Thursday 25 February 2010

The Prince of Notting Hill - Draft #3

The Prince of Notting Hill

Olivia Rousseau knew what it was to be alone. She could taste it in her morning’s breakfast and hear it in the door chime. Abandon prickled in her stomach and ruptured her vertebra piece and piece as she dressed in her school uniform. Her argyle knee socks and auburn curls were incendiary, igniting the fountains at Trafalgar during twilight. Mme. Rousseau presented Olivia at parties as though she were wrapped in silver ribbon. Olivia would stand very still and pose as her mother had disciplined her too.

Tonight she stood on the street, scraping her patent leather heel into the asphalt. Edouard’s townhouse looked as it had two years ago, when she saw it for the first time. White and five stories it stood alone behind molded rod iron gates. The houses around it seemed to shrink in submission to its grandiose presentation. Olivia stuck her hand through the gate and lifted the latch, tentatively pushing it open and slipping through. She closed it quietly. Stones, stacked upon one another, made a walkway to the heavy blue door. Lush vines had spread from the ground to his bedroom window. Eaves leafed over the windows on the second floor, rustling with the breeze. The door was unlocked. Olivia laughed humorlessly. Edouard had always been careless.

To reach the roof there were four staircases, one hundred steps, six wide landings, and one glass skylight to surpass. The journey to the sky passed through a mausoleum of antiques and artifacts that chronicled the life of a family that had hardly met. Black and white portraits of paunchy women and pock mocked men were framed in textured gold that matched the clean eggshell paint on the wall. The frozen family ties were relatable through vacant eyes. Edouard himself did not know who these photographs were of, but one man was pictured with a black bowler that had a striking similarity to a bowler he remembered his father wearing when he left for a function several years ago. Olivia had seen a black bowler for sale in a shop on King’s Road over the past weekend. She had thought of this photograph.

Each time Edouard climbed the stairs carefully, always taking note of the silver tea set that sat on the cherry-stained wooden table on the third landing. It was strange, he knew, but he wanted nothing more than to touch it. He wanted to smudge the shine, leaving his mark. He wanted to feel if the silver was cool or room temperature, but it was as if his mother’s gaze emanated from the set and if he touched it the pieces would shatter and fall. Instead he taught his friends how to unhinge the springs that held the skylight and pull the glass back so that it wouldn’t be scratched so that his mother would never know the difference. As Olivia ascended she remembered how special she felt when he had told her all of this. They had jumped the iron fence at Kew and as he undressed her against a sculpture he whispered that he had never believed in anything.

On the roof the garden was full with white and purple petals that exploded from manicured bushes, like a fire raging in snow. On holiday from university, glasses clinked as old friends, lovers, and ripe hangers-on celebrated one another’s homecoming. Pouring pints and dressed as an emcee Edouard moved swiftly amongst his guests. The university boys had engaged themselves in lurid conversations with the young girls that they wished to bed, gesticulating about Milton, the Pre-Raphaelites, and what was on at The National. The girls giggled and spilt a bit of champagne when they added their bits to the tête-à-tête. Ed smiled and hovered over his silver lighter before smiling at his tableaux and glancing towards the street. Olivia emerged, watching him suck in and hold the smoke. She stared silently at his cigarette smoldering orange. His eyes were dry and the twinkling lights from the roof illuminated his bloodshot pupils.

“Edouard, where’s the rest of your beer, mate?” It was Simon, a round boy who had heard of the party through a friend of a friend. Ed refocused his straying thoughts.
“In the chest next to the skylight.” He pointed to the open ice chest. He saw her standing by the chest helping herself to a Magner’s. She twisted the cap. She could see that he saw her and was watching her back in the dark. He leaned against the terrace with his elbows up on the stone rail, the cigarette hanging from his lips and a bottle of wine in his right hand. She waited but he continued to drink from the bottle, cavalier and dismissive. An old school friend rushed to her and began chattering away. Olivia turned her back to him.

Edouard was a conundrum, to be sure. He was a vexation, a trustafarian, a child. At his core he was a charmer, a skill that he had learned from his father. His boyish fervor encased him in a sea of dewy eyes and tangerine perfume, pink lace and kitty heels. He had a house attendent and the key to his father’s liquor cabinent. He had a sister too, but after an Oxbridge rejection she had opted to spend the year at the flat in Paris. No one paid her any mind and the children were undoubtedly separated from one another in the way only blood relations can stray.

