“Uh.”
“What’s wrong-”
She stretched her arms over her head and bent back across the log they sat.
“It’s the whole woods thing ” she said hair in her face as it shifted around with the movement of her lips, “Can’t we meet somewhere else-”
The man beside her remained still as he watched and adjusted his half-moon glasses, letting the light, pocketing in through the pattern of leaves, glance off them into the shadow of the forest, a paler shade than even he. Even so it was almost as if he wasn’t there.
“What is wrong with the woods-”
“Well,” she rolled her eyes as she sat back up and looked at him with her piercing blue eyes that startled (his were always a shade greyer), “It’s just we always come here, and you know, there’s nothing wrong with the city. We could meet at a park or…”
The man sighed and stood up, the wind blowing his pale stripped scarf around so it barely stayed on. The same clean and slightly worn brief case he kept by his side as he made his way across the clearing.
“Oh, what-” she got up in good humor after him though it was as if he was not listening, “Is it the whole URBANIZATION thing-” her voice rising for the stress, “We could meet at a bar—“
“Aren’t you a little young for that-” his said without a pause to look behind him. And his companion smiled a secret smile.
“Yeah, but why would that matter-”
The pair blundered on in near silence but save for the rustle of dying leaves in the tunes of red and gold as they past the isolated ground and though no path seemed set, the man seemed to follow as though one was made years ago and during from use and repair and reuse and perhaps even denial. The trees themselves, penn oaks and ash, seemed to swallow them up in time and issue as the silence remained between them, she in innocent contemplation of beauty and truth and he in constant indifference and impatience and tolerance as the old are often plagued. He was not nearly as ancient as perhaps his demeanor endowed though, more of the age where one just becomes ready to be old, with a few wrinkles here and not the same physic he may had had as a young man, pale hair that might be thinning and the possibility of mortality finally setting in. And that brief case, if there was anything so tell-tale about a man on the verge it was his brief case for within were all his dreams and hopes and fears-once-desires all locked away and he held it close not because he needed to remember but because he had lost the keys and the most comfort he could pry now was knowing they were so close at hand.
He looked to her in longing and saw, yes, something of the dreams he could not hold. She turned and smiled to him for she did love him, quite dear. Or as much as a youth can, he whispered in the back of his mind, as much as a child can. She was but twelve years old and everything of spring of summer and nothing of fall and she smelt of running water. As slippery as an otter and glowing with Apollo’s wrath, she was nothing of death and age and responsibility and he loved her. He dearly loved her.
“We’re here!” her sharp voice stirred the inner workings he’d gotten himself caught inside his mind so he could slowly begin to peer out the globes of his eyes and see it, a tiny wood cottage, turned lavender with age, emerging from the wooding like a mother greeting her lost children home. Red shutters and passageways stood on its welcoming sides looking out across a garden of shade plants, ones that in the summer sprouted with butterflies and faeries that stayed out till the last moments of light and sometimes after as little beacons in the darkest nights to find the way home. Home, he thought, home. She danced up to its red door and pulled a golden key from her pocket, her energy boundless as her fragile fingers inserted it gently into the keyhole, the gentle sound of tumblers mixed with the tinkling of a spring and watermill behind the porch and the portal became open.
He followed her steps in and took in the musk and exhaled. This was his home. He threw the faded kaki coat on the side desk and placed the brief case on the dinning table then pause and picked it back up. Well, home enough till they returned to the city.
She was sitting on the kitchen counter looking through old post cards left from the previous owners of the cottage. One of a fishing rod and boat dated 1963, another on a lake somewhere up North dated 1967 and the last a bit smaller than the first two with a scene of the Loch Ness and a sad old man waving to the screen dated 1972.
“What were their names-” she peaked over their browning edges, the back of her legs hitting the cabinet with soft thuds.
“Hmm-” he stepped into the living room across the way, “I don’t know.”
But here was where they lived, he thought privately, here in the living room where tears were cried, laughs where released, and truths were unburdened. There was an old stuffed bass above the stone mantle and a wall of books to the left as a window let the light in just enough to raise any dust motes that might have been if there had been any. An out-dated plaid sofa set sat parallel to the fireplace where warm stories might have been shared and a table of wood varnished in glass that upheld parts of a cracked violin embellished now only for its value in the golden light. If he closed his eyes he could almost hear the laughs of a family reunioned at their predecessors’ house in memory and in song at the things that had been and that would and always always with each other. He held his heart.
“I always thought names were important,” he turned as she spoke “They are what we are. I once read a story—it was Asian, I think—they reverse the names there because their first names are too precious to give to just anyone.”
He walked into the red-checkered floor of the kitchen.
“How long do you have today-” he asked.
“Mom thinks I’m with my friend practicing Math. I told her I’d be back around three or four,” she smiled again and her face seemed to lighten the whole of her being and for the first time he smiled back.
He placed a hand on the exposed skin between her neck and her dull pink stripped tee and the other behind her auburn head as his lips met hers. She smelt of lavender and tasted of rosemary. Her teeth rubbed against his and she moved slightly under his hands so she was cupped in the clutch of the cupboard and paisley wallpaper. He pushed her up against the corner and felt her exhale sweetly on his cheek as her tongue cushioned against his flesh. Her thin legs tightened and relaxed beneath him as she whispered softly:
“Steven”
He shuttered. And she reached out cupping his ear with the tenderness of a leaf and grazed his heart that danced on the edge of his lips making him tremble in return:
“Jay.”
They were in the bedroom and on the floor, moving in rhythm, drawing in slow secret gestures. Her thin clothing fell away like a flower shedding it petals across the floor, revealing the softest rose he pulled gently closer, touching its pale inners, her flat chest, its rounded surroundings, her slight pouch on her belly where she kept midnight sleepovers, hot day lemonades, and peanut butter dinners at new friends’ tables, its undisturbed rhythm, her small heart beat, like an echo beneath his own, struggling so to keep up like a good dancer and every time she met him well. The ages of two, summer and fall, meeting across the distance, touching like animals unused to touching, with noses then lips and breasts, and finally palms presses against one another and clenched in sudden surprise and pain as each coursed across the other like a ship in seas uncharted but so very sailed through. His breath ceased and she cowered under and the gentle beat of the flesh inside rippled through his chest and thighs and aching back and through the rest of the house like a lark flapping its wings.
This is my home.
And on the table near the kitchen lay the brief case waiting, longing to reach out and touch that sound. The beat is inescapable, it would have said if this were such a fanciful story, except to those who are locked out and then it is a burden and consuming like our hearts in the fire—measures of limits that cannot be and will not be till we pass the edge and fall down softly and slowly and without a sound.
