Page 48 - WTPO Vol. VII #5

Devoted
“Tis too much proved—that with devotion’s visage And pious action we do sugar o’er
The devil himself.”
–Shakespeare
Or sits and writes at the table and often turns her gaze toward the clouds congealing in the heat bubbling above her like a milky copula. The clouds arrive, single soldiers, but quickly close ranks, and unfurl like a wrinkled banner from horizon to horizon.
At such moments, in the closing hours of the after- noon, Or would place the pen on the pitted lacquered surface of the table and watch the clouds roll over the north of the island, their lower, back fringes blackened with shadow, as if trailing tails of shame.
And each day, the lush hill would turn a deeper shade of green, jade, emerald, and khaki. At her house pressed against the river, the overgrown trees were spaced unevenly along the road like drunk sentries, breaking ranks in a panic and spilling down the valley to entomb the ramshackle pagodas and green pools in plumes of vines and immense stands of bamboo. All objects, animate or inanimate, appeared to crest the hill only to roll down the far side as if exhausted to their vital cores.
~
Or remembered only with difficulty. In this place of steep hills, jagged valleys, and coves clogged with
salt marsh, sustained memory was as impossible as preventing the monsoon rains. When she remembered an incident from the past, it was like a puff of smoke evicted from her forehead, floating over the mottled garden of stones near the kitchen path, revealing an image, a smell, a sound, before bursting. The notes
she jotted on paper were mere invocations of what memory can suggest—a brief beat, a staggered silence, and nothing more. She did not resist. She allowed the events of the moment to tumble at her bare feet and die.
~
On the hall table was a mound of Arden’s notes. He wrote on all manner of scraps. This was part of Or’s
evening: all day, the bicycle boys from the city deliv- ered the messages to her house and deposited them in the foyer.
Ardent’s blocky, angular script was the perfect me- dium to express his failed attempts at writing monu- mental works: incomplete epics, scraps of a cycle
of stories, a prologue for a philosophy of history, an introduction to a book on human memory, the outline of a sprawling, intergenerational family novel. Ardent sent Or the swirling detritus of his creative life. This, she knew, was an extraordinary compliment. He could not trust himself to be the guardian of his terminated children. So Ardent repurposed Or, trans- forming his ex-wife into both archivist and sentry.
She held a sheet to the window’s fading light and read:
CHP 1. When he was a small boy when he skinned his knee he was riding his bicycle down the wooded path of the old manor house when he heard people laugh- ing and he turned to look and in that moment hit a horse trough and landed hard and began to cry and the girl his cousin ten years his senior rushed out and led him to the enclosed pagoda and she sat him on a step and cooed below him parting her pouting lips blasting a hiss of cool air at the wound and asked him if it felt better and when he said yes the cousin stroked his pants and snaked up his shorts pumping his tacky member and he felt a raw aching pleasure for the dark side of this act and its kin had yet to seed and sprout for this girl-woman-cousin procured her desires with an arsenal of coercion and manipulation speckled with loving often material gestures and when she became
a woman she honed her art and trapped him a cousin sister mother rapist and she cast a mold he would pour and shape with everyone he was supposed to love....
“God,” Or said out loud. “One run-on sentence and no commas.”
He continued in his own voice:
I’ll see you for dinner.
If I don’t arrive by 8PM, don’t expect me. You are my treasure.
– Ardent
~
Or settled into the chair with rosemary tea. Ardent Zonder had long called her his treasure. Eight PM arrived and departed and she was alone. Since their
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eric Maroney