These Days

And she whispered to me with those white soap lips flecked with a subtle algae green in the upturned corners. Her voice was thick with years but lightened by confession, like dust settling on droplets of honey. Fingerpicking her words as if speaking a fragile lullaby, vibrato and strings twitched behind her in harmonized dance of papered grace: she told me of the lives she never led, the things she had wished to do, the children she had dreamed one day to have, Susana, Ella, Jackson, and Thomas, gold-haired princes all dressed in sky green camasoles, sweaters and skirts.

She told me of the dead men who once fancied her, each in their different ways and each more selfish than the last, convinced that he and he alone had the neccessary masculine sensativity to pry her open, reach deep inside and find the still-beating pearl lying so lovely amongst its flowery beds of gently folded flesh. She had not forgotten them.

She used to lay her head on pillows of silk and daydream of all the lovely ways there could be to live one day, one future day as she listened to the wheels of the clock turn in quarter-tones past midnight. She would make her home in cavernous clouds of such cascading possibilities, so very many different things to sample, taste, compare and choose.

She used to gamble and to laugh, she used to stroll in the park in warmer days to see the rare but hopeful sight of the leopards screaming their joy in the air overhead. She used to fuck and run and dance and sing as the warm rain fell so densely from the heavens; unafraid of death, unafraid of the lightening or the moisture or the angry vengeful wraith of an unnamable diety who threw all this costume horror down upon the earth in crystaline spite and who saw everyone, everyone else in the world, flee inside at the sound of his loud ejaculatory rage. Everyone but this one fearless girl with the slender hips and the ivory lips as she ran and danced and sang and fucked as if her heart were about to tear open and gush out the streaming, burning pages of a long-locked, long-lost childhood diary.

She had made no comprises because she had none to make.

But the years float by like steam up, up, up into the cold, thin air, losing meaning as they twist around the city spires ever faster and dissipate into the dim, pink sky. Fruit slowly sagged from her bones and flesh fell from the trees in harvest. The kids never came. The lovers never stayed. And the pearl remained buried, private, permanent, embedded in its red folds deep behind hard-hearted and sheltered bone.

She learned to fear the rain.