her name was alex and she had been dancing for a long time. hours maybe. years more likely. she was lost in the sounds and in the silence – for her, time was crawling by so slowly that pausing moments in each rhythm took ages to complete, each break was a heartache and she could never recover quickly enough to cease her swing.
angles quaked around his awakening form, paced through his warm limbs to rapidly cooling emotions. slowly he creaked from under soothing cover, stately mannerisms belying pain crouching just below the surface. a wrong step, a slight turn too hard and he was on the bed again, age forcing him low though dignity urged him up. finally, conquest in his eyes, he raised himself and stood erect on the equally aged floor, pine boards rubbed thin through years of meticulous sweeping, decades of clubbed feet wearing smooth the soft wood.
“papa,” she glided over, “papa, why are you so grumblycreaky of a morning? i am already awake for hours before you join me dancing.”
“child, i have lost my youth, yet you throw yours away. why do you wait for my waking before you go about your life? my time for wakefulness is passed. let me asleep.”
“ah, papa, morning is no time for your dreams. come, today we to market!”
and papa agreed, as always, his only child wooing him the way her mother failed to but once. “with this girl, there is no reason, only motion.”
as Dear left the now cold bed, she brought with her no poetry and no delight. she clambered over blankets heaped into mountains and leapt, as from a great height, the few inches to the floor, the same floor that she stumped around all day, all night, all her life. she thought of the child and the man and, as quickly, dismissed them: “fools, they have no idea. they market, they dance, they dream, but no sense they have.”
she limped into the kitchen and lit the fire, the ashes stirring lightly in the sweeping wind of her housedress.
“mother criticizes so much our dreams, papa. why does she hate us?” Holding tightly to his rough hands, she skipped through the festival feel of the market.
“she cannot understand our freeness, child. she has only her hands and they swiftly move to fail her.” He picked at linen displayed on a board piled high with silks and muslin. “she tried to compromise. and fell too hard.”
when she was young, Dear had a name.
“your momma, she painted. did everything, really. she could create, your momma, but then she created too much and she had to put away her youth and turn into an old woman – she never experienced being a mother, only a maiden, only a crone.”
Ilania.
“she used to do so many beautiful things – music and art and love, but she forgot how to do all that when she learned to knit, to sew, and to sit. that is what kills her – the sitting. your momma has no patience, only courage. so, everyday she sits to discipline herself and everyday she ages more, embittered further.”
“what a strange and tiny thing, this husk. corn is never so dry. so barren – why, how could I?”
No comments:
Post a Comment