The Disassembling Woman
Fiction by Sumitra Singam & Cole Beauchamp
Each morning, you shape me into a new configuration. Each night you destroy me. How did it begin, this reshaping? This disassembling? How will it end?
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Today, I am as insubstantial as the sky, as blue as a puff of air. You are the sun, rising to paint me with light, shaping me.
You barely notice me, except when I cannot hold the wet and release great drops of grief. Below, umbrellas unfurl, flapping batwings blocking me out so that I slide to the ground, pool where I am not wanted.
I plead with you, my voice a distant grumble, our atmosphere unstable. People consult barometers, thermometers, hygrometers, disconcerted by our dysfunction. Your negative charge bolts through me. Darkness falls. Night turns. There is no me without you.
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This morning, an anaerobic garden blooms on my skin, grey-brown fungi hallucinating life. Darkness disperses as you approach, inky black to indigo to a coral wash, flushing me with the warmth that radiates from your face – beloved, despised. Your fingertips brush the skim of green that I have become, frilly laced grey and brown of lichen.
And how is it that I rise to your touch, reassemble, disassemble as you command? Your command is all I know; but after you scrape and obliterate me, still I dream, neon bright, in phosphorescent streams of colour, a fantasy of self-creation.
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Now, I am chamotte and grog, slop and slurry. I am clay that is unformed, unfashioned. You take me as I am, uncut from the wheel, to meet your friends.
In their home, the woman is fine porcelain. She is a vase, curved and slender. Her bone china glows celadon, lit from within by a saintly pallor, a selflessness that gives her shape and solidity. She stands, smiling, answering eruditely but briefly. Her elegance is in her restraint. Then her husband fetches himself a drink. Just him, not her.
Perhaps there is a hairline crack in the glaze now. Perhaps her smile tenses. I cannot be sure. I am not sure, until she looks at me, her eyes a kiln fire, tongues of flame beckoning me, calling me to take my own shape, resolve my form. You step between us, block her from view.
Now her husband is luting her to him. Yet her eyes seek mine, yet she shows me the kintsugi in her. She cleaves from him, shows me the beauty in the cracks she has joined, edged in gold. You lead me away, but it is too late. I have seen. I have seen her magnificence. Her re-creation.
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This time when I reassemble, I am blossom and leaf - the fusion of hundreds of compressed dreams and desires. You monitor my pH balance and bathe me in nutrients, careful fingers stroking my burgeoning fruit.
Planted in regulation rows, I am one of many, safe from the prevailing wind. We sprout pups nourished by our root systems, endure their nestle and poke. The higher they grow, the less you visit, casually checking my soil for acidity and sauntering off. Soon I smell other gardens on your clothes, the cloying scent of jasmine with her willowy, clinging tendrils. Husky honeysuckle, with her tubular flowers and long, flexible stems.
I am abandoned but not alone. My sister plants and I tend to each other, looking for signs of disease, for mealy worms that feed off our sap. They say together we are enough, and I want to believe. Still, my leaves discolor with discontent. I die back, wilting as I remember your whispered promises. You go and go and go until there is only one thing left to do. I twist my pups free from my browned leaves and wilt to the soil.
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With the new dawn, you are the hammer, me a sheet of metal, waiting for the blows to fall.
You say it is simple. That I am yours. That I will always be yours. You vibrate with this certainty, this duality. You. Me. Shaper. Shaped. Master. Mate.
But with each strike I realize – I am the one constantly reborn. And I have created new life, cell dividing into cells. I feel how, under force, metal can be both latticed solid and flowing liquid. I see endless multitudes, the places where two things meet, the possibilities in between. Fractals, ever repeating, hiding a complexity within. I see self-creation, despite pain. I see a vase reformed, made anew. I remember the kintsugi. Other women have cracked. Other women have reformed. A new possibility sparks.
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I have made a floor for myself. I made it with the bits of me you broke down, ground down. This floor holds a womb, my own, into which I curl amphibiously. In the night, everything is replenished, a soft wash of rain covering my lanugo. In the morning, soaked, fed, replete, I birth myself with a great gushing of waters.
I am sleek, a quicksilver fish darting in this ocean of my own making. I flick my tail and the wave grows. It brings the shoal to me and now I am one of many once again. This time I feel our power. We dart about, flicking the tide higher and higher, swallowing the world with us. We are a cleansing, a silvery mirror held up to you.
And you, how you fret. Why? We have only given you back your own fear, your desperate need to shape, slice, scrape, obliterate, hammer, master me. You cannot feel the whole – only terror – but we feel the great, soft holding.
We are fish and ocean. We are sky and earth, animal and mineral. We hold our cracks and fissures with love. We are in our own selves, and within each other. We are every mote of water, and we are the whole vast, unending sea. Our waves lap at every shore, our tides pull at all consciousness. We are in it all, and we contain it all.
END
Cole Beauchamp and Sumitra Singam met on an online writing course and became friends over WhatsApp despite their incompatible time zones (Uk/Australia). Neither of them live in their country of birth. Their late night/early morning convos on WhatsApp run the gamut, from infertility and menopause to growing pineapples in England to rejection bingo. They wish they could invent a time machine and go back to 2002 when they both lived in London, so they could have real-life chats over chai. They have written two collaborative pieces, one of which they feel okay to share with the world (sorry, Leila and Raj but the world will never meet you).
