I am scared to cross but my fear doesn’t register with anyone. There’s my father, hands inside threadbare corduroy pockets. Each night, I have to duck my head to go through a hole in a fence. Barbed wire catches my ponytail. I can feel a tantrum rising up, my voice trapped deep inside my body. I am seven.

The river doesn’t speak but pulls me all the same.

*

Things without names are soft and strange. My hand goes toward them against its will. The dough rests and rises in a bowl in the kitchen.

I try to understand the rules of what to touch and what to leave alone.

“It’s resting.”

My mother snaps when I try to look at the thing in the bowl. She won’t let me touch it. It stays still and warm under a tea towel in the dark.

Time passes. Afternoons become night. 

A flick of light then darkness. 

I dream I am twirling on the merry-go-round. Around and around.

I try to understand the rules of holding on.

*

The bridge goes from one place called Nowhere to Another. My father says it goes somewhere but I don’t believe him. The bridge is just beyond Jetty Marsh, the place where I am jettisoned. Each time I go there, I abandon part of myself. I embrace forgetting instead of truth. I am unable to cross the bridge to reach the other side.

The river beneath the bridge is filled with a sediment of clay, so it doesn’t flow or move with the energy of a normal river. The river is still and murky. You can’t make out its exact depth because of its murkiness. The river is always high because of the days and nights of endless rain. My sister calls it the Chicken Soup River after the soup my mother puts in bowls on the table—from a tin with a red label. The tin is taken from the cupboard and opened in silence. The contents are poured into an old saucepan, then watered down. A flicker of a gas flame, small blue light.

The soup, once served, is eaten in small, silent spoonfuls. 

My mother has lost her imagination after all the fighting with my father. She has been decanting drinks from brown bottles into teacups earlier and earlier each day. 

My father says the river and the soup are not the same. He says there’s a clay quarry nearby, a shallow pit in the ground. That’s why the river runs slowly. The clay is excavated and used to make bricks and pipes. Some clay that is dug out gets turned into cups and saucers, even the soup bowls.

I see the river turning to stone. 

*

I was always straight-hipped. Always hiding the edges of me in baggy, oversized clothes. Cross-eyed and sullen, hair like string.

“You’re difficult,” my father says on account of my fear of crossing the bridge. My hair hangs half-way over my face as if it’s a veil. I am seven or eight. 

I wasn’t difficult. I was just afraid. I was a child whose fears and terrors went by unnoticed. 

*

I can’t see properly. I’m supposed to be wearing the blue plastic glasses issued by the National Health Service but I keep losing them. My mother is angry because I lose everything: lunchboxes, rucksacks, my coat, pullovers, and other parts of my school uniform. I always lose the glasses though, which means another trip to the eye doctor. From the front door there’s a gently sloped step that leads into the softly carpeted reception. Large mirrors in ornate gilded frames hang on the wall. There’s a thin, narrow eye chart inside a black frame. The lights are always yellow and bright.

My mother hates it there. For most of my appointments, she drops me off and goes shopping in town. 

“I’ll be back soon." She settles me in the waiting room as if dropping a parcel instead of her daughter. 

“Where is your mother?” the receptionist asks. 

I sit until the question flies away. Staring at the chart, I begin to time travel. 

*

In the dark, small room with the optometrist, bright lights shine into one eye, the other. He asks which is better: this one or the last, this one or the last. The words swim around until my eyes feel blurry. I cry. The doctor lets out a long sigh, taking off his glasses and rubbing the bridge of his nose. But he’s kind and waits for me to collect myself.

“Let’s try again, shall we.”

Sometimes, instead of bright lights, he shows me pictures of small animals in glass circles. He asks me to talk about the animals, to explain which is brighter and clearer than the others. 

I am the daughter who cannot see well.

*

I am someone who knows a story that cannot be told. It’s a truth that has to be washed down the river that is still and turgid. It’s the worst river in which to drown a secret. 

I am from the house upstream, from a dirty cotton nightdress. The bed sheets have holes in them. Something unspeakable is torn apart. 

I travel back to the house of my childhood to rescue the girl who was once me. I find her in different rooms, still holding onto false beliefs of herself.

She takes my hand. I wrap her in my coat. It feels soft and warm.  

*

When I reach the river’s edge I drop things that don’t belong. I try dropping my childhood, but the the river pleads. No, that’s too heavy. I drop sticks.

Stop, you’re slowing me down.

Standing on my tiptoes, I drop handfuls of leaves—crumpled and dried a pretty brown, copper colour. I throw them like confetti.

Stop! The water’s turning red!

I listen to the river and sit still. I imagine different ways to drop things. But the river watches, eyes inside its banks. 

The rivers have eyes like the hills. 

Still, I cannot reach the other side.

*

I’m carrying bread to feed the wild chickens that live by the barn, down the river. They are from when a family lived there, with cows in the hay barn, a donkey and farm cats. Now there are only rats and mice and crows high in the rafters. My father says the crows build nests on the ledges high inside the barn. Nightfall, you can hear them caw to each other. My father says they have their own language.

I tear the bread into pieces and throw it to the chickens. My father stands there impatiently with deep sighs.

There’s a smaller chicken behind the others, black feathers and soft downy plumage. Like me, it’s the youngest. I want to take the chicken home but my father says no because my mother will put it in the oven.

*

On the way home my father is lost in thought. He’s never fully present, always somewhere else. I’m lost in thought, though, too—disappointed for not crossing the bridge. The other side remains a destination I cannot reach, a place of lost memories and lost parts of me that lived things I simply can’t remember. 

At night I return in fitful dreams and episodes of sleepwalking. I wake suddenly, heart racing. I am standing back against the fence, tears running down my face both in the memory and reliving it in real time. My coat catches on the fence. I want to go home but I’m stuck in an ephemerae.

“Oh, hurry up!” my father says. 

But I cannot cross the bridge. 

My sister runs across and then the dog, and then the dark looming shadow of my father. I watch them grow smaller on the other side of the bridge.

I stand idle, suffocating in my own cowardice. 

*

There is always a truth to tell, only sometimes you can’t find it. Sometimes it’s easier to find the lie that needs to be released. The lies are told through time in a voice that communicates feelings of unworthiness and worthlessness. These are the lies to be untold, carried in the darkness of a river, carried through the blackness of a sea.