In the night Ed glittered in the hyacinths, smoking whilst the neighborhood boys mixed white grapes and bubbles on the roof. He had given them that champagne. Those grapes and those bubbles. The boys were his waxen moldings, his prodigies. They were his schoolmates who dined with him on the eager harem of girls behind flower stalls on Portobello Road, at Swiss Alps chalets, and on beaches in the south of France. But it was over now. Carnival was done and the streets were clean. The boys had gone to be freshers at university, or on a gap year. Edouard himself had had every intention of moving with the pack but had failed to do enough revision on his A-levels and could not commit to a route for his own Grand Tour. Ed had begun to sleep in the garden.

He stubbed his cig and inhaled the air, beginning to drift. The smell of roses and dogwood. Olivia. She was there, he knew – but he couldn’t look at her. He closed his eyes. He lived in the castle on the crescent with his father, who may or may not have been married to his mother, the bejeweled woman whose inheritance everyone knew. She bought tuna in oil and watched television under the stairs. He felt Olivia stare at him with her bright green eyes, quiet and ferocious, asking how he could have left her against the sculpture, naked and sweating. He drank and justified that she should have known and if she truly hadn’t known than if it hadn’t of been him it would have been someone else. Olivia smiled and danced with a group of girls, averting the pain and searing pull she felt towards him. His tie was loose and the present company blurred into movements and shadows. Perhaps her bright green eyes were simply that and his alcoholic stupor had merely born another nightmare.

He sparked the lighter. His raw thumb stung when he pressed it against the tinny metal rivets. It didn’t take. He did it again. His thumb blistered under pressure. Rubbing and flicking – there’s the flame. He heaved in, his lungs filled with smoke and toxins that detonated inside of him until his eyes rolled back and the whites were exposed. Eyes were everywhere – gaping and dilated as he fell into space and galaxies where there were no ticking clocks or locked iron gates. There was only slipping and sinking and the muffled sound of voices that rustled like the displaced cadence of Olivia’s voice saying his name. There were ghosts floating between waking worlds and the land of the dead as smoke curled further down the webs inside of him. Lights were violent, white, and crimson but the sky was black and these colors were only the remnants of synapses firing in his mind. He couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t swallow but he could see the air everywhere. Touching, not tasting – alone in the birth of self-awareness and the awakening of his body.

He drank the red wine in his grasp and tried to piece together the fractures of a beautiful face that loomed above him. Nothing burned at his fingers – the drugs were gone. He heard the sad singing of a man in pain and bells ringing like symbols crashed in the distance. His body shook with the rapture but he knew that God was dead. He’d simply had too much to drink. Olivia disappeared as he reached for the outline of her body against the fuzzy yellow roof lamps. Where was the singing? It was louder now, he was trying to listen. The noise was important; it was saying something that he needed to understand. He could nearly make it out in the chaos but he floundered because the syllables didn’t make sense and there was no one to translate. He burnt the flowers with the fag and went back to the party.

The city sparkled underneath him and the cabbies knew his address. The Prince of Notting Hill. The Prince trounced the town with his smile and his cigarettes. The town knew his address, but no one knew him. He told her that he wanted it that way. He led a band of boys that loved his image but hated his being and he was so aloof that one couldn’t help but feel that every time you saw him could be the last. He was hazy and everyday was one day closer to the hour when he would disappear from their lives forever. Olivia could sense the imminent seclusion, as a dog can smell the rain. Edouard was fading. She had come here tonight. She had drunk his liquor and wandered into his garden. His cigarette burned to its filter but he let it nick his fingers. She was savoring seconds and manipulating moments, reliving the one when they kissed in the grass as she twirled to a song she didn’t recognize. She could feel the breeze blow in from the west like it had that night and suddenly nothing felt as if it had ever been long ago.

He could have loved her. Olivia. He could have loved any of them, but his father couldn’t love so he couldn’t love, and the world turned in the way it always did. The women would come and the arrangements would be made but there were no plans to speak of. She had wanted plans. If there were plans they changed and alcohol-infused dreams were broken by the brisk snap of the morning after – there was Olivia. There she was on the molded stone, staring at the sky. It was so easy but there had been so many of them and the Prince couldn’t justify why she would be any different. The boys fed him booze and women but he was alone in the drugs, and to this end nobody cared.

