Heres a short stream of consciousness story I wrote a while ago about growing up, as I understood it then. Sometimes I feel miscast in my older poems and stories; I feel to have grown into this one. I always pictured the lake from Harry Potter. Rites of Passage October 2012 A sparrow passes overhead as darkness tears the grass from stone. For what place as this, its genius hidden beneath a crown of anarchy, would be immune to the broomstick of dusk, to be only hidden in the corner of an attic somewhere—there behind your books, your memory, your jewelry. The night moves intently, as though not to spoil its surprise, as it steps down each hand-carved stair, down each meander of ivy to the grass where she sits, finding its way to her blade by blade and day by day. She is facing a lake, her skin rough from the trees (she had been nodding off) which clung to her blouse mechanically and as she stirs, come free and fall to her. The trees are familiar; their grounds are hers and their roots stretched on and fed from the lake. Her mind hums on, each explicit notion vanishing as rings of smoke as they leave their flaming source. Her mind is an armoire, its clouds of smoke warm but altogether dull, conflicting, and packed with moths. The tragedies she found—she preferred incense to lace—was that and none other: How soon the fashions of concept came and went, how soon she would stare at her hands damning the space between her fingers and the anthills at her feet. She struck a match, its coarse sigh dark and jagged freezing the crickets, before its light blinded them. Thoughts filled her nose; toxic such as match smoke is, singeing the senses they met and wetting her eyes. She passed the torch to a cigarette, which caught immediately, though discretely—as if exchanged in the back room of a shop in some distant town years off or years past. A moth—was it a woman? —fluttered and frayed, skittering to the match, its veins aglow through the transparency of its wings as trees at night through steam of kitchen windows—only to be disoriented again with the girl’s breath—sudden, darkening, the portent’s condensation lingering like gunsmoke. The drags she took dug plant and paper into ruts as heels through the softest earth—they had no interest in coming back with her, yet traced a path regardless. She cast her thoughts skyward, brushing the tree from her face. “Musing among the petunias again?” (Preferring incense to lace) thought Miss Vaughan, teetering with her feet before her between the tree and the lake, which called first melodic, then with the permanence of time. The cigarette burned her fingers while Vaughan left firework ash to the hands of chance, their faint glow dying as they swam through the indigo skies, turbulent with thunderheads, down to the anthills. A sparrow—from before, she asked—grounded at her feet, skipping as they do, between here and there. Its wings a deep red; bricks; the richest coffee; the chillest stare; twitched at its side as it angled its head to ask her the time. Late, it now was, for hours spent in silence pass in either centuries or heartbeats and never in between. It was centuries tonight, as her cigarette neared her hand, one breath at a time, looking to burn again. She began to rise, her feet foreign beneath her, bare on the cold grass, callused from the stones it concealed. She stepped indirectly, her languid path like her thoughts through the earth. Her armoire began to crown as she neared the lake. Its tide was null, its shores untouched—damp—but unmarked. Her footprints eternal in the sands of the moon the shift from grass to grain startled gently, beckoning for attention. The sister tree behind her was tall as ever—she’d been expecting an obscurity from perspective by now. She stepped into the lake, knees locking from the cold, her waist cringing from the midnight autumnal water that met her. She lowered her hands, her cigarette hissing like hot steel, burning out at once and drifting to the stones below. Her head titled back of its own accord and her eyes filled with water as she plunged herself underneath. Rising, her clothes clung to her like vines along the meanders and hair twisted down her face. Her eyes caught the stars, the ripples she made, moving them above. Above her, the tree in the distance shook its final leaves free in a midnight commencement, which accumulated at its base where she had been resting. Her mind hums with its complications—illusionary, visionary, as she treads in the great body of nightfall. For what understanding had she now, that each time she retained the rings of thought, tossing her head back and looking beneath the water, it stung her less and less. The forest echoed her laughter and their waves together began to move the moon.
Posted on: Mon, 24 Mar 2014 23:16:58 +0000
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