Tar Coast

He remembers the day she brought home the music box, the little remnant of her years as a dancer, mediocre she said as she twisted the tiny, rusty mechanism to start the sound, and it seemed to him that this was the end of the world as she twisted the handle again and again until she stopped and looked him in the eye and they sat for hours, listening to the glistening, automatic sound of the ballet as the ice blue swan turned around itself, repeatedly, slowly like an eddy and at these moments he thought that this was their marriage that this was what tied them together in life, eternal, before anything and after everything else and until death. And now as he twists the handle, hears the rusty snap, he thinks 'and after death.’

There is logic in the language of defeat. inevitability crowned with wreaths of roses, chrysanthemums, daffodils as yet in bloom, some trademark of an old, outlandish festival that somehow remains linked in these spheres of misty light hanging on everything as I walked and as my breathing became something natural, something as obvious as grass and trees and hills and mountains and sea. Between the blinking of my eyes and the colour blue I lay my head and shrank infinitely into the sand of a blank pebbled beach. The screaming winter wind chiselled my face as the lights turned on and off and on again and nothing was inclined to rest but the slow melodrama acted out behind me; the return of sailors to their wives, fishermen tying the strings of their children's hair. It is so difficult to breathe, surrounded by so much wind. I listen to the vague voice of the winter and through the threaded clothes and the salty hair I reach some ancestral plane, I think that things have happened and I twitch from the cold of all the winds I have not felt; I flinch away from every whisper throwing me off balance, making my mind stop to hear everything that I don’t know; I stammer, ‘s-top’ I want to say to the howling and the shrieking and the rose-coloured singing of the mermaid chant; I have lost plenty of time. I have lost so much time and the song that should beckon frightens me; I have not freed myself from anything. I want to make a startled expression and leave, get up and go everywhere. Like the wind.