Olivia lay back on the stone balcony, her shoe dangling against the side of the house. How far would she fall if she rolled herself off roof and into the night? Only to the street? Or would it be beneath the ground? She could continue to fall, tunneling her way deep beneath the yellow street lamps and into the ground, finding some solace at last. He could chase her there. She wanted to know what it was that was buzzing inside of him. The connection in the disconnection, the money in the safe. Where were those answers and why hadn’t he stopped when she said “no”? She had said no but she wanted to feel his hands and mouth on her on the wet summer grass because she had never felt anything. When he pushed on it made her feel alive. She gave him her necklace.

He was protected under a name but that excuse had been worn by his seventeenth birthday. She was protected under nothing and as her mother drove her to the clinic she wondered if the moment and euphoria could have really of been worth it. He was wanted and people looked for him to tell his thrills, sell them his pills, cocaine, and tranquilizers. Once on holiday in France his cousins had tried to chase him down for a hit of their own. He had hidden between booths on the Promenade, wishing to be free of his captors.

Olivia. How long ago had it been Olivia, with the public school boys in the sunshine, her hair in the wind. She had expected the best but he had showed her the worst and he still had her necklace under his pillow. Another girl had found it one night and the charm’s silhouetted shape swayed in the moonlight next to the window where she stood. There were boys that he had molded in his image but it they had moved on. The Prince was at their peril, the power dynamic had shifted and now he was in the back with the empty pints and the kitchen orders on weeknights. Bar back was the worst but his father might be in when he came back, and the day was coming when he wouldn’t be afraid of himself anymore.

Olivia-the necklace-the drugs in the castle-it was happening. Edouard watched but he would not speak. Olivia was here and if she was here than she was telling him that she was in love and he was forgiven in the only way that she could. He needed to give her the pony charmed necklace back. It was the only token that she had to offer after she had given herself and tonight he wouldn’t even feign a conversation. He could have come down in the garden but the high had twisted his routes until he was infinitely lost and her emerald eyes against the blue night were too much. If he could have that touch from anyone again – not hers, it didn’t have to be hers – but a touch from a hand he knew, a graze he recognized, an afternoon in the grass. Where was everything and when did it go? He was seventeen but it was over. His father was off with the women he had never met, his mother kept calling her daughter though the phone went straight to voicemail.

He popped the next bottle and cheered with the boys. The chosen girls had been selected for the evening like a batch of cherries. They toasted their men before the streets that knew their stories. The St. Paul’s and Morehouse girls all divvied up and equally matched. The Prince was the host, he had the first pick, but he only wanted her, so sweet on the ledge, with the arms that would hold him until this episode was over. His heart had stopped, his eyes glazed. His fingers loosened their grip, his whole body consumed in the disarray of the moment and splayed on the ground. How do you bridge the time that’s past when the next moment could make all the difference? When you stretch but you can’t breathe, the air thick in your head and your bones are old though your skin is smooth.

“Ed!”
“Eddie!”
“Edouard!”
“Ed!”
“Call 999!”

Flashing lights and chaos, feet scuffling through the sky window, scratching the glass and scurrying down the stairs. Bottles rolled and clinked against one another like broken wind chimes barely audible in the wind. Pulse. Check. Breathing. Check. Just a bit much, the cops chuckled. They left brown, dirty footsteps on the white carpet. Then nothing. The night was silent. The house was silent. The roof was empty. The boys had fled. Olivia held out a glass of water, to which he sipped and let his head loll in her lap.

“You’re all right Eddie. You’re still here. I’m still here.”

A flicker in his mind. It was morning and he awoke in his lofted bed, alone. She had left before the sun rose. Isolated and frozen she was falling, sinking, dying in her black taffeta dress – alone in the way that she had arrived.

Wednesday 3 February 2010

The Prince of Notting Hill - Stories and Reflections


The Prince of Notting Hill


Edouard was a conundrum, to be sure. He was a vexation, a trustafarian, a child. At his core he was a charmer, a skill that he had learned from his father. His boyish fervor encased him in a sea of dewy eyes and tangerine perfume, pink lace and kitty heels. He had a maid and the tightest security system in the neighborhood. He had a sister too, but after an Oxbridge rejection she had opted to spend the year at the flat in Paris. No one paid her any mind and the children were undoubtedly separated from one another in the way only blood relations can stray. The clock ticked above the stove. There was still milk in the crate, a nutri-grain bar left on the countertop. It was one thirty in the afternoon, and he didn’t have work tonight. The boys were out at seven.


