Anima

Emily Vandenbroeck

Life and all of life courses through you. Birds fly across the dimming sky above you, and you feel that longing; to be as free as they are up there. Their migration is silent across the span of your vision, and you turn your body to track their movement. You imagine that there is an immense sense of calm for those birds, between the beating of their wings—in the moments they are suspended; still, gliding. 

They are staring up at the sky, neck craned to reveal the cartilage ridges of their oesophagus through skin and, if you look close enough, the jugular and its pulse. Their mouth is ajar, as if in a daze. Their eyes remain still, trained on an object above them. Ever so slightly, their head turns to track movement.

You look down and with a sensation of falling, find yourself seated on grass—right leg crossed under the left. You and your kind have flocked here. You realise that, in this place, you are as solitary as the birds you saw above. A solitary being, alluded to be a part of a collective. Each bird is one within the formation. You realise that everything you do in a partnership or collective, is not done together, but in tandem. You feel the grass between your fingertips and the snap of its stems as you pull. You look over to your friend’s face and realise the beauty in them; there is beauty in knowing someone. 

They are cross-legged on the grass, part of a circular formation made up of other cross-legged people. Their knees touch those of the person beside them, but there is a barrier—their knees knock and they cannot get any closer; they cannot merge or mould. They pick at the grass with their fingers, and look up at their friend’s face, eyes softening. 

You blink and their face appears before you once more, but it’s dark. Lights flash behind you, illuminating the glass of their eyes, their cheeks, forehead, the tip of their nose, and their smile. You feel music throbbing under your feet, beating against your bones with its invisible force. You find yourself mirroring their expression of glee, begin to bend your knees one at a time to feel yourself bouncing, as if your movement makes up the music. Or maybe the music makes up you? You feel yourself shrinking as your mind takes in the ever-expanding atmosphere around you—the ceiling so high above your head, the edge of your vision swelling infinitely into darkness. Your friend takes you by the arm and turns you toward the dancefloor. Hundreds of faces shine red and green and blue and white, eyes on the DJ, who you could mistake for the gathering crowd’s deity. Nobody moves but to lift a drink to their mouth, or to hold another by their face or ass or waist, or to suck on a vape or bob along with the rest of the crowd. As you press into the space between bodies, you feel their sweat, sticky, and smell the heat on their skin. You notice that despite this light feeling inside, you, and everyone around you, are tethered to the ground by gravity—you cannot rise above the crowd for air, there is only hope that you can swim out to its edges in time. 

Their body is almost identical to the rest of the mass in movement, but their head is swivelling on their neck as if it were a compass needle confused by infrastructure. The body never stops moving, but at times the eyes will lock onto something, and their head will still, brows quirked. Their friend takes their arm and leads them into the crowd, where they disappear as if through to another world, beneath a blanket punctured only by light and sound.

You look down at your hands; one holds a serrated knife, the other an apple. You notice there is light streaming through a window before you. There’s the smell of melted butter, eggs, and bacon in the air. You cut the apple; first into big pieces, then smaller. You put the slices into a container and take another apple from the fruit bowl. You peel the sticker off and notice how the sound of it becoming unstuck is similar to the sound of taking a bite—teeth against the shine of its skin. You begin to slice this apple in swift forward to backward movements of the knife. The singular apple turns into multiple, smaller pieces of itself, easier for consumption. You sink the knife into the final piece, pushing the knife forward, and pulling it back at the same time you realise your thumb is in the blade’s path. It all happens abruptly and you had a rhythm going, so, when you feel the teeth of it bite into your skin, you continue, as if moving the knife through the crisp of the apple and not the soft flesh of your thumb. The blade slices clean through, which you find surprising. You put down the knife, cradle your injured hand with the guilty one—as if the hand wielding the weapon had not realised its actions until the damage was done, and it now pleads forgiveness from its victim. You dare the wound to bleed, and when it does, you simply stare, gauging how much. You stutter to your dad, who stands stirring sugar into his coffee, that you’ve cut your finger. He tells you that it was a silly thing to do and you decide to act. You take a tissue and suppress the bleeding. You run it under cold water. Your dad passes you a band aid, which you apply after drying your thumb. You find that your left hand is near obsolete; any movement of your fingers also puts strain on your thumb. 

