(FREE STUFF – FICTION)
She dreamt.
In the dream, she sat at a sparkling yellow Formica table in a matching yellow chair. She ran her hands along the chrome edging of the table’s surface, brushed her fingers lightly over the table’s flattened sunshine. She pulled one thigh and then the other from the cushioned seat on which she rested, delighting in the peel-away of flesh from vinyl and the satisfying re-adhesion as she settled herself. The room was warm, and she lifted her gaze to seek the window-framed water that coursed between the well-groomed slope of the yard and the wilderness beyond. A breeze blew through closed windows, the scent of wet mud and slickness suddenly heavy in the air. Her feet swung as they had not a moment before, and she smiled as they arced through time.
A cup of coffee appeared and she sipped, reaching for the smoothness of the eggshell with her tongue.
A cigarette appeared, a red-lipsticked ring on the fragile paper a guide for her own unstained lips. She inhaled deeply, the small embered ring sparking to life as she dragged oxygen over flame, the paper burning in ordered surrender as the tobacco seethed within. She welcomed the concealing smoke, its tendrilled hands pulling a soft gray blanket over the sharper bits within. Clouded exhalations, the proof of her existence, met the room’s humid air in an eddied smokey mist that seemed, for a brief moment, to fight for shape. Or perhaps it was not the smoke taking form, but instead wrapping itself around an invisible solidity in the emptiness of the room. She hurried to fill the room with smoke, thinking that she saw the edges of something … someone.
The curve of a cheek, perhaps.
The texture of a braid.
The extension of a neck.
Perhaps.
She dropped the butt of the cigarette into the dregs of the coffee and there was a small sizzle of extinguishment. She bit at her lower lip, tasting there the slightest waxy proof of another. She bit harder, tasted blood, wished she had a cigarette with which to mark the way for the one who was to follow.
A photo album appeared, its pages black and bound within a cream-colored cover by looped bits of ebony rope. She flipped with careful fingers the pages of her long-ago past. Images held with small blackened corners to their places in memory; she marveled at the right-angled perfection of these carefully placed quoins. Anchors but also a meeting place of the past and the present even as the present slipped itself into the past … cornerstones of evershifting time. She moved in her seat to bring the album to her lap, and as her skin fought and then surrendered to vinyled embrace, she reached with a finger to trace the length and width of a photograph.
It was a photograph of a small girl digging in the sand, digging a large trenched hole around the corner of a building whose grassy yard sloped to the water. Digging deep and excavating the foundation of the building as she burrowed, the small girl’s back was to the camera, her attention on the task at hand. The girl’s body hunched in serious determined curve as she reached, frozen in time, for another spade of sand to throw toward the blurred rounded shape that occupied the lower right forefront of the photo.
A pile of sand, perhaps.
The excavated sand … her mind and her vision made adjustments in interpretation as she held the photo album in her lap … she looked again.
Perhaps not sand.
With a fingernail, she worried at one of the photograph’s black quoins, trying to make sense of the discrepancies. The house with the sand that held its corners did not exist on a sloping green yard. The girl in this photo was too small to be digging at the foundation of the sand-held house.
The small black corner fell away, and she curved the photo slightly to slide it from its remaining anchors. She brought the photo to her lips and breathed a kiss upon its aged gloss. She held it close and tried to read its secrets. She sighed, a heavy sigh, the exhalation proof of her existence and her place in this moment. That proof flowed heavily through the space before her, eddying across the surface of the photograph, revealing the contours and the form of indistinction.
Not a pile of sand at all, that blurred rounded shape.
The curve of a cheek, perhaps.
The texture of a braid.
The extension of a neck.
Impossible.
She closed her eyes and breathed again … in and out upon the photograph … opened her eyes. The photo took shape. A small girl digging earnestly at the corner of a small house held by sand. A sloped grassy hill to water and wilderness beyond. The profile of a woman, her cheekbones sharp, her long gray hair braided and wound about her head like a crown. The tendons of her neck revealed as she …
turned.
Sand was thrown.
She dropped the photo as the grit filled her mouth and ground at the corners of her vision.
Darkness.
She woke to a sense of suspension over a great void, her being filled with the certainty that the next instant was one of great transition.
From one moment to the next, perhaps.
From here to there.
From now to not.
With her eyes still closed, the memoried sand still choked within her throat, she breathed. She worked to drag the air in and out of her body, its ragged course a fire within her. A seething fire around which she burned in ordered surrender, a container for the fuel. She pulled herself up in the bed, her thighs to her chest, her forehead to her knees, arms wrapped around her legs. Exhaled the proof of her existence even as it brought her one step closer to extinguishment.
Breathed.
She made her way to the bathroom and stared into the mirror.
Leaned to fog the glass.
Watched as time collapsed and indistinction revealed.
The curve of a cheek.
The texture of a braid.
The extension of a neck.
Hers.
Perhaps.