A Beautiful Day

It was a beautiful day. 

The swollen sun had burned away what remnants of the come hurricane still resided in the cracks in the sidewalk before our house, so that all that remained as evidence of Lucy was the litter of worms and dirt debris scattered throughout the yard. But I should not have been disconcerted, for the rains had come before, and they would come again, to once again wash down the sewer any trace that the storm had ever been there.

This beautiful day was no event in and of itself. Many beautiful days had been seen before in this small yard of ours, and so on this particular beautiful day I wasn’t possessed by my usual urge to break through the heavy door and purge my lungs of the smoky air behind. I remained in my darkened cave, just before the door, eyes carefully following the flutter of wings behind a small and rather bright bird, which, once perched on the sill of my window, began to chirp brightly. I responded in kind, and soon the bird and I were engaged in a duet. 

Birdsong now died out I felt that strange compulsion once again. A prepossession, as a whole, I have readily thought, is nothing but the body’s expression of compassion and warmth. One must follow their love, and desire, and driving force to its natural conclusion, to force the bitter despair that creeps in like frostbite at the nails from any extremity one may wish to keep nearest to the heart. This compulsion has oft before possessed me and now once again it will spin me down the hall and past this once-locked door. 

I can hear the thrum of that door as I pass it and some glimmer of hope passes behind those eyes of mine. Us two, we are one and the same, and for this simple truth I will love the door more than any other. Its ornate patterning, the vines that weave and wind across its hard, polished, maple surface render it entirely incapable of being unseen, a feat I will master in due course. For now, I will be shut up in this house, with no one but my love and my love to hold me warm and tight. 

For now the door releases me from its spell and another compulsion washes over me. That feeling of desire I had once felt emanates from a small prick on my foot and becomes me, an animated puppet driven by nothing more than intrinsic purpose. 

She is there, in the open space past the hallway, with bitter light streaming in through the one broken window I have not yet addressed. Save for her there is no light in my life and in this old house, so when I gaze upon that overflowing hair and those punctuated eyes and this lit-up face I may be blinded for a moment, her purpose and drive and passion peeking through the cracks like the weeds I have watched blossom from seedlings to trees in the breaks in our sidewalk. 

A slight shuffle from this pin-struck foot of mine and she will turn back to me, I know, to gaze through me again and to once again watch the dust as it falls in neat piles on the floor.

She will see through the patchwork persona I have built for her, the quilt of lies I have suffocated her in, so that she is now nothing more than a limp sturdy bag of skin and flesh and meat and blood and juice. With no more purpose than a fruit fly, the one my bird has eaten, as I had it. She will be no more than the light I can once again patch out of my house and my dark eyes.

And this is enough.

There are no screams from my house. This beautiful day will not be disturbed by me, I am sure of it, I am no storm but rather the debris that follows, and as I can watch the tattered remains of my life wash down the stream and out to sea I can see the reflection in her eyes as my pillow pulls the last wills of strength from her head and she falls to the ground as a limp pile of worthlessness.

She will stay here longer than I can hope, to rest and relax in the aftermath of my storm, to eventually flow out the gutters and through the floorboards, to become this house I have loved. She will live again, I can see it, as I can see in the darkness the patterns that grow on my wall, all around me.

And with that I will hide her away in this house of mine. In my home, where she can stay, until one day I too have come and gone from here - to find another place to call our own. She has asked me for a child, for a son, from the day we first began our lives here, from the day we first began on that porch before my house. We were so light and bright and happy, and she squirmed with the excitement of our lives coming together. She squealed with the anticipation of us finally living together, finally becoming one.

Those screams died out today. She is no more. Nothing more than the mold that infected my lungs so many years ago, nothing more than the lone feather that will sit idly on my porch for years and years and years until one day a new storm will blow these ruins into a new world. A new town. A new life.

The day they burn this home to the ground is the day I die here, too, is the day all of us die together, her, and the other, and the others below them, the hundreds of hundreds of us all, piled high for miles within the creaky wooden boards of this once-might.

The day they burned me to the ground it rained. The ashes spiraled down is fast-moving currents and eddies through the sidewalk canals and deep into the damp recesses of the sewers.

It was a beautiful day.