In the night Ed glittered in the hyacinths, smoking whilst the boys mixed white grapes and bubbles on the roof. He had given them that champagne. Those grapes and those bubbles. The boys were his waxen moldings, his prodigies. They were his schoolmates who dined with him on the eager harem of girls behind flower stalls on Portobello Road, at Swiss Alps chalets, and on beaches in the south of France. But it was over now. Carnival was done and the streets were clean. Jean was at uni, Nick was on his gap year. Ed was in the garden.


The smell of roses and dogwood. Olivia. She was there, he knew – but he couldn’t look at her. He closed his eyes. He lived in the castle on the crescent with his Father, who may or may not have been married to his mother, the bejeweled woman whose inheritance everyone knew. She bought tuna in oil and watched television under the stairs – Olivia. He burnt the flowers with the fag and went back to the party.


The city sparkled underneath him and the cabbies knew his address. The Prince of Notting Hill. The Prince trounced the town with his smile and his cigarettes. They knew his address, but no one knew him. He told me that he wanted it that way. He led a band of boys that loved him but hated him too and he was so aloof that one couldn’t help but feel that every time you saw him could be the last. He was hazy and everyday was one day closer to the hour when he would disappear from their lives forever. The boys could sense the imminent seclusion, as a dog can smell the rain. Edouard was fading.


He could have loved her. Olivia. He could have loved any of them, but his father couldn’t love so he couldn’t love, and the world turned in the way it always did. The women would come and the arrangements would be made but there were no plans to speak of. If there were plans they changed and alcohol-fused dreams were shattered by the brisk snap of the morning after – there was Olivia. There she was on the stone, staring at the roof. It was so easy but there had been so man and the Prince couldn’t justify why she would be any different.


His mind was a consistent run-around. The boys fed him booze and women but he was alone in the drugs, and to this nobody cared. I would just watch him from the distance, wondering what it was that was buzzing inside of him. The connection in the disconnection, the money in the safe. He was protected under a name but that excuse had been worn by his nineteenth birthday. People looked for him, for they had heard of him and once on holiday in France he had hidden between booths on the Promenade, wishing to be free of his captors.


Olivia. How long ago had it been Olivia, with the public school boys in the sunshine, her black hair in the wind. She had expected the best but he had showed her the worst and he still had her necklace under his pillow. Another girl had found it one night and the charm’s silhouetted shape swayed in the moonlight next to the window where she stood.


There were boys that he had molded in his image but it was a job unfinished and the royal court had staged a mutiny. The Prince was at their peril, the power dynamic had shifted and he was in the back with the empty pints and the kitchen orders. Bar back was the worst but his father might be in when he came back, and the day was coming when he wouldn’t be afraid of himself anymore.


Edouard sparked the lighter. His raw thumb stung when he pressed it against the tinny metal rivets. It didn’t take. He did it again. His thumb blistered under pressure. Rubbing and flicking – there’s the flame. He heaved in, his lungs filled with smoke and toxins that detonating inside of him until his eyes rolled back and the whites were exposed. Eyes were everywhere – gaping and dilated as he fell into space and galaxies where there were no ticking clocks or self inflicted destruction. There was only slipping and sinking and the muffled sound of voices that rustled like the displaced cadence of Olivia’s voice saying his name. There were ghosts floating between waking worlds and the land of the dead as smoke curled further down the webs inside of him. Lights were violent, white, and crimson but the sky was black and these colors were only the remnants of synapses firing in his mind. He couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t swallow but he could see the air everywhere. Touching, not tasting – alone in the birth of self-awareness and the awakening of his body.


He drank the red wine that had snaked into his grasp and tried to piece together the fractures of a beautiful face that loomed above him. Nothing burned at his fingers – the drugs were gone. He heard the sad singing of a man in pain and bells crashed like symbols in the distance. His body shook with the rapture but he knew that God was dead. He’d simply had too much to drink. Olivia disappeared as he reached for the outline of her body against the fuzzy yellow roof lamps. Where was the singing? It was louder now, he was trying to listen. The noise was important, it was saying something that he needed. He could nearly make it out in the chaos but he floundered because the syllables didn’t make sense and there was no one to translate.


