Clutching me, tongue searching for my mouth…
And then a terrible ferocity of motion and voice, an expression as chaotic and inexplicable as evil itself, as the victims of her seductions descended upon my Lyla, tearing her away from me and having her for their own.
~
In the twilight the blanket floated on a sea of dandelions. As I approached the spot I became momentarily confused, even touched by panic. Then I remembered they were in the car, on the floorboard where she had taken them off.
Dispossessed
It was a dry misery, tearless and bloodless, silent. Sometimes, with the passage of wind, the barn’s boards sang, and the thrill of it vibrated through his thinly cocooned body, reminding him of music, long lost music. When would she come back, his Ahraia who had stolen all his tears, his blood, leaving him bound in this sheath?
He had been a farmer, a workhorse and widower starving for company, when she rapped on the door.
“Who…?”
“Has the Lord thy God abandoned thee?”
She wore a patterned dress, hair done up in conservative curls, and she carried a hefty tome which he mistook for the Good Book until he saw the runes in its animal skin cover.
“Are you a missionary of some kind?” he asked. “Are you here to save me?”
“I’m here,” she said simply.
He was not an uneducated man, though perhaps he had regressed into naïvete through the decades of living out his chosen profession far from the mob. He let her in upon those two, forever elegant words.
“How did you get here?” he said as he gestured to a reupholstered chair in his handsome living room. He had noticed no car.
“I walked,” she said.
Though it was autumn and cool, and the rural distances vast…
~
Sometimes an animal wandered in, unable to smell any residual vitality on him. Eyes luminous in the night, blinking on and off as they passed between the boards, reminded him of her. Not even the gopher rat that made residence beneath the barn knew of his existence. For a period of time an owl had enjoyed the loft. There were occasional bats. Once, a man; a vagabond.
Over a smoky fire of hay and rotting boards, what was left of the vagabond’s drained soul drifted on the song that escaped his cracked, bloodless lips: Yes the Lord my God has abandoned me, and Ahraia has left me to wither away…
This had revived hope in the watcher behind the boards. He had been preserved in his cocoon for some purpose.
He would see her again, just as she had promised.
~
“I wonder why the milk hasn’t arrived,” he said one morning early in their courtship. He spoke as he removed his shorts, slipping back under the covers, where most of their strange, negligent hours were spent.
It wouldn’t be the last question of its kind. There would be no mail, and no calls from widowed Willa Green, an interested party in her mid-sixties, some ten years his elder. The telephone never rang, airplanes never flew over, and cars never drove past.
Her way of soothing him was by telling him the world belonged to Ahraia now. At first he understood this as a personal proclamation, a sort of endearment. Then later, when the petals of isolation spread fully, he began to realize the larger scope of it. He did not lament the world’s dispossession as long as she made love to him, stroked him and read to him from her book, which spoke so lovingly of the transcendence of humankind.
“Where do you come from, Ahraia?” he asked her in the third week.
“I cannot offer you heaven,” was her reply. “No one can do that.”
~
On clear nights when there was a moon, the light spilled through the cracks of the shambled roof of the barn, slashing his prison with white fire. As he watched the cobwebs in the corners capture the light in their threads, he wondered if the silken sheath in which he was wrapped glowed similarly, making him a radiant ghost.
On hazy nights he swore he saw her through the fog…cruelest of sirens who summons the petrified.
When it rained, the world was a mirror.
~
“What do you offer, Ahraia?”
“Somewhere. Can you believe in that? In somewhere?”
“I can.”
“Will you let me restore your faith?”
“I will. Read to me, Ahraia.”
She did.
~
It was a dry misery, even when the mirror roiled violently as it did tonight. Hymns and dirges wept from the boards as the feeble structure shook in the grip of the storm. He bathed in its memories, in the sweat of the farmer attacking the day before him, in the tears of the husband as he held his ruined wife in his hands, in the blood that fell from her split skull. Like a little girl in her excitement and carelessness, she had run out to give him the good news, had just caught his attention over the noise of the motor when she stumbled and fell into the blades behind the tractor.
“I love you! I love you! We’re going to have a b—”
But they were memories only, for there was nothing left to weep, to bleed.
Ahraia had seeped it all out of him, for the restoration of his faith. If only she could be here now, to see how earnestly yet faithlessly he prayed for the destruction that a storm of this force might conceivably bring.
He closed his eyes and kept praying. He knew how forsaken he was.
~
Morning came with a mist. As his eyes focused on the distinct change in the pitch of reality, he knew that no mist inspired the manifestation of her, epiphany amidst the rubble of the devastated barn. No mist of the land, no mist of the imagination. She evolved of something more, and less.
