Miss Margaret | after the storm
her heart is a lake, and there is always a glimmer on the waves.
Her heart was a lake. Boats, and fish and lovers swim and sing in the dark, rolling marrow of her frame.
It was a supple voice, barely audible in the clamour of traffic or in the heat of a carousal. There was a slight wooden taste to the words, the way one trails away and fades into the next like rain-softened bark.
A bird lands on the windowsill. She whispers a soft, hoarse hello and resists the urge to tap the glass. This was a little sparrow, maybe the first in his season. He is looking for a mate.
There was no immediate depth, and the pacing was moderately lively and somewhat slow. She reveled in those words, how they came not from the bottom of the throat but drew in and outward from the lungs and the belly. She convinced herself that singing was a matter of planting the right flowers at the right time, so that they were always in their best condition. But of course, flowers tend to have a mind off their own sometimes. They relished in sunlight and danced in rain, but all the excitement: the buzz of the lights and the sound of palms repeatedly striking. Striking. Striking. All was too much for such a little flower to bear.
He hops round, inspecting his stage. It must be his debut: the little bird must be in his best set of plumes. Delicately tailored and dew-kissed. She lays her head down on the sun-drenched sill, eyes anticipating, heart quickening just a little.
Her thoughts drifted however briefly to her own stage. Yes, that voice was slightly bitter and very sweet. There is no use thinking about that voice, she thought as one hand traced small circles on the glazed wooden surface. That voice is gone now. But just the thought of truely letting go from a near perfect thing: it was shattering, wretched, new. Her body was still her body, her eyes still saw things and connected things and loved things, and yes, they still shed tears. The mouth still moved, and the sluggish morning air still moved in and out of her chest. Yet it was a voice that she lost: a voice that was cared for and talked about and cried over.
She shifted her position a little, so that one eye would still remain on the fluffy, gentleman sparrow. He had no trouble, surely. A bird is made to sing, she thought. They create songs with no beginning and no end, but a sound which spirals up and up and down and down and fast and slow and never quite stops at all.
And then she found her hands on the keys of an old piano, in the warm and soft-edged land called childhood. It was a time when the world was always a little blurry, the way nature paints new pictures with the discarded canvases left in the rain. A classical piano, the notes were dreamy but still clear. How does a piano sing? Well, she thought, rubbing the sleep away from her eyes, a piano has wires and little hammers and wooden contraptions inside. The mind was unsatisfied. It asked again, a little more pensively: how does a piano sing? She yawned, and almost tried to hum a tune; the words that came were still pretty in a different way, the same way a cracked riverbed was pretty. She stopped.
A piano? A piano sings when it is comforted by gentle hands.
Outside the sparrow stands very still. Is he about to sing? For a brief few moments their eyes met, and then the cathedral bells rung in the distance, and he fluttered off in a spiralling panic. Miss Margaret sighed, and leaned back in her chair.
The therapist would be here in a moment: she always came after the first bells. She tries again, but the sounds which came were broken, sullen notes that fall to the ground with a *thump*, twitching. It was a horrible place to be, and she knew that over the weeks she would look at these different sounds, sift through them with wasted hands and reminisce at the one she had. She was an old soul with young eyes and a tender heart, but there is only so much loneliness one can bear.
Yes, her heart is a lake. Driftwood, bones and waves roll about, hither and thither, filling the empty spaces.
