A Bright House

“this teetering bulb of dread and dream” ~ Douglas Hofstadter

Degrees of soul. From egg to sperm, slim to stout, grow grow grow. Isn’t that the duty for each? Is duty the wrong word to affix to this natural, inevitable progression? A spiral up and outward is metaphorically optimum, with this ascension a part of the concept of eternity that so mocks we human minds. Wee human minds. However, ego-based attachments that erroneously take possession of that which has no business in a body, the free-of-definition, will contrive to hold a soul down. No upward spiral. Stasis. The word responsibility seems apt here, as in we have a responsibility to this gift of opportunity, no matter our station.

Jenny had chosen the path of no path. If choices made are enabled by reasons, she had plenty; not knowing who conceived her... not having answers for the cruelty in their way of dealing with her, leaving her where she could have perished... the indefinable emptiness of foster homes and almost-love... all leading to her connection with the man she would open her soul to, shedding weight through vulnerability, attaining courage through trust, all to what end? His end. As fervently as the younger Jenny wished to believe her heart when it sang of the layered blessings in her life, the randomly ruthless act of pulling it all apart came back with its louder mockery; all of this is borrowed. Three o’clock in the mornings of far too many sleepless forays into the harrowing abyss, where Jenny could actually feel how stuck she had become. Justifiable paralysis? Something that seemed best chosen from so few options had been meant for a temporary coping. Had Scott’s body been found, that closure would have proven invaluable, but the universe had selected her for special treatment, the variety that creates walking death. Without the ability to see it within herself, she had taken the ultimate abandonment that was Scott’s disappearance, and made it all about Jenny.

Even with that reality construct, Jenny hadn’t wallowed into the toxic wasteland of anger so much as she clung to the pain-become-precious. Nurturing the emotional environment best suited to pain retention, she kept Scott perversely alive. She simply wouldn’t allow him to die. Years passed before the tragedy of their separation mitigated itself through a tempering of her resolve to remain withdrawn from the gardens where hope will always grow. Metaphorically, she spent the first years indoors, locked away but dimly believing in a distant process back to the world. This was how Jenny could watch movies that flaunted love before her teary eyes, making her say to the flickering screen “I was there once”.

It was how she could read herself to sleep with a lump in her throat, but it wasn’t how she could enable her paltry wish to wake from the awful daylight dream. Jenny in the park with her sketch pad, pretty as you please, could strike a passerby in the most pleasant of ways; she was at home beneath an Autumn oak, a part of the landscape where lake Ontario met its sandy east side shore, a haunting spectre staring into the space between spaces on the subway... no eye that beheld her could know the ball of agony inside its pleasant exterior.

Pain and fear want ownership. Love wants nothing but more love. Pain and fear are unworthy byproducts, a necessary risk, for the reward that IS.

Ray knew. He stared into the depth of her eyes within the shadow of her hat brim, and he knew that she hadn’t chosen anger toward others, but was imprisoned by something of her own making. He hadn’t yet received the impressions that would detail the impetus for how she came to choose incarceration. Angling sunlight that escaped through breaks in the cloud cover made for a flattering bloom around his new female friend in the making, but his belly knotted as the impressions arrived; she was dropping her guard, willingly, and that alone held promise... yet, Ray sensed the reason and wasn’t comfortable with it. To be respectful of his unusual gift and burden was to be helpful through its application, but these offerings of aid came with their own potential pitfalls.

On the ferry as it approached the dockside terminal at Ward’s Island, in the early stages of west horizon mauve with tangerine accents in the cloud bellies, Jenny’s first flushes of desire were not based in body. Not any more than they were rooted in plausibility. She felt it so keenly when the ramp was lowered and people began to leave the vessel; a ghost of a chance... the saying, also the feeling. Timing and fortuitous placement of this man as catalyst, she allowed, had rekindled the old desire that she attain more than what life simply offered; her self. The slightest hint of that long buried anticipatory nudge, wink, inertia, was more than she could have hoped for on a Saturday out of the proverbial blue. With him tall and utterly comfortable in his skin, beside her as they left the ferry deck, Jenny remembered what belonging felt like. In this case, however small and simple a memory if accurately applied to their interactions thus far, it was an avalanching potential for what it could feel like to be a part of the entirety of life. Not a bystander. She looked at others who were actual couples, some holding hands, others obviously attached by invisible threads spun from willing cloth, and she remembered the peaceful wordless places.

