Berek Plage
We live in a vacuum, I think; each of us believing that we cannot touch or be touched. Once, I pretended it was love. Yet now the midnight moons will not give me succor; it is not love.
I know these things now; that's fitting, now that I'm too old to change it. And still too young to allow it to overtake me.
I run instead, from the perfumed hive of lust we made, pink as the inside of a baby's ear, seeking a wilder womb in the cold blackness of the outside.
Down from the metal spires that hold together our doorframe I come running. The hiss of steam as it snakes up the neck of a teakettle, a serpent shadowing Eve's face. The black, blank-faced kitchen, its sterile surface made perfect.
My feet sucks in rain as it clings to every little crevice and dried-out line in my soles. The woods are mine, you know. When I was a little girl, I would tell it my secrets, and now, with it's silent language I'm told in return by a black-browed sky, waving branches that spit down slim needles: It is too cold, go inside. A storm's coming.
Still, I stand, knee-high in a patch of marshweeds. If you could see me, you would shout that I'm about to freeze; that the house is much warmer. But the cold is between us, not my skin and the wind. Hands are wrapped inside the sheerness of my nightgown; lace-hewn, Victorian. Simultaneously sexually beguiling and frigid, but I love it for its moth caresses at my ankle, the way it fails to restrain my shoulders. My fingers feel a rip by the hip, a bruise on my wrist; a place where you couldn't protect me from the aggression of what was meant to be security.
The bruise is from Tuesday's chairshot. You had promised that you would protect me. Missed by inches.
A body's length from me in the distance, movement echoes and takes shape. Stepping through the weedy remains of spring on cloven feet; carefully prancing, a doe. She lifts her head and meets my eye; one moment as unification. Then she turns, prancing away, stopping only to pluck two green straws protruding from the ground, a balding man's last parody of youth.
I turn, stand, as though I can feel the bruise beneath my finger disappear. The water has been sucked back; sheets of mirror stand and reflect clearly in the plain sunshine.
You don't love me, Billy. I can't be your wife; I can't have your baby. I'm not the sweet little Torrie you remember.
But as plain as glass, I can't turn away.
I'm warmer. Now I can return to the house.