A toss of light stirred Mairian from her humble bedding. White sheets slapped gently at the mattress as she flipped her head to the foot of the bed, back to stomach and a poof of down. Mairian breathed in the cotton and held on. This was her favorite breath. The first conscious one of the morning. It was an agreement with herself and with the light–an agreement of intention. Insert: a settling release of air.
One more twist and she was sideways on her bed with her black, full hair falling off one side and her bare feet off the other. She wanted back the days when nothing went falling to the floor when she went sideways on the bed. And yet, there were days when she felt just that small no matter how much dust she swept with her hair.
The light was elegant in the morning at Mairian’s sea-salty house–boards dry and soaked at the same sight. Unlike the dancing light of fairies bouncing from corner to corner, each movement here was slow and thoughtful. Mairian’s light drew long, thin lines of tapestry down her greying walls. Mairian’s light placed slippers on her feet. It played the quietest silent movie music in her head. Mairian’s light took her hands and told her, “Spin. Spin up and out of bed.”
There was a bloosh of white linen falling at Mairian’s ankles. Cold feet on cold, grey boards while the light whispered sweetly a beckoning.
Mairian left her doorless, empty bedroom–also her dinning and ball room–for a lonesome staircase to following the promise of rapturous light. The walls of her staircase fell away–those ever inconsistent walls. She turned left at the landing, now open to the morning rising shyly from the distant sea. She peered out and around the wall-less, glass-less window.
No more grey of dreams, Mairian’s light drew up great, thick and spongy, green moss. Green like mystery. Green like boys playing marbles. Green like monsters at the bottom of the sea. Green like surety giving itself a pep talk. Up and over hills and all the way to her windows, the moss came, turning over itself into complicated braids, the light pulling and tugging from every corner. “Alice would surely be lost in a moss like that.”
And the house blew away from her mind. There was no other moment than this one of peaceful, natural eloquence. There was no need to scrub or tidy or fill any space with remnants of dreams or half-met desires in the form of pies or piano keys. There was no need to sing old songs of lovelornity. There was no need to experience any other emotion that the one of light and slippers and green moss.
“A photograph. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a snap of this perfectly winsome moment to hold on to and refer to tomorrow when the sun does not rise quite the same?”
Mairian reached around the staircase to an old wooden drawer and took out a handy bit of metal filled with plastic and silver. She held of the worn camera to her umbrian eye. Click, ck-sh, kish. But the click was empty. Mairian set the camera down and picked it up again. Kish. Empty. A broken camera; a dissolving photo. Everything was slipping away. Slowly and silently. Walls to air. Photographs to memory. Memory to moment. The sunrise and the green, braided moss, and the smell of the shy sea were all instantly present and unpresent at the same time–lost in the siren of longing.
When her photograph would not come, Mairian stayed there on the landing. She stayed to dishearteningly freeze time. And the few seconds of clicking replayed and replayed. Replayed.
Clickish. Nothing. A picture of the brink of acceptance. A toss of light stirred Mairian from her bed.
Naphtalia 