tell you how.”
He took her to some shady grove, and there he laid her down,
Said she, “Young man, I think I feel the world go round and round.”

“Do you ever feel the world go round and round?” Arthur asked her slyly, interrupting.
           

“I feel it now more than ever,” she giggled.

Then she screamed for joy, deep and long.

She had evidently done it; she had found the heart of the song that had charmed her whole life, that, from the moment she first heard it drifting from an inn window or from the mouth of her grandmother at the fireside of a winter’s evening, had whispered to her of paradise, of passion, of hidden and forbidden things, of the untold pleasures of voice and body, of days too ideal to last and yet remaining all the same, available to all with a mind to it, the glimmer in the clouds of the workhorse’s life, the shining behind all things. Her reenactment had been a perfect act of manifestation. She was enveloped within the song, her own variation of its lyric and meaning, the world outside replaced by the world within the tune.

Old Frankie could see the delight in her; he could read the quivering excitement in her limbs; he could understand the brief ignition of the flame within her, the flame that called back beyond original sin to original peace and happiness. The sun was yellow on them; the sky was blue; the grass was green; the violets purple; the primrose pink; their dress white and brown and red of neckerchief; all was as it should be and the crow’s caw had been covered by sound of Emily’s voice, caressed by innocence and experience. She and he on the tumulus were more beautiful than the nightingale; prouder than the robin; more fleet of foot and thought than the sparrow; above all things like the hovering kite. She- they- were more than the words on the wall, more than the blood of the lamb, more than Reverend’s sunbeams.            

Old Frankie threw down his paintbrush, walked through the knave and left the church. Damn the Reverend; damn him to heaven or to hell and back. He could paint for himself. Frankie didn’t need his few pence. The couple were still laughing and the nuts on the tree were ready and ripe for the picking and it was Saturday and it was summer. 

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Billy Stanton is a London-based working-class writer and film-maker, originally from Portsmouth. His short fiction has appeared in Wyldblood, The Chamber, Horla, The Rumen, Literally Stories, Tigershark and the ‘New Towns’ anthology. He co-runs the ‘Noli Me Tangere Short Film Festival’. His blog is: steelcathedrals.wordpress.com

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Please share this to give it maximum distribution. 

If you would like to be part of the Rural Fiction Magazine family, follow this link to the submissions guidelines. If you like contemporary dark stories and poems, you may also want to check out The Chamber Magazine.

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