Olivia-the necklace-the drugs in the castle-it was happening. And he could have gone back to the garden but it was a long way down and her raven eyes in the black hair with the blue night was too much. If he could have that touch from anyone again – not hers, it didn’t have to be hers – but a touch from a hand he knew, a graze he recognized, an afternoon in the grass. Where was everything and when did it go? He was nineteen but it was over. His father was off with the women he had never met, his mother kept calling her daughter though the phone went straight to voicemail.


He popped the next bottle and cheered with the boys. The chosen girls had been selected for the evening like a batch of cherries. They toasted their men before the streets that knew their stories. The St. Paul’s and Morehouse girls, all divvied up and equally matched. Those were the girls who were already to fucked up to know the difference. The Prince was the host, he had the first pick. He wanted her, so sweet on the ledge with the arms that would hold him until this episode was over.


His heart had stopped, his eyes glazed. His fingers loosened their grip, his whole body consumed in the disarray of the moment. How do you bridge the time that’s past when the next moment could make all the difference? When you stretch but you can’t breathe, the air thick in your head and your bones are old though your skin is smooth. Even though the proceedings are no different than they were last Friday, and the one before that… for five years.


“Ed!”

“Eddie!”

“Edouard!”

“Ed!”

“Edouard Renee!”


Silence.


The night was silent. The house was silent. The roof was empty. The boys had gone. The raven held out a glass of water, to which he sipped – quiet like a child.


“You’re all right Eddie. You’re still here. I’m still here.”


A flicker in his mind. It was morning and he awake in his lofted bed, alone.


Olivia


Olivia knew what it was to be alone. She could taste it in her morning’s breakfast and hear it in the door chime. Abandon prickled in her stomach and ruptured her vertebra piece and piece as she dressed in her school uniform. Her argyle knee socks and red waves formulated her mother’s only fantasy. She presented Olivia at parties as though she were wrapped in silver ribbon with sparkles. Oli would stand very still and pose in the way that she had been shown. Oli was a belle, and every Friday Edouard held a ball. Tonight his garden looked the same as it had two years ago when she saw it for the first time. She stared silently at the orange smoldering of his cigarette. The garden was full with white and purple petals that exploded from manicured bushes, like a fire raging in snow. She watched him suck in and hold the smoke. His eyes were dry and the twinkling lights from the roof illuminated his bloodshot pupils. He saw her. She could see that he saw her and was watching her back in the dark.


She had come here tonight. She had drunk his liquor and wandered into his garden. His cigarette burned to its filter but he let it dissipate. She was savoring seconds and manipulating moments, reliving the one when they kissed in the grass. She could feel the breeze blow in from the west like it had that night and suddenly nothing felt as if it had ever been long ago. There was a party on the roof with the boys from school. Laura and Tash were up there and she knew that she should find her way back up the ladder. Edouard watched but he would not speak. She was here and if she was here than she was telling him that she was in love in the only way that she could. He still had her necklace with the gold pony charm. It was the only token that she had to offer after she had given herself and tonight he wouldn’t even feign a conversation. Isolated and frozen she was falling, sinking, dying in her black taffeta dress – alone in the way that she had arrived.


Edouard [sensory]


Edouard sparked the lighter. His raw thumb stung when he pressed it against the tinny metal rivets. It didn’t take. He did it again. His thumb blistered under pressure. Rubbing and flicking – there’s the flame. He heaved in, his lungs filled with smoke and toxins that detonating inside of him until his eyes rolled back and the whites were exposed. Eyes were everywhere – gaping and dilated as he fell into space and galaxies where there were no ticking clocks or self inflicted destruction. There was only slipping and sinking and the muffled sound of voices that rustled like the displaced cadence of Olivia’s voice saying his name. There were ghosts floating between waking worlds and the land of the dead as smoke curled further down the webs inside of him. Lights were violent, white, and crimson but the sky was black and these colors were only the remnants of synapses firing in his mind. He couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t swallow but he could see the air everywhere. Touching, not tasting – alone in the birth of self-awareness and the awakening of his body.


