Mackerel Skies

I like how the air breathes on my skin during my long walks. I once tried to explain it to Joan but she only crinkled her nose at me in that way that told me that I had just said something unusual. I myself found it unusual that I have no problem sharing my thoughts and feelings openly until someone else appears to receive them poorly. In most cases I don’t care, why should I? Once I share, the thoughts and feelings don’t belong to me, I’m not responsible for them. In the case of Joan, though, I feel that annoying itch of sadness behind my sternum whenever I think I’ve alienated myself from her.

The air is cold and hard against my skin, alchemized into a refreshing energy pulled into my lungs to warm the hearth at the base of my stomach. My gut tells me that there’s a storm coming, lightening flickering miles away.

I am glad she got out.

“Mackerel skies, never long wet, never long dry,” or "Mackerel sky, not twenty-four hours dry.” The two sayings waltz around my head and I wonder which one is more appropriate while looking out at the cloud-freckled sky. No one came looking for me when I took my long walks at sunset. Joan once told me that not too many folks come by here anymore since there were a lot of accidents of casual wayfarers falling off the rocky cliffs by the open path. They tried blocking the path with a flimsy rope that has only become an affectionate milestone to cross during my stroll. The cliff’s edge formed a deceptively unbroken thin line hidden along the horizon, one that favors the vast sky above over the liminal falling space above crashing silhouette spined with white breaks below. I like that sort of misdirecting prank.

I didn’t like how my own breath clouded my glasses like cumulus eye floaters whenever I wore them outside, when I wrapped my nose, chin, and mouth up in the forest green scarf Joan knitted for me. Since one of them had to go, I tossed my glasses into the sea last week because I didn’t really need them to see the sky, only for things up close, and I didn’t really like having things be that up close to me anyway. Joan didn’t seem to understand when I explained where my glasses had gone but she just bundled me up tighter in my scarf, making sure my face was protected against the high winds. Even up close and blurry, I could tell Joan looked worried.

The manor is humble among the others scattered across the moors, having been abandoned by a wealthy family decades before and repurposed to be what’s called a wellness retreat. The estate does the heavy lifting in its lush greenery and decorated garden paths of fine gravel, while the manor itself is a scalding white with too many windows, all too thin and high and dark. We can be like old British women going on holiday by the sea to heal our ails, Joan joked when we first came. I didn’t get it at the time but I could tell it meant a lot to her, and I’m not one to deny her anything, even if it meant having to live with a bunch of sick people for the season.

Joan really fought to stay in the same room as me during our vacation. I think she figured out that I wasn’t really interested in making new friends, especially not with a bunch of invalids. She always told me not to use that word but I read it once and now it’s too fun to say. They’re human just like you and me, she’d say. I didn’t think that was altogether my problem or choice.

Ever since Joan lost her parents, I knew she needed something and sometimes that something was me. I knew her when we were kids and she looked different after. Still lovely and smiley in the ways that matter, but I can now trace the lines in her forehead and under her eyes. She insisted that she was fine after nine years and that she wasn’t afraid of the dark and heavy blankets anymore. Her thrashing in her sleep hasn’t convinced me.

One time I made the mistake of shaking her awake during a particularly windmill-leggy episode and though she didn’t cry, she clutched my arms until they hurt and stared past me and muttered under her breath, like a curse, “I think losing someone ages you. It’s not time that takes us.”

We never talked about it but she frightened me then.

I don’t think she ever meant to scare me. She was too preoccupied with her own scaries. It makes sense that she’s so afraid of drowning when she lost everything in the hurricane. The news had given it a disproportionately sweet-sounding name. Joan told me that there was a very official standardized process for naming hurricanes but I didn’t care. For her sake, I won’t mention the hurricane's name. She says it doesn’t bother her anymore and that it’s just a name and that whatever I think in my own mind is my own business. But still. I can’t prove that Joan can read minds, and it’s not likely. Just in case, though.

The sun is setting and so am I, sitting down on the edge. I swing my legs and bounce my heels off the uneven rock face, in that way that made Joan nervous when she went on my walks with me to prove to herself that she’s not afraid of the dark water. She’s away today, though, thankfully. I think she likes it better in the nearby town because she can pretend she’s living independently and not bookended by white-starch chaperones for a limited time at limited stores. But even so, Joan gets a lot of leeway with the nurses. She only ever wanted to go to the bookstore to affect freedom and she was always so polite.

Joan’s not the kind of girl to clamp down on foreign forearms with a forceful jaw just out of curiosity. Joan never understood why I had such a bad habit of biting people and I never understood why she couldn’t see that I only did it when I felt someone’s uncomfortable touch. But it wasn’t her fault that she didn’t know that I felt that uncomfortable touch always.

It’s funny. Once bitten, twice shy, is what Joan keeps saying whenever I fight her on doing anything new more than once, something I find tedious. But I remember biting her when we were six and it didn’t make her shy around me, so I’m not sure where that saying comes from.

The mackerel skies are turning into a muddy purple against a coruscating, burnt red, so red that I could swear I hear steam as the sun dipped its collapsing heat into the ocean, bleeding a fainter flame into ripples striped in the deep and unforgiving indigo of what scares Joan the most.

Last month we went to the aquarium and I realized that deep sea jellyfish don’t swim. They pulse and beat and float like hearts. What’s wrong with that, I wondered. To pulse and beat and float in the depths until you don’t anymore. There’s something quite beautiful and enviably quiet about that. I could think of worse ways to die.

The discomfort and unpleasantness washes over, like adjusting to a shower’s temperature. I suddenly wish it was a rainy day now, one of those that flew over dock workers toiling from sunrise, trying to empty excess water from their fishing boats from the previous night’s showers. I fly over those people and come in for a landing in the foggy harbor horseshoed by cobblestone streets and burnt sienna roofs.

I wish it was today. More likely it will be tomorrow, though, based on the mackerel skies.

I imagine that the way Joan feels about drowning is how I feel about burning. I don’t have any particular aversion to fire, but I can’t stand the smell of burning, the char, the hungry gnawing singes that soured the air. Even though Joan always said she likes the smell of a lit cigarette, a cozy fire, or a gentle crackle of a fresh wick, I figured she would hate the smell of that very same element biting its way through ancient support beams and crisply clothed invalids.

The chorus of fire alarms rang out through the moors. They were faster than I thought. It wouldn’t be long until Joan came back from town. What did you do, she’d probably shriek in that shrill way that I hated but tolerated. Because wasn’t that what love was? To stare at the whole of someone, through thick and thin, even when that someone occasionally did things that are so far beneath you or at worst ignite an inner ire that you thought you had quelled years ago?

Take a deep breath, Joan would always say when I’m having a fit. Right now my lungs were starting to fill with something hotter than the cool sea air Joan likes so much. I stare down between my feet at the broken backs of crags and sea stacks bent jaggedly out of the crushing waves that shaped them.

I’m a coward the same. I don’t want to die, though I do want to sink to the bottom of the ocean to pulse, and beat, and float, in silence. But the difference is I know it and face it and try my very best to change it with quivering fingers and knees made of glass.

What would you know about it?

I look up at the sky, waiting for the fulfilled prophecy of rain, still far away, too far away to put the fire out and save the estate. I blink away the smudgy eye floaters before remembering that I’m no longer wearing my glasses. The floaters are unrecognizable to me, an odd eye sore, dancing across my tableau of speckled cotton candy clouds over a forever transforming, reiterating sky.

Is it snow? Or ash? Or skin?