MORNING SERIAL
THE landscape is loud again: the river seeming to rush and roar, the birds shrieking, the crash of a deer through the shrubs. Everything is moving and loud except for Anton. He lies, open-mouthed and rubbery, at her knees. She opens her own mouth wide and leans down, sealing her lips around his, awkwardly and with enough pressure to bruise them both. She pinches his nose hard and then blows, glancing out of the corner of her eye to see if his chest responds, if she has enough air for them both. Five times she forces her own frantic gasps of oxygen down into his lungs. There is still no splutter, no flicker of eyelashes.
She leans over him then, tearing his shirt open and exposing his chest, pale and almost hairless bar a whisper of dark curls on his sternum directly between his nipples. She makes a doublehanded fist and leans her entire weight onto that point, forcing his ribs to bend under the pressure, counting out loud. ‘One, two, three, four, five, six, seven,’ the rhythm and the number something to focus on. When she gets to thirty she drops back to his mouth and forces another two breaths into him. She is on her second cycle of chest compressions when she simultaneously feels and hears something crack beneath her clasped hands. Bile rises in her throat, but she grits her teeth and continues. ‘Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen.’
He coughs. It’s a choking, gurgling, wet noise, like an old man with bronchitis. She stops and rolls him, holding his chin and tilting his head so the water can drain out. He is spasming, each cough a full body seizure, then violent retching that forces the swallowed water out of his stomach and throat until he is dry heaving and drooling. She wipes his mouth with her sleeve and settles him on his side, watching each rise of his ribcage as if it might be his last. Every time his chest moves she herself takes in a breath in synch, releasing the tension on the exhale and feeling it build again as she waits for his next intake of air.
The Half Life of Snails by Philippa Holloway is published by Parthian at £15