As Cattle in Winter
This is the first two sections of the first story in a short story collection I am developing. All feedback is welcomed. Thanks.
ONE: As Cattle in Winter
PAGHAM BEACH — PRESENT — 1st YEAR
It loomed like a curse, and I thought of it as a cold indomitable mountain. My limbs numb themselves with hot anticipation.
We gathered as a unit for the first time after our dejected pillar had passed. Father, as I called him, was a difficult man. His true love had been ripped from the cradles of his compassion, as a baby is snipped from its maternal cord. My sisters and I were bystanders to this crime, simply eyes to bear witness to the erosion of a sensitive, ignorant man. Had I been more academic as a child, I would’ve attributed my fixation to the idea of devolution, solely to him. Sadly, I was as ignorant to one’s natural emotional instincts as he was, yet I was five and he was 38. His fists could clench with bones hardened by tragedy, mine were clumps of blunt flesh and meat yet to understand true male anger. If he were to have an outburst, it wouldn’t have been at Sylvia, Joan or me. It would’ve been to Annie. If I were to have an outburst, I would’ve been left to cry it off.
Those memories were recklessly recounted on this beach, just us three siblings this year. Emotionally poignant memories, but contextually void ones at that. These memories serve divergent functions for each one of us, but Annie’s memories were especially effective at winning us over. The substitute mother she was, she felt that her connection to father was an tether bound by flimsy floss, doomed to be deemed as nothing but a grand catharsis to Annie, his long-awaited death.
As much as Annie may say, he was not a bad man. He served us as a traditional father would, his mould of parenting fit as it contextually should have and we shouldn’t have expected anything else. He was the subject of cruel conditions that surely would’ve driven any living subject to have such a distain toward the outside world. Excitement lingered as oxygen does, there was no wonder to his world anymore. Everything necessary to live became a mechanism, exploration did not excite him. Only numbness excited him, that is to say, nothing excited him. He wished to be alone until he died, and that is what he tried to perfect. Annie stood in his way, as she should have, and she welcomed the trauma with an oldest sister-mother hybrid mentality.
From these recounted memories of Annie’s, this became clear to me. Annie enjoyed being the punching bag. She collected leverage over us recklessly, sometimes inciting them herself just for the thrill of knowing she was the worst out of us. I’m not sure Sylvia or I saw it this way, it was not a ‘No I’m Spartacus!’ competition to us, we were too young. Joan saw it as naïve as one’s impressionable eyes could have.
Joan admired Annie, as much as she admired our poor mother. Annie was certainly fortunate on the aesthetics department; she bore gorgeous plump cheeks scorched with a red hue. Her eyes were a bright blue, her lashes naturally floating dark and long above. She kept herself well maintained, her hair always a deep oak brown that dangled itself from her broad shoulders. She hit the stone wall of adulthood with a force so hard that she was noticeably bruised more so than her peers. She appeared experienced and cut from harsh cloth. Attributed to her natural maternal strengths, she excelled in academics, specifically philosophy. She learned many lessons about morality and freedom, her function as a female, artistic expression and the true meaning of one’s life. In this function, she became a gloater. Sylvia and I were too young to keep our heads straight, so she berated Joan with her knowledge instead. This tattoo loomed over Joan, one could easily see she loved to hurl into Annie’s pouch of philosophical stories the moment the cold became airborne. In this way, I care for Joan much more than I care for Annie. Annie has always been heavy with herself, I have never wished to apply my own weight, only my eyes.