They’re in the kitchen now, by the window. They’re slicing an apple with a certain ferocity. They deposit the apple into a container and grab another from a fruit bowl full of overripe bananas, lemons, and apples. They cut the apple into quarters, and then eighths. On the final slice, in a motion too quick to see, the knife cuts into their skin. It isn’t until the blood begins to leak from the skin in one large drop that they do or say anything. After informing their father, who stands nearby, of the injury they take a tissue and apply it to the cut. They remove the tissue repeatedly, peering closely at the thumb, the tissue. They run the wound under cold water, dry it with the same tissue, and skilfully apply a band aid. Their hand seems to operate now without the thumb, though this is not entirely possible and so they grimace at slight movement. 

You’re driving your car; left foot resting, whilst the right presses on the accelerator. You sit with your back reclined, one hand on the wheel. The other makes contact only at the fingertips, elbow resting on the centre-console. You imagine what it would look like if someone were to view just the body here—the visible physicality of the car removed, but its concept and force remaining. Before the roundabout, a crow with a wing dragging along the ground waddles across the road. You slow in time but lose sight of the bird. You sit up in your seat trying to peer over the bonnet. The crow appears on the nature strip to your left, and you continue your journey with relative peace of mind; a healthy conscious. 

They’re in the car, approaching the roundabout. Slowly, a crow with a broken wing hobbles across the road. There is a high-pitched screech as they apply the brakes. The bumper of their car stops mere centimetres from the crow, who continues as if it had known all along that they would stop. They sit up in their seat, eyes darting from left to right over the dashboard, the same way Grandma’s eyes dart across the page through her multifocal glasses. They slouch back into their seat with relief when they spot the crow hopping onto the curb. They soften their grip on the steering wheel and gradually accelerate, watching the crow in the rear-view. 

The air is fresher out here. You’re trekking down a mountain. The path is rocky but either side is an infinite line of trees. You know that not so far away lies suburbia, with its concrete and brick and glass and steel. Your friend follows close to you, copying your steps, which find stable rocks and the sections of gravel least likely to slide beneath your feet. Sometimes you get too comfortable in your ability. You take a step and the ground moves with your downward trajectory, causing your stomach to drop and your arms to flail as a shriek escapes from your throat. Gravity is always trying to drag you down. You manage to stay upright and laugh to your friend, saying something like ‘that was close’, only to take another precarious step in your distraction and find yourself slipping—for longer this time, as if you were skiing. You land with your ass a centimetre from the jagged terrain, a hand thrown out to catch yourself is punctured by gravel. Your friend asks if you’re okay, and you laugh, say yes, because you are. 

They are on their way down a mountain, legs focused to prevent tipping forward and finding themselves at the bottom of the hill sooner than expected. Their friend trails behind them, slower in their cautiousness. There’s the sound of gravel sliding underfoot, and they tilt backwards, but regain balance. In laughing it off, they find themselves, again, falling. This time, their hand makes contact with the ground. They’re still for a moment, one arm supporting their weight while the other remains suspended. They laugh again, stand, brushing off their hand and behind, even though it never met the ground.

In your dreams, you’re either falling or flying. When you wake, you find that, after mulling it over, both instances are impossible. Each time your body jolts on impact of imagined contact with the ground, you find that your body has been laid upon solidity all along. Unless your bed was to dissolve from beneath you by some miracle, you would not fall. When you wake with the light feeling of flying, there is a quiet eagerness thrumming within you. With the realisation that your anatomy and Earth’s gravitational force will never allow such a skill, this ambition drains out of you quicker than blood from a severed artery. So, instead you lie in bed and think of your day just passed or the day ahead, and the month following, and the year after. The ceiling brightens as the sun peaks over the mountain ranges. 

They lay in bed, as if a corpse. They respire slowly, blinking in the creeping light of morning. Both arms are still, by their side, above the duvet which, in turn, hide the body underneath whilst also disclosing its shape in shadow and light.

You slept with the window ajar, to keep your bedroom from becoming stuffy with breath and stale air. It also means that you wake with the birds; a cacophony of different songs, distinguishable from each other if you listen close. You missed the sound. For some reason the birds don’t seem to sing so much anymore. 

Emily Vandenbroeck is a creative writing student at RMIT. She was born and raised in Ringwood. For her Bowen Street press submission, she has written an experimental creative nonfiction piece about the freedom of movement and the body, inspired by Animate Loading 1 by Riana Head-Toussaint. She writes contemporary fiction and has a strong interest in memoir writing. She enjoys reading and running, and is the mother to various house plants and two dogs.