Point of View [Short Story]
Aug 25, 2009 8:34:33 GMT -8
Post by Marbletoast on Aug 25, 2009 8:34:33 GMT -8
Milly had nearly choked on flower fumes before they allowed her a short walk outside. Outside was musty and tight as attic air, but there was no hanging cloud of fading roses and lilies already stale. Her skin had grown close inside, as if she was curling like the browning petals, and she had feared her own decay might begin to overpower the reek of the flowers.
He had waited, Milly realized once she was seated on the cold stone steps of the church with the light of the world shrinking and slipping into dusk around her, until the world had reached its heart’s strain. Now, on the teetering edge of autumn but just before the heat actually began to decline, the sky and earth and whole of nature seemed to throb her mightiest and most desperately—a dying heart who remembers hot life but whose blood has already run cold.
With plenty of deep breaths, Milly had forgotten the flowers and was watching the black line that swallowed the sun. There were no mountains, not even any trees, and her vision fell off the flat earth with the sun as she stared. Twilight had slipped over her shoulders and stolen into the corners of the stonework when Milly saw a crow.
He was as black as the horizon he broke out of, cawing at the sun’s last efforts. Taking his rest not far from Milly, his keen black eyes shone red in the dying light as he watched her.
“What are you laughing at?” she asked him, but he only set his beak to the side, ruffled his feathers, and laughed again. They stared at each other a little longer, and the crow took wing when the church door opened and Milly’s family and many of her friends filed into the coming dark.
She is waiting for me. I knew she would be the only one come to see me off, the only one who could not stand such morbid fascination with what was and isn’t anymore, and will never be again. I could not stay either, not in that pungent cloud of mortality. I had other places to be.
Milly does not recognize me, even when she and I share the same joke. Milly knows the night is coming, and Milly and I can laugh at the sun together, but Milly will not laugh with me. What am I laughing at? The cosmic punch line of the fall and rise of the sun. If some burning sphere can come around again each time, certainly a hot blood filled heart can do the same.
Milly, if you cannot laugh with me yet, then I will wait for you on the other side of the sun.
It’s very dark, which isn’t at all what you expected. It really is as if you’re only lying inside a coffin, and all the noise is going on outside just out of hearing and you are left only with a silence like you’ve never heard before. It is a silence never broken by your own breath or your own heartbeat. Surely they aren’t right, the ones just out of sight who are weeping and lying dying flowers over you. Surely they do not know where the sound of your heart has gone.
There it is. You know, but they never did, that if you listened long enough, if you lay long enough in that stagnant silence, you would hear it—the throbbing, almost like wings. In the darkness you take up flight again and rush to meet the morning.
~
He had waited, Milly realized once she was seated on the cold stone steps of the church with the light of the world shrinking and slipping into dusk around her, until the world had reached its heart’s strain. Now, on the teetering edge of autumn but just before the heat actually began to decline, the sky and earth and whole of nature seemed to throb her mightiest and most desperately—a dying heart who remembers hot life but whose blood has already run cold.
With plenty of deep breaths, Milly had forgotten the flowers and was watching the black line that swallowed the sun. There were no mountains, not even any trees, and her vision fell off the flat earth with the sun as she stared. Twilight had slipped over her shoulders and stolen into the corners of the stonework when Milly saw a crow.
He was as black as the horizon he broke out of, cawing at the sun’s last efforts. Taking his rest not far from Milly, his keen black eyes shone red in the dying light as he watched her.
“What are you laughing at?” she asked him, but he only set his beak to the side, ruffled his feathers, and laughed again. They stared at each other a little longer, and the crow took wing when the church door opened and Milly’s family and many of her friends filed into the coming dark.
She is waiting for me. I knew she would be the only one come to see me off, the only one who could not stand such morbid fascination with what was and isn’t anymore, and will never be again. I could not stay either, not in that pungent cloud of mortality. I had other places to be.
Milly does not recognize me, even when she and I share the same joke. Milly knows the night is coming, and Milly and I can laugh at the sun together, but Milly will not laugh with me. What am I laughing at? The cosmic punch line of the fall and rise of the sun. If some burning sphere can come around again each time, certainly a hot blood filled heart can do the same.
Milly, if you cannot laugh with me yet, then I will wait for you on the other side of the sun.
It’s very dark, which isn’t at all what you expected. It really is as if you’re only lying inside a coffin, and all the noise is going on outside just out of hearing and you are left only with a silence like you’ve never heard before. It is a silence never broken by your own breath or your own heartbeat. Surely they aren’t right, the ones just out of sight who are weeping and lying dying flowers over you. Surely they do not know where the sound of your heart has gone.
There it is. You know, but they never did, that if you listened long enough, if you lay long enough in that stagnant silence, you would hear it—the throbbing, almost like wings. In the darkness you take up flight again and rush to meet the morning.
~
