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for bleeding so I thought, perhaps I will still bleed even though I am dead now. I wasn’t sure so I tried it out when one of the slave women had died, I pushed a knife through her skin and into her flesh but she didn’t bleed a nd her face didn’t move and her eyes stayed open and wouldn’t look at me. She was dead and I wanted to be like her, but she wouldn’t tell me how; I sat beside her all night and talked to her and asked her and asked her and then I became angry with her and shouted at her, and I pushed the knife into her because she couldn’t feel anything and I wanted to be like that and she wouldn’t tell me how.
    In the morning my mother’s brother who is my uncle found me and he laughed at what I had done and said, you have come too late, I killed her first. And he kicked the dead body and he laughed again and took me away with him. And all the time while he lay on top of the body that I knew then wasn’t mine I thought, I have become like him, he killed a woman with cruelty and then I killed her again; he has killed me and he feels nothing of what he does and soon I will feel nothing at all but I will still not be dead.
    The piece of slate has fallen to the ground, and I watch the hand snake towards it and pick it up again, and I watch as the pointed end is pressed into the skin of the arm, of the thigh, I watch as the hand scrapes the ragged edge over the shinbone and the back of the other hand; but this time I feel nothing at all, and I hear nothing at all as they come to fetch me in for the night when it’s dark. I see their mouths opening and closing and see them point at the piece of slate and while one of them tightens the ropes so the fingers won’t be able to find their way out again, another bends down and picks up the slate and flings it into the water, your water Arganhell; will you look after it for me because I will need it again tomorrow.

    * * *

    This day is cold, there is no light glinting on the water but there is water in the air, falling in droplets out of the sky; they have no colour, like blood does, they are cold not warm and they taste of nothing. There are large grey shapes in the clouds moving slowly like ghosts and the trees on the hill shiver because they are cold.
    I can hear something moving in you Arganhell, thumping and splashing and metal clinking against your stones and many footsteps.
    All day long the body sits and waits and the fingers pinch the legs that are white and blue with the cold in the air, and watch how long it takes the tired blood to flow back into the white pinch marks. When you pinch a dead body there are no pinch marks because the dead don’t feel anything.
    One day I will be dead and the body will be dead and everything will be over.

    * * *

    I can hear the clinking again Arganhell, and the splashing and the thumping in your waters. There is a long line of horses and they dip their hooves into you one after the other and walk through your waters and clink against your stones and walk out on the other side, the side where the body is sitting and where I am watching them through its eyes.
    But they never arrive here, as soon as they touch dry land they dissolve like the ghosts in the clouds, and there is nothing left here, not even a mist.
    I watch the stones in the water, grey and black and silver like smoke, others a dull red like dried blood. There is the sound of crying in my head, and I watch the body start to sway, and beat itself and its head against a tree; the bark is rough and damp and smells dark green, and there is a thump, thump, thump that drowns out the crying and after a while there is nothing at all except the thump, thump and the swaying and there is a patch of pain that spreads through the head and the arm and the shoulder of the body, nothing much but I can almost feel it and after a while I forget the crying and I’m dead again.

    * * *

    I cannot hear the clinking this time, or the