Written piece
Thread
Lena Pasqua
Australia
About this piece
A creative response to the author’s published autoethnography on post WW2 immigrant Proxy Brides. Elements of magic realism convey expressed visceral effects of the Proxy Bride experience: a story of resilience despite the absence of agency and a mounting fear of the unknown.
She was a bride without a groom. A Proxy Bride. She must travel across seas to Australia, they said, to the man whose name she now bore. She felt an unravelling, but WW2 was over, they said, you will not die. They pressed his photo into her palm, their breathy words in her ear: severe the thread now, go now. She left for the docks, gripping the leather handle of a cardboard suitcase, the unbroken thread trailing from her mouth back to the gate of her Southern Italian village.
Standing before an iron hulk, her head tilting back and back, she flinched when a hand nudged her onto the gangplank. Ascending now, the thread stretching now. And when the SS Oceania launched, colourful ship-to-shore streamers tore away. Her own thread grew taught.
On the Mediterranean she drowned in seasickness and monochrome dreams of mad landscapes. The thread held and the photo in her palm spoke: nearer now, a new ocean now. And on the Indian Ocean, her thread snapped.
She swallowed her loose end of the thread and it coiled around her organs, preventing their collapse, connecting them so that upon arrival both heart and lungs refused to breathe the new air. Fragments of thread entered her bloodstream, settling behind her eyes like a rippling curtain, distorting her view of the dock. She saw blurred, monstrous faces and sobbed like a startled child, white-knuckled fists wrapped around steel railing. Someone called her name and her fists unfurled. She felt the thread uncoil, swaying within her, dissolving now like a loved one’s parting wave from the shore. She exhaled and bade her thread farewell. On the dock, a man came into focus, his face raised toward her. The bride picked up her suitcase, a cardboard case holding a monochrome snapshot within.