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The Chase
The footsteps she leaves are consistently interrupted by white lines as narrow as threads. You see them, then feel compelled to tilt your head upwards. You feel your brow compress into sutures as you consider the limpid light. The edges of your vision are rimmed in gold.
On one occasion, you walked the dusty streets of a forgotten town in Nepal. You passed through a storefront for the dimness you sensed would cool your shallow breaths. A man stepped forward from the shadows lingering on the walls. When he smiled, he blinded you with his teeth and you blinked. As your lashes fluttererd open you saw a thin trail of smoke evaporating from the cup of tea immediately in your hand.
Let us discuss the passage of an hour, your mother once said. Let us discuss how the tilt of a minute hand is both inconsequential and fraught with meaning. And, your mother added after a silence fell like a wool cloak, how the importance of an hour becomes relegated to the sound of each quiver from the hand on the face of an otherwise mute clock. In response, your belly began to simmer and you asked faintly into the silence, Mother: how did you come to speak like this?
Over her footsteps, the edges of chiffon dresses once swayed with the breeze. Your favorite evoked rainbows and butterflies traipsing through rays of light. Once, she paused and turned to offer you an orange. You have never forgotten the experience of peeling away its thick hide—the remnants that would cling between the edges of your nails and skin. There were seeds, but you welcomed their bitterness to heighten the bursting sweetness of jasmine, of honeysuckle, against your tongue.
These memories are a single weight and you are the one with the extended palm, open and trusting the fall of light against the flesh that surrounds your life lines.
From the edge of your extended palm, air spills and as your gaze follows, you see her footsteps carefully straddling the thin excuse for a rope.
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Copyright ©2005 Carayan Press