“You have lost all faith then?” she said.
“Yes.”
“You could not have waited till I came for you?”
“I waited. You never came.”
“If I unbind you now, you will join the vagabonds who wander this wasteland, searching endlessly for what cannot be regained.”
“I’m finished,” he said.
Nodding, she stepped forward, holding the book aloft as she began to unturn the membrane.
Last Days of Solitude
With the snow came a hush. The gates of the city fell closed for the season. Lanterns on posts illuminated melancholy aspects in misted second-floor windows. Katrina’s was one of these faces, caught between the permanence of winter and the ephemeral flames burning in the fireplace behind her.
In the dead of night she sat there by the window, sipping the cognac a neighbor had given her, unable to sleep because she knew she was in her last days of solitude. On the adjacent wall a wooden clock ticked off the seconds, collaborating with the diminishing stack of logs by the hearth to prove that time had not really come to a standstill. The big lazy snowflakes falling on the already blanketed roofs and roads made it seem like it had. The absence of wind tonight, the silence, the mystic hour…all these things made it seem so.
Raising her drink to her lips, seeing the flickers of the fire more clearly in the curve of the glass than in the sweating window, a sense told her there was movement beyond the reflections. She placed the glass on the flower table and wiped the window with the sleeve of her gown. Yes, there was something—a small girl, wrapped in fur and looking down the tunnel no longer recognizable as a street. No adult was to be seen, only this child of perhaps five or six standing shin-deep in the unshoveled snow. She appeared to be on the path leading to the door a short distance behind her, but Katrina didn’t remember ever seeing a child at Miss Bettie’s.
On an impulse she tapped the window. The child looked around, apparently uncertain as to where the noise came from. When she glanced up, expres
sion revealed in the light of the lamp on its post, Katrina recognized all the emotions the girl was experiencing. For once upon a time she had experienced them herself. Once upon a time she had wandered the night looking for answers. As she gazed down into the little girl’s confused face, she felt herself hanging in emptiness, supported only by the ribbons of the moon. Then knife-sharp, icy water rushed over her, engulfing all the other emotions with shock.
Wrenching the window free of the night’s cold grip, she hissed down at the child, “Go home, you! There’s nothing out there but snow. Go home!”
The girl turned and started to run, but fell. She got up, wiped her face with her mittens, glanced back once at the window above, then resumed the effort.
~
In the morning the little girl’s footprints were gone. Katrina tried not to think about her as she watched the milkman deliver his fresh goods to Miss Bettie’s and the other doors along the street. Her own street was next, so she went downstairs to wait. She opened the curtains to a freshly white morning. The snow had ceased to fall, but she knew the city would have more about the time the snow covering the ground began to get dirty. It was the season’s way. And next time, undoubtedly, the weather would come with wind.
She watched the milkman through the kitchen window as he walked up the path. They were so rare, the men. To watch them sometimes was nice. She suspected she was experiencing some maternal feelings as well. She touched her breast, cupped it in her palm, thinking about the milk it would produce. When she glanced up again, he was waving at her through the window. Had he seen her caressing herself? Had it moved him in any way? But no, of course not. Men took their nourishment in their work, their cognac, their rarity.
As she put the bottle of milk away, she realized the material of her gown over her breast was moist. She sighed, thinking how quickly the days passed, even as each one seemed to last an eternity. How many, three more now? As if she didn’t know…
She went to the living room’s cold fireplace, positioning some kindling under the grate. The fire crackled to life quickly on the seasoned fuel, reminding her she could do with spending more time down here where the spaces were more open, the mood brighter. Sitting on the hearth’s edge, looking into the flames, her hand found its way beneath the neck of her gown again. She squeezed her breast and felt a drop emerge onto her finger. Carefully she brought it up to look at it. It was pale, not like pure milk but like a baby’s teardrop laced with milk. She wondered if she would let her daughter suckle. Had she fed from her own mother’s breast? She couldn’t remember.
A commotion outside drew her attention. She went to the window and saw that the girls had surrounded Peter again, giggling and making fun, a common sight since school had let out for the break. Peter lived a few doors down and was the only boy in the neighborhood. At least ten girls surrounded him. He didn’t stand a chance.
~
About noon of the next day the city bell rang seven times, signaling the opening of the seaward gates and making Katrina wonder if somehow she had her days wrong. The sky was almost clear and a salty scent off the sea hung pleasantly in the air. She had stayed up till ten or so the previous night, in bed with her cognac and book between infrequent trips to the window. There had been the occasional wanderer-by, but no sign of the girl. She had meant to check at a later hour, but fell asleep, and slept pleasantly until the morning.