Pagham, as a place, is extraordinarily uninteresting. We discovered this place under the guise of an emotional episode driven by the grief of our father. I was three when this happened, Sylvia would have been one, Joan Six and Annie Ten. We were ejected from our rooms, stood to dreary eyed attention in the damp hallway, our dressing gowns loosely assembled around our waists as we were ordered to march down the stairs, Sylvia clung to my arm. We rummaged around the dark in the back of the car for a light, shovelled in there like cattle and told to go back to sleep. Sylvia and Annie managed to sleep, Joan was terrified and I was dormant. We arrived at Pagham at 7 in the morning, to the dreary sight of pale graffitied shops, nature-taken front gardens and the dreadfully stony beach. Our father did not say anything, his eyes smoothed over the rising sun as a bow caresses the skinny strings of a ripened viola. This gaze was an emotional timestamp, I felt myself reciting this story at every inconvenience, as a nervous choir boy gazes to his harsh parents at a recital.
We now visit this rugged landscape on the 1st day of every year, however hungover we are, we vow to be here. As both a respect to our unknown mother, and to our crucial father.
CHAPTER ONE — HOME — PAST
Back before the streetlamps come on…. Annie used to tell me. My father would recount his childhood living room, dank and poised. The sixties were different, the sixties were harsh, the sixties brought me up… he would say. I wouldn’t understand. The phone would ring, my father would jump, both then and now. I hadn’t the faintest clue why, but I was an inquisitive child! ‘Why?’ must have been why my sisters began to resent their chubby little brother. Annie seemed to know the answers but hesitated to tell. ‘When you are my age’ and all the usual quickness. Joan didn’t seem to know but acted as if she did, her plastic-ness fainted upon her mercilessly then and has seemed to formulate the pavements of Joan’s most obliviously discovered roads. Sylvia did not know and did not act as if she knew. She is the youngest, unfortunately just a baby during the prime of our family years. If she is to recall that old house now, she is sure to be taken via a bumpy, rugged earth both scorched and dried with assumptions and opinions, especially if she were to listen to Annie about the whole thing.
Get maxestainforth’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
I hadn’t grown up to be much of a talker myself. I felt akin to my monkey counterparts, using my grapple more than my word. In Annie’s rule I had felt stripped of much expression. If there was gossip from me, it fell deaf. My news came from a younger mind, certainly devoid of any spiritual meaning. I felt like a lone reporter on the red carpet, masked by thousand-pound camera set ups, flashy logo-equipped microphones. To Annie, my thought was nothing but ammunition. Everything argued was lost, no matter the width of my convincing. Joan had unconsciously equipped herself heavy with the learnings of Annie’s academic preaching. In this unfortunate effort, Joan had stripped her individuality similarly to me. Sylvia was happily ignorant, being too young to be swayed by anything but food and warmth. As we grew, Sylvia defined herself with a void. She chose an abyss to represent herself, cross-witnessing via a morbid silence. Yet, I’d say this individuality was to an advantage, I became self-sufficient, in thought mostly. My utility did poke its petite head round the mostly closed door, despite a moral rope trying to keep it in.
When I was four, we sat for a Sunday roast. At the head of the table sat Annie, who argued with my father viciously that she just had to sit there, as our mother used to. Joan perked up to the left of Annie, Sylvia babbled opposite her. I was next to Sylvia, often having the pleasure of wiping her mouth when food ran from her jaws, my father was opposite me. His head always bowed when eating, a ritualistic curvature in his spine that I was sure meant he wouldn’t swallow the food he had spent years trying to be interested in. Conversation lingered precariously. Annie would spearhead the ordeal, as a royal figure must in holy halls, starting what was simply filler for the silence. Annie never liked music much, nor have any appreciation for the arts, so we ate to the aloof tempo of her voice. She refused television, slandering the very nature of being consumed via screen. The radio sat far from my reaches, sitting lonesome in the garage which was detached from the home. Not until I was completely alone in adulthood did I find where Annie kept the keys. Whilst eating, Annie’s retelling of her day became a buffer on time to me, I had no interest in politics or finances in any sense. I hadn’t the slightest clue how to pay for a mortgage or finance a car, I almost don’t know even now.
