Helena Fox

"Sixteen-year-old Biz sees her father every day, though he died when she was seven. When he suddenly disappears, she tumbles into a disaster-land of grief and depression from which she must find her way back"--

How It Feels to Float

Lainie Stuart

Scarly

You can wish as hard as you want for something to stay, but it will slip right through you, drift to the bottom of you as you stand, watching, watery, logged, bleating bloated blubbering, doing and holding nothing. Look at yourself, Biz. Do you see?

It feels like a night of vivid dreams, and when you wake, all day you hold one dream close because in it everything was back to how it once was.

It feels like you’ve fallen overboard. You are swimming to get back, but the boat moves steadily away. You can see the lights; you can hear the laughter and the music on the decks. You try to follow. The boat moves away.

I have been in bed so long, barnacles have had to be scraped off my bottom. I gathered moss in my belly button. I grew mushrooms on my tits.

Here I am, in borrowed bones, in makeshift skin, looking out of eyes that are a construct, breathing with lungs that are only a step—a basic rearrangement—away from leaves. How funny, to have a body when I am not a body? How funny to be inside when I am outside?

Am I better? Can you be better when you’re still sad—long patches of sad swooping in at night when there aren’t any sounds to cover it? Are you better when you still feel blank, fog rising inside you, great empty spaces like those moors people walk on in British films? Are you better when, as you’re going through the motions—talking, laughing, listening, walking the dog, helping Mum with dinner—at the same time there’s this lost feeling walking beside you, so you can touch it, like a tongue on a tooth?

And suddenly I feel so alone it’s like the universe has yawned open and sucked me in, rolling me like a moth in spider silk. I’m cocooned by nothing, and there’s no path out.

I can’t speak. I can feel the pistons of my heart moving, feel my lungs filling, emptying, my pores clogging. I feel the movement of the stars and I can hear the echo of all the black holes consuming everything—

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