– Shauna Gilligan
Her mouth gapes
…like a letterbox of happiness, the man who takes her breath away says with a smile.
*
It was her stubbornness that pushed her on. It was her love of shapes and the consideration of taste that made her search. She’d always loved honey, and in a book found in a library, had spent hours staring at the beauty. The beauty of honeycombs. Later, as an older girl, she discovered that the name she was looking for was hexagonal.
*
Her mouth gapes
…as she considers the wonder of research, and the surprise of the ideal when it appears in nature.
*
She wore her hair back, tied with a black silk ribbon, practical with a polished sheen. Her eyes were bright, and blue, and eager. She rolled the place word around her mouth, like a marble. London joined the pollenous mass of words tumbling through her mind. The contrast of the r of her French governess with the n of the German with the smiling eyes and downcast mouth. It was a different place, for a girl of 13, and for her father. She felt his life made sense there, the prestige appointment: a Chair of Geometry. She wanted to please him, and prove herself more than a girl who smiled at the wonder of the world.
*
Her mouth gapes
…old now, sighing as she pulls her comfortable skirt over her face, she thinks she is too eager. The temptation of the sparkle of the French water in the heat, longing to feel the coolness against the parched skin of her feet. This is the last spark of energy.
*
She’d never cared too much about what people thought because she was already following the thread of possibilities permanently racing through her mind. She inhabited her passions fully when they began in a whirl of colours, before becoming shapes and forms that she could recognise, and question.
*
Her mouth gapes
…with the coldness of the air, and the surprise of the pain when it hits her lungs. She sees, as she resists sleep, the shape of her lungs, the oblong, the curve and the ease with which they expand and contract. She finally drifts into the lull of sleep.
*
When she had a shape and a form that she recognised she’d dream about it. Toss and turn. Her husband, in the early days of marriage, had proclaimed her impossible, but he loved her still. They slept in separate beds with a wooden table between them and she was pleased that she could have him near while keeping her thoughts moving. He loved her still and understood her curiosity though not how her mind worked. His mind – and this is why she desired him so much – needed to feel. The contour of the skin, how parts of the body fit together perfectly, how we move with grace from birth – but also how sometimes, life squeezes that grace out of us – to death. The cold knife of the surgeon beside the heat of the flesh. He was excellent at repairing what had gone wrong: she knew this by his reputation and smiled widely at him when he walked in the door exhausted and spent.
*
Her mouth gapes
…with the stray fibres from her skirt, and the wait, that terrible wait, for the rescue that never comes.
*
When he went so soon – for he could not fix disease nor stop time – she did not remarry. As her twenty-year-old heart grieved, her thoughts grew and she felt the need to write them down. His name that was still hers felt right as she penned it beneath articles, as she designed experiments, the pencil moving swiftly across the page. Character moved her to investigate the interactive nature of thought and behaviour; the development of the person. She was surprised by the way her mind evolved neatly and in tune with society. The wholeness of things is what attracted her attention – how science was both moral and a philosophy, how nature was both perfect and flawed, how women were delightfully as able as men.
*
Her mouth gapes
…at the gap in memory: how easily forgotten, she merges with the landscape, how these two weeks she lies, alone, her skirt still covering the mouth that gapes but does not breathe.
Shauna Gilligan
Shauna Gilligan lives in Kildare with her family and a black and white cat called Lucky. She writes short and long stories and is interested in the depiction of historical events in fiction, and creative processes. She is currently working on her second novel set in Mexico.