The upper canopy of the tree in which it sits is a place of smaller limbs where hungry avian beaks have stripped the foliage to almost nothing. Large to the eyes of thousands of birds making the Leslie spit their temporary home, it sits high in the tree within hundreds of equally stripped trees, and is weightless. The branch does not bend beneath its massive talons of golden yellow, the skin so creased, ancient, evocative. If human eyes were to behold this visitor, a shimmering within the visible light spectrum held its form in a wavering halo that would alternately fascinate and frustrate the viewer. This part of the landfill nature preserve, however, is not a place where even the most ardent birders will visit. Swooping nest- protective attacks and the constant droppings are reason enough. Its beak is savagely hooked, three times the size of any indigenous red-tailed hawk, peregrine falcon, turkey vulture, kestrel. The eyes are piercingly acute. They have seen beyond the measure of its body. They are travelled eyes. For the span of the morning into afternoon and early evening of a day like and unlike any other, the eyes are fixed across lake water to a point on the eastern edge of Ward’s Island.

Jenny and Ray stopped for a moment at the railing that afforded them a clear vista of the city skyline. Anyone looking at them together would have placed them together. They made a tandem that radiated unity, despite their wildly differing ingredients and the far flung paths they had taken to reach the intersection of the predetermined, or the random lesson point, or the sceptical naysayer improbability. Or all of the afore and so much ever more. Different paths, ingredients, soul missions, but seemingly meant to be at that railing precisely when designed for maximum realization; that much was felt in unison as they stood quietly, he thinking one way, she another.

He fished the ferry schedule from a front pocket, glanced at return time options, and asked her where they could walk that would be “eye candy”, which caused her to smile openly as she continued to watch tiny star sparkles by the thousands that existed only due to the happy meeting of sunlight and water. She suggested a slow wander through some of the quaint traffic-less narrow streets of the Ward’s Island residential community, mostly smaller cottages and mid-sized homes of more traditional city architecture, though few of brick.

“Perfect” he said, tucking the schedule away and turning from the skyline to face a long path that ran the south shore of the island, close to the lake. He could make out the distant sight of a few scattered picnic tables, and pointed behind her shoulders. “Maybe we can work our way toward one of those tables, and sit for a while before the sun leaves us.”

“Sun like the Ray” she offered, and he playfully pushed her shoulder, groaning. They began to stroll, then, in an easy outward unity that belied the active trajectories of their differing thoughts.

In a hard scrabble dust coated village that shouldn’t exist in such a hostile kiln, at the base of tall mountains where many have died, a man who has lost his words appears from a swirling horizon of blown sand. He is drunk with near death. His legs to rubber. His arms across the chest in a grim foreshadowing of the coffin pose. Tottering into view, he is first seen from a small adobe building by a young boy who has been watching the sand storm approach. The boy calls to his parents and they congregate at the window. The staggering sand shadow clarifies into the form of a man, a large man. The boy’s father, as rugged as they come from a lifetime lived at high elevation where toil is survival, knits his leathery brow in concern. He tells his family to stay where they are and makes his way outside into furnace winds. The sand is beginning to pelt, and he shouts back to the home for them to close the wooden latches for two west facing windows. The calendar year is 1977. The location is near a plateau at Pampa Lluscuma, Chile. One to be obeyed instantly, the head of the family hears the shutters behind him and approaches the distant figure, which appears to be unclothed through the churning winds of sand. Before the distance between the two men can be closed to within a hundred yards, the unexpected visitor collapses face first. His arms do not attempt to break the fall. Pedro Rosales hurries forward and tightens the wrap around his face, sand now hitting exposed skin with tiny bites. Howls so familiar to Rosales play the gap between he and the fallen one. He arrives before the sprawled mess of a man, already well dusted, a backside crisscrossed by deep lacerations and horrid contusions visible even under these challenging conditions.

In the subsequent telling, in the village legend born this day during one of the harshest events of its type, it isn’t that the man is so graphically defiled. It isn’t that when Pedro turned him over to his back, the man had expired. It was that both eye sockets had been violently emptied.