Windmaker | cusp
The lighthouse wouldn’t be far, he told himself.
“There’s this impossible feeling in my brain. Like a block that I can’t cut through. Does that sound silly to you? His blanket is still on the chair, and his slippers near the door. He’s gone, but there’s that groove in the carpet where his feet usually rest.”
Poppy liked to talk to herself. She didn’t really know why. Was it the years spent alone, with the sea and the birds and the wind? Her hands fumbled with a little piece of driftwood. Her knife sheared off thin wafers of pale and brine-soaked fibres. Her eyes were half-closed. Her thoughts drifted. It was a strange little figurine, curved in places and elongated and flowing. Maybe those indents were little faces, all coalesced into a mass. Maybe this was the wind, blowing hard over the promontory.
Another mark here, to emphasise the anger. Nothing too much, or it’ll ruin the eyes.
Poppy watched the wood-shavings blow across the floorboards, carried on a phantom drift, all the way into a corner. They spun into a little whorl, briefly invigorated by a gust that rattled the windowpanes. And for a moment, she pictured Lou inside that wind, enrapt in the cold and the darkness. She laid down the knife, brought the wood up to the light.
“What if he is scared, like really, really scared?”
Her body shook, and she closed the window.
The match shivered, and was out. From here the ocean’s breath was steady. Long and drawn out and struggling. This was the murmur of the waves as they broke upon the shore and receded. Water moved very much like wind, he thought. They both carry things, Lou thought, and folding upon them again and again, tumbling incessantly, only to leave it behind once more.
The lighthouse wouldn’t be far, he told himself. Yes, the lighthouse wouldn’t be far at all. The hand reached out, met the cold and slimy surface of stone. Was this it? Lou huddled against the cobblestone steps, and struck his last match. His body crumpled inward, the little light sparkling between his fingers.
And for a moment he wanted to curl up into a ball and bury his head between his legs and forget and sleep and die. The lighthouse shouldn’t be far from here. Yet he could not see the searchlight, long and sweeping. He imagined Poppy in the highest room, waiting. She was going to teach him how to capture wind. Yes. The lighthouse shouldn’t be far.