Joan would only perk down when Annie spoke of mother, of which was normally a correlation between herself and mother. Sylvia brought all intellect to a halt at the dinner table, normally because she was either choking, throwing up or throwing a strop. I enjoyed these tantrums; they became so disruptive I could eat through the shouting with my head down like my father did and really push through the meal. In fact, I relied on them. Once, I had put a small metal ball I had broken from a toy train into Sylvia’s food in order for her to choke. I never meant to harm her, her utility was certainly important, but in my youthful wisdom I imagined just a few pumps would eject the object from her throat. Plus, she probably would have choked anyways but I’ve never been much of a gambler myself.
If father were to say anything at all during dinner, it would have been a formality or a goodbye. He always locked himself inside the living room before work and after dinner. I never interacted with him much when he was alone. If there were anything to know about me, Annie would’ve told him and he seemed content in that world. As a family, we occupied a small space of only about 5 rooms. Two were bedrooms, one was the kitchen, one was the dining room, and the other was the living room, which ought to be another bedroom as my father had adapted it into ‘his’ room for the most part. He and Annie were the only ones who ever got true isolation. Annie had her own room, Father had his, Joan, Sylvia and I occupied the remaining bedroom. It naturally was very cramped, with one small bed for Joan and a bunk bed for Sylvia and I. A singular window split the room in two most mornings, the curtain had always been late for its shift it seemed. Why we didn’t sack it remains a mystery. Moist winters would infect the room, a black mold lived above my head and would trickle into my airwaves with a sly dryness in the mornings, unbeknownst to me at that time.
Sharing a room with a growing woman proved to be an unobtainable gossip it seemed only I had the answer to amongst my friends. I remember shuddering in freight at the sight of Joan crying violently as she grew. I often had to clean after her and so got used to seeing blood quickly. I’d like to say it formed an emotional maturity in many spaces in my late teens, yet my first love tested those lessons greatly. I am sure she will resurrect herself in some aloof anecdote, but I’ll save myself the descriptions for now.
By age 15, I’d say I was grown enough to have my own room, so was Joan, but money was tight and we lived off what we already had. My father had just started to become ill by then, I could say now. Only Annie and himself knew of the illness, they had chosen to keep it from our room for what I can only speculate was protection. Annie had always acted like a woman, but it was visually very clear she was an early adopter of the emotions and hormones one’s body stores in shadowed corners. Sylvia was just turning 13 and had seemed to miss out on Annie’s inheritance as she lay quietly in bed every weekend. She remained very quiet until I saw her last, when she said what were her final words to me, of which I regretfully do not recall.
Joan had certainly grown up to be the most troubled sister of them, as she would sway unnaturally across the ballroom floor, underlit by flashing colours that kamikaze onto her growling sobs as she awoke from her sleep to act a painfully gorgeous performance nightly. I remained a spectator of her plays, being on the top bunk. I would lean myself over little banister of the bed like a curious man does in the gods of a broken theatre. Sylvia got the front row tickets but preferred to listen instead of watch. Her plays consisted of a fiery dance, the dance I remember because it was always the opening act. Her hands would scrunch the duvet, yanking them off her as the lights rose up. That thump of duvet on wooden floor was the signal that it was starting. I would lean over to gaze upon the outline of my foetal sister, curled up and wincing with frustration. The silence after the duvet was drawn would be slowly followed by the gnawing of blunt fingernails against thin belly skin, an itching of undeniable animal rage. Act Two bursts in with an energy that put Act One to shame! I remember one showing I saw contained the most curiously beautiful coincidence. As Act Two began, Joan took centre stage with a confidence marred by sorrow… her wiry, bumpy surface would rise as it always did, she took her hands to her hair as cattle mine through straw, rinsing its root with a clamping bite. Just as her hands excavate her sprawling dead field of hair, the curtains ploughed out of its natural position to allow the bright full moon to dawn its searchlight upon Joan. Her body quickly embedded itself in my mind. Her pale skin was torched with scratches, cuts, marks and bruises that desecrated upon its dry colour. I felt as a soldier does upon finding the missing platoon lying flat and lifeless, face down in the fields raped and tortured by the brutality of a conflict. Her breasts hung slightly, cursed with the same fate as her torso, both cut and unclean from nipple to underneath it’s mound. The cut was rigid, unprofessional, but certainly ripened with age. Its red frozen river swayed to a tumorous black with intensity.
