Dagmar's Daughter - By Kim Echlin Page 0,58

scavenging the shore after the ice storm found him, he was still alive, but they couldn’t budge the tree that had cracked under the weight of its icy limbs and fallen and crushed his right leg. They put their ears to his lips and felt his breath. Some call it destiny, some call it fate. Donal lay trapped under that tree two nights and two days and thought about certain things. He knew that one act leads to another and that he could only act on what had happened before. In the judgement of others he had many choices, but he did not. He could only choose as he did, the web wrapped more and more tightly around him. Since the first time he heard her play there was no choice. And then she wouldn’t play with him any more. And she left him. But all his meaning was now tied up with her and with playing with her. He believed that she had delivered him to himself and he was responsible to his own music. The difference was that his music was now their music, and yet he could not bring himself to go looking for her. And because of this, he might die or he might live, but if he lived it would only be by leaving his right leg pinned under a tree fallen randomly in an ice storm.

Peering up through her own icy hair Nyssa heard the familiar voice.

Girl, awake! Keening time.

What is this? said Nyssa, trying to raise her head.

The bony woman stood above her where she had struggled her way to the hole lined with blackberry earth. Frost-bite ate her cheeks. Through the frozen glooming Nyssa saw Moll’s legs with her single good eye. Moll sat with filthy socks over her hands, her thumbs poked through holes once made by toes. There was no smell in that cold.

Moll tugged at Nyssa’s frozen feet and said, My feet are froze. Give us your boots.

Nyssa lay trying to move her fingers and Moll tore off her brocade boots.

What? moaned Nyssa.

Quiet, said Moll. Inside a woman is a wonder! She slapped her thigh.

Nyssa shifted, trying to get her other shoulder out of the ice. Looked for shelter for her naked feet. She could not tell whether she was looking into Moll’s blank black eyes or the starless storm sky. Things were flat and she could see nothing from her right eye.

Everything happens between a woman’s legs, Moll said. Out came my baby, nose curled forward in its little sack and couldn’t breathe. My little mousebaby and I turned it over and counted its tiny arms and legs, one two three four. I dropped it into the sea and went back to the grub house and stared at a picture of a Venus with broken-off arms.

Moll whooped then, pulled in her arms and swung the empty sleeves to both sides like a pinwheel.

Look, girl, she cried, no arms to hold no baby. She craned her head to stare at the ice still falling from the sky. She said, Weak skin’s my home. Your mother made this storm, and she won’t stop it.

She sucked in her cheeks, pinched her lips like a fish, stared at Nyssa, her nose frostbitten. She said, The cracker berries gone. No one brings me a groaning cake. All the universe is between a woman’s legs. Sure as worms.

She looked down on Nyssa’s feet, naked without her boots. She took off Nyssa’s sweater and pants and socks and hat. She squatted over the girl curled on her side, head tucked into her knees. She judged against her.

Nyssa heard Moll and did not move. She could not think what had made her set out as she had to come here. She was only sure that she might die if she could not rouse herself but each time she tried to rise she fell back. To venture to where there is no memory or conscience or any of the things by which human beings try to order what has no order is to go where life is forever altered by neither reason nor compassion. Nyssa was so frozen that she no longer knew if she was dying or dreaming or already hanging dead like a skinned rabbit from a meathook. She was divested of what she had been and did not yet know if she would become something other.

It is a condition of language to search for meaning in its most indistinct syllables. In the babble of