He drank the red wine that had snaked into his grasp and tried to piece together the fractures of a beautiful face that loomed above him. Nothing burned at his fingers – the drugs were gone. He heard the sad singing of a man in pain and bells ringing like symbols crashed in the distance. His body shook with the rapture but he knew that God was dead. He’d simply had too much to drink. Olivia disappeared as he reached for the outline of her body against the fuzzy yellow roof lamps. Where was the singing? It was louder now, he was trying to listen. The noise was important, it was saying something that he needed. He could nearly make it out in the chaos but he floundered because the syllables didn’t make sense and there was no one to translate.


The Hallway


To reach the roof there were four staircases, one hundred steps, six wide landings, and one glass skylight to surpass. Edouard’s journey to the sky passed through a mausoleum of antiques and artifacts that chronicled the life of a family that had hardly met. Black and white portraits of paunchy women and tired men were framed in textured gold that matched the clean eggshell paint on the wall. The frozen bloodlines were relatable through the identical vacant eyes that did not have enough life in them to die. Edouard did not know who these photographs were of, but one man was pictured with a black bowler that had a striking similarity to a bowler he remembered his father wearing when he left for a function several years ago.


Edouard climbed the stairs carefully, always taking note of the silver tea set that sat on the dark wooden table on the third landing. It was strange, he knew, but he wanted nothing more than to touch it. He wanted to smudge the shine, leaving his mark. He wanted to feel if the silver was cool or room temperature, but it was as if his mother’s gaze emanated from the set and if he touched it the pieces would shatter and fall into the pool of disappointment that he had come to embody for her. Instead he taught his friends how to unhinge the springs that held the skylight and pull the glass back so that it wouldn’t be scratched and that his mother would never know the difference.



The Holy Trinity Vignettes

The Father

Father sucked vodka soaked ice through his teeth in the newly tiled kitchen. He had bought an upright, chiseled property in the backwoods of Massachusetts amongst colonial spirits and white-tailed deer. The ice stung his sensitive teeth, his silver watch ticked. At mid-afternoon there was nobody home and the titans in his mind began to peak around the intricate moldings carved in the doorway. It was seven years ago today. Father spun the cap off of the liquor bottle and poured another glass. From the kitchen he could see the Great Room, an affair with bright yellow walls, four identical portraits of the children, and a brown leather couch that formed a crescent in front of the fireplace. Father picked up his glass and slid along the wood paneled floor between the two rooms in his socks, like Tom Cruise. He held his arms and spread his legs the way that they had been in the movie, and as he stood still reminiscing it occurred to him that as the light changed the yellow paint became darker.

Father tipped his toes towards the portraits. The girls were coiffed and blushed, holding black and white bouquets that had been retouched with sepia tones at the photographer’s request. The boy sat in his suit and yarmulke, wincing into the lens, smiling through his teeth in the way that he had been taught when he was little. The father recognized the dirty spots near the corner of the son’s eyes and realized that he had been crying. The children were not his. Father tilt his glass back, running liquid into his insides to digest with water and Ego Waffles. The four children carried his name but they were not his. The son would always belong to his mother, his daughter also destined to remain a shadow of a woman seven years gone. The other two girls came from his new wife, and were as equally disconnected to him as his own creations were. Father sat on the floor with his legs crossed, facing the portraits and murmuring to himself all the ways that life can change.

Seven years ago there would have only been two pictures, framed and displayed in a different house, hung on a wall in his children's' home. The father remembered how he sat stiffly in the simple living room, trying to understand that the fight was over. The children’s dead mother looked like she was sleeping in her bedroom tucked in and warm. The fan in the corner was unplugged because she was cold. Her son asked her how she was, and she said, “freezin’”. The boy had been with her as she passed and in the forlorn emptiness the foundation of a family so well cared for crumbled six feet underground. Father jolted himself off of the ground. His stepdaughters would be home soon and he needed to get back to the office. He had not put any pictures of his first wife in the house, not wanting his new family having to combat with the ghost that encompassed his kin. He rinsed his glass and put the bottle back in the cabinet. Tomorrow he could return to his equilibrium and fountain pens that inked his rehearsed signature. Today he could only feel the sticky residue of his loved wife dead, only haunted by the perpetual moans in her children's' silent eyes.