The tolls of the bell, as it turned out, represented the return of the hunting party that had set out before the city, save for certain, prescribed business, had shut itself off from the outside for the cold months. All thirty-some men had returned intact, and with quite the fetch. Her street being near the city center, Katrina was able to look upon their haul as they rolled past her house in the four wagons of their caravan. As a boy was expected to do, Peter came out and examined the carcasses up close, then rode with the party for a short distance, feet dangling off the back of the last wagon. The hunters looked positive but exhausted, and ready to return home to whatever it was men returned home to. Katrina recalled having long ago asked her mother that very question, but whatever her mother’s answer, it hadn’t been worth remembering.
That evening Katrina didn’t even bother to look outside. The cognac sat untouched by the bed while the book took her to places that even the rattling of the window didn’t disturb. Sleep came easily, but the images weren’t as benign as last night’s, when the worst she’d had to endure was unburying herself from a strange soft substance that proved to be snow. White prevailed again tonight, but it was reinforced with the silver thread of clarity.
In front of her was the boat, a gray-eyed man in a seaman’s coat urging the children aboard. As each of the girls stepped on deck, one of the crewmen lifted a sack onto his back. This went on, in the fashion of one sack for each passenger, until all fourteen girls—Katrina counted that many exactly—were on the boat. When the last one had stepped off the ramp, the man in his dingy coat searched the area with his gray eyes. Katrina felt a terrible, consuming dread as they passed over her once, twice, then returned to fix her in their snare.
She woke gasping for breath. The cognac by the bed was warm. The window was fogged. The night revealed no secrets.
~
The next morning Katrina answered a call at her door. She was surprised to find Peter standing there.
“My mom is ill,” he told her. “She said maybe you would come.”
Katrina did not know his mom, but she quickly got into her boots and coat and went with him. The snow had begun to fall again, lightly yet on an active wind. As she followed Peter around the building to the street where he lived, swirls formed in front of her, a map charting transitory, unknowable places. The sky over the city was ashen, the air trembled with the murmurs of the tomb, and a sense of fragility hung over all. Katrina removed her gloves to check Peter’s cheeks. He glowed in the warmth of her hands for a moment but then made her keep going, the blush dissolving as quickly as it had come. His home was down the block from Miss Bettie’s, smoke curling out of the stump of chimney protruding from the snow-laden roof.
The door opened inward across a dry mat. The interiors were unpleasantly cool, as if all the heat went out the chimney with the vapors. There was a nondescriptness about Peter’s home which made Katrina wonder about her own. The boy led her up a stairs, which made for better temperature, but the smell about the higher floor spoke of lingering. She had the sense of having been here before as she entered the room, knowing its weight if not exactly its fixtures. Peter’s mom was on her bed, skin gray as the boatman’s eyes.
“Thank you,” said the woman. “I’m sorry to have asked for you, but I’ve seen you in your window.”
Katrina did not ask what she meant. She knew the woman lived in reclusion, being the mother of the only boy for blocks.
“What afflicts you?” she said. Peter started to speak but his mother waved him silent.
“‘Afflict’ is a good word. For that is certainly what it feels like. But you must know that. In your own solitude, isolation.”
“Yes, ma’am. But if you’ll forgive me, mine is of my own choosing.”
A strangled laugh came from the bed. “Your fate might have been negotiable, but your lot, I fear, is permanent.”
“What can I do for you?” Katrina said.
“If my condition worsens, if I become irremediably invalid, or dead, see that my son arrives in the appropriate hands. He’s young. He’s never even been outside the neighborhood. He is alone.”
“You have no one?”
“I have a son.” The double meaning did not escape Katrina. She didn’t know what to say to the woman. The task with which she was being charged was certainly no large one, but…
“I can agree only to deliver him,” she said at last. “I can’t have an
y more responsibility than that. My own time has come.”
“Ah,” said the woman, a faint smile touching at her gray lips.
“But I’ll see that Peter is taken care of.”
“Thank you. Pray with me, then.”
~
The woman slept and Katrina told Peter she would see herself out. As she descended the stairs, she heard a noise, a rhythmic metallic tapping coming from a room off the hall below. She came to a door that stood slightly ajar, pushed it open. The room appeared to be a playroom, with objects of various shapes and sizes lying about its wooden floor. In the rear stood a little girl dressed in tights and ruffles, whom she knew at once to be the same little girl who had looked up at her window from the street the other night. The girl let the spoons with which she had been tapping come to rest on the circular mouth of a heavy metal dairy container standing almost as tall as she.
A Dirge for the Temporal Page 21
