The Sky Is Full of Mysteries Tonight
The swallows play in wheeling arcs, then sharp as if yanked by an invisible cord, which really is there and is their own hunger, fling themselves in some other direction...
The swallows play in wheeling arcs, then sharp as if yanked by an invisible cord, which really is there and is their own hunger, fling themselves in some other direction after some other bug. There is an almost painful looking flutter of their wings before the gliding begins.
They garble at each other, and the sound is like a fast moving crick pouring down into a hollow in the earth, perfectly shaped to turn the burble of water that isn’t there anyway into an echo that sounds like alien laughter. Or something like that. I wonder if they’re saying look, that dragonfly is almost as big as me.
What they are saying, whatever, reaches me mostly from behind. There’s somewhere else they go over there, far enough eventually that silence descends, and just as I wonder if they’ve folded themselves in beneath whatever eaves they’ve found for nesting, the sound comes back, them with it, and three fly over me, my head, my left shoulder and right shoulder—that one so so close I can hear the flap of its wings.
Eileen died I’m not sure when. They found her body today. I knew when I came home from work because it smelled of death, and Paul was standing sentinel outside 4E, and the sight of him chimed death, and it was death.
Those aren’t their names, of course. I don’t know them, though I wish I did.
What happened was, Eileen made a cup of tea, and lit a candle, and put on that old silk nightgown that’s hung in the back of the closet since Jack died. She turned down the bed, patting the pillows, so many pillows, and a breeze, there was a breeze yes, it bellied the curtains in towards her enticingly.
She had a brush of sterling with soft pony-hair bristles, and she sat with her feet dangling over the smooth hardwood. Her tea steamed on the bedside table beside her flickering flame, which cast playful shadows in the coolness of the room, and the breeze, remember. She brushed her silver hair with her silver brush and her head shone and shone in the candlelight. Her finger pads were warm honey against the cold metal of the brush.
Taking a sip of tea, setting her mug down to let the rest go cold in the night, she laid back among the pillows, so many pillows, and she closed her eyes, and she did not wake up, and she was not afraid. There are many undignified deaths to die, but it just wasn’t like that for Eileen.
And that was only last night. In the back half of July, it doesn’t take very long for a dead body to perfume the air. Paul and Eileen share one pan au chocolat every afternoon at tea time, so he came knocking today like normal and she didn’t come to the door. He used his spare key to let himself in as death chimed in his own ears. Once he was in, he was there and found that she no longer was and frankly neither was death anymore. Her candle was a puddle of wax on the bedside table there, and the room was very still. It only smelled because the day was hot and the breeze from last night was chased off by the sun, that’s all. And come to think of it, Eileen, chased off with it too.
The clouds turn brown in the last grip of sunset, or at least they have tonight. If you watch the sunset every night, every night will produce a color you’ve never in your damn life seen before. The sky behind me is a bruised peach, but above me it is still very blue. Passing clouds wisp out, and at the edges an electric light glows as if each one has some secret smaller sun behind it. Our big sun has dipped below the horizon already, so where is the light coming from?
The stars come out timidly, and that star is moving, is a star, is not a star. It’s the clouds that move, but it does seem that the stars are conspiring with the deepening twilight, trying to trick me into thinking they’re airplanes. They’re dancing so much. It must be the breeze that makes the light dance. Yes, the breeze is back. That one up there is surely a star. It is. The mourning doves coo, must surely be saying goodnight, and the color leaves the sky, surely to return tomorrow.