The Son

As a student of logic, the son counted. It was 61,320 hours since she had died. 17, 520 hours later there were two new rings, two new children, and a new family certified by the proper legal authorities. The son sat at his desk clicking through banal emails, categorizing envelopes, filing requests. He had 1,208 unread messages that had piled up over the term but no new voicemails and he accepted that another year had surpassed without anyone remembering. It was hot and people swam around him as if they were aquatic dancers in a dream but the son was lost when he tried to recognize beauty. His dry eyes skirted beneath the lids as he tried to maintain order and control over the synchronized sea of the office. Time lagged and hazy clouds peeled like carrots underneath the sun. It was the hour of her departure. Shadows from the window blinds crept across the desk like a warning sign of the minutes to come. It was 3:10. At 3:46 it would be over, and another year would grow before he felt the death again. Seven years ago she still had 36 minutes left.

The son always thought she knew, like she could feel the end twisting up from the root of the disease deep within her. What is there left to say in thirty-six minutes? Not even an hour, but long enough to watch one more episode of her favorite sitcom, or listen to her son read her favorite passage of The Great Gatsby five more times. The shadows climbed onto his hands, severing them into five even splits. The son’s computer screen refreshed, he had a new message. The day persevered despite him. In a room of buzzing phones, dinging alerts, and frenzied student government officials his world died as the clock ticked. The second hand mocked him when it paused, as if this year it might take mercy on him – as if it might stop and remember his mother for a few more moments before the minute arrived that she evaporated. He wanted to wraith on the floor, to twitch and feel his pores expand to release the nectar of sadness that echoed off of his insides and clung to his veins.

But he remained concentrated, ever perceptive to the movement and talk around him. There was a choice to shout and scream and cry, to be wildly unabashed so that his insides covered the room, the walls dripping with loss and remorse. There was a choice to remain gravely still, stoic, and focused as more labels were printed to categorize papers that would be rendered insufficient in six to ten months. The continuous motions of his fingers allowed an icing numb to expand within him, to freeze his blood and suppress his beating heart from ever being surprised or enthralled. There are ways to fill hours that the son had never fathomed before 3:46 seven years ago but today a moment in wait caused him to hold his breath without realizing it and question if he had ever made a difference. The son had to serve her. He had to prove to her that he had learned what she had tried to teach him, that he would spread her message as deeply as the poison had seeped within her. To wraith was not a choice but a defeat. To scream would be an abomination. At 3:45 he bit the inside of his cheek and answered an email saying that he would be in a meeting at four in the afternoon. With a tock it was 3:46 but the world kept spinning and the son was left to bare the weight alone.

The Holy Ghost

The Holy Ghost sat in the corner, silently mulling in the antique cerulean rocking chair. The day was bright and beams of light dripped a paler shade of yellow on the walls. The sky was blue. It was peaceful here. The fireplace had six-inch tapers on the white mantle, a crushed rose lying between them like a sacrifice on an altar. The Holy Ghost rocked steadily, pacing her movements as to keep time steady, to ease the father’s ticking watch, and the sun from setting too soon. The Holy Ghost eased and rocked as if her heart beat within the father, pulsating wildly against his lungs.

The father sank to the floor in front of the portraits of the children. He held his empty glass tightly and bit his lip. The Holy Ghost rocked slower, trying to steady the pain. When the tip of the rocker touched the floor a pang shot through the father like a spark on ice. He twitched with the jolt but did not look away from his wife’s children. He put the glass down and got to his feet. He stood close enough to the portrait of his son for his breath to fog the glass. The father lifted his hand to touch the son’s face in the most intimate way he could fathom, through a pane. He pressed his fingertips onto the boy’s frozen cheek. The Holy Ghost watched the man desperately trying to connect with an image on paper.

She arose from the chair as the wind in the room died and the clouds overhead ceased to blow. She walked slowly, aware that time and space, life and death are merely states of consciousness in which we choose to take part. The father put his forehead to the glass, keeping his hand on the son’s face. Oil from his forehead sullied the frame and his tears dropped like burdens to the ground. The Holy Ghost lifted her frail peach arm and placed the stems of her fingers on his back. She felt him breathe, she could feel the oxygen expand in her dilapidated organs, her extremities tingling with the kiss of air.

The father steadied. Two hundred miles away the son shivered with a chill and touched his hand to his face. He looked over his shoulder. There was no one. He continued to hold himself, cradling his cheek like a child in a hammock as his desk lamp burned in the dark. The Holy Ghost held the Father, and the Father held the Son somewhere between waking and sleeping, between the light and the dark, feeling pieces of flesh that they all recognized from very long ago.