Finally, as the curtains drew their winking eyes back to their resting position, I saw Joan end her performance by grappling her arms around both shoulders in a hug, before nuzzling her mouth against her hand, kissing it softly and then biting it before plummeting back into an unrestful slumber.
Joan’s plays would revisit her throughout the day; it became clear to me. She detested moving up to the smart, peckish black jumpers at school when she had ascended the ranks and become a senior student. Her sudden rejection of this ascension made her dejected from her social side as well. I think her friend Jeanie noticed the change first, after she had chosen to come to mufti day in a polka dot red dress, white knee socks and a pair of polished black shoes. Her hair swing violently in pigtails, she stood gleefully young amongst her grown peers. She detested the boys and their changes, their greasy hairs sprawling from their oily faces in unpredictable patterns. Their yellowing teeth, gnawed and shifted by cigarettes and sugar focused diets. One boy, Milo, had forced Joan home after hurling abuse at her appearance, something along the lines of ‘This isn’t The Sound of Music’ sent her into a panicked frenzy. It seemed like melodrama, and Joan was sent to the medical office. She cried so harshly her skin developed a permanent redness where the river ran down and dried with an ache. She shuddered and clattered around the medical office, the poor young boy who had bumped his head fell an unfortunate victim to her tantrums. She only left when Annie arrived, writhing.
I remember this specific day because Annie refused to walk to school twice, once for Joan and once for me. I trotted home alone, unaware of Joan’s problem. As the door floated open, Joan’s winces were visible in daylight for the first time. Her foetal wrenching was clear, yet she tried to block out the image with the curtains. They failed at their job as per usual, and her paleness almost shone at me with help from the lines of light from the failing curtains. I climbed into my hideout and assumed my nightly spectating position, casually leaving an omission of help from my pondering shut mouth. Dinner came by but Joan had fallen asleep by then, leaving Annie to become even more frustrated at Joan for her unusual antics, and so we ate without her. Upon returning to my room with Sylvia, Joan was gone. Sylvia had fallen victim to my advice before, so I decided to lie and say she had gone to a friend’s house. I am not sure why I didn’t tell Sylvia the truth, nor Annie or my ignorant father, but a burning curiously had lit itself underneath me. I waited for hours, into the heavy night, before my curiosity had turned to panic and I woke Annie up.
We started the search around the suburb, to the play park and the local football field. The social club was closed; the streetlamps had turned off. All we used was a small flashlight to light the street. Annie’s anger hadn’t settled, and she thumped the ground as she walked with me. She had put this disappearance down to the fact Annie didn’t allow Joan to have a friend over for dinner the week before, but I thought it was something else, of which I did not voice. The falling temperature led us back towards our house, where Joan sat on the step.
I bit her tongue upon seeing her, Annie shouted to ask where she had been. Annie stormed towards Joan, as Joan’s scorched eyes lifted themselves to reach Annie’s turret gaze, Annie reeled back her hand like a cannon and slapped Joan. I gasped but froze. Annie stared Joan’s body down.
Annie unlocked the door and stood over Joan’s body. I helped Joan up; we did not share a word. She wriggled back into her bed and fell into a sob. I decided not to spectate this night. I fell asleep as the weekend descended upon our house. Joan hardly moved that weekend. As Monday rolled over and Joan still faced the grim walls of our bedroom, we called an ambulance.
I didn’t go to the hospital. Anna did. My father didn’t. Sylvia was asleep.
She stayed wherever they took her for two months, Anna came back the day of and announced she wouldn’t be returning. The leader lays down the law, so I was taught.
