/estrago

She surveyed the veritable menagerie of dusty skeletons, some on their knees and praying, half-sunken into the stone ground of Asgard, for gods that had not come; others, with hands thrown out as if in attempt to shrug off cobwebs. The empty halls breathed with expectation.

That is disgusting, she said. A brief shiver ruffled the walls as, like a dog chastised, the hall reclaimed its trophies, and bone sank into a mire of unbroken white stone.

She sat at the bar, book in one hand and fork in the other, and every once in a while I caught her lips moving, as though ink were too fragile to contain what spilled over into movement and sound. I liked the way she turned the pages, as if there were something sacred in dried paper pulp.

As the amniotic sac punctured beneath the glass scalpel, the embryo emerged, with a covering finer than the lace of any bridal veil.

The day fell, roses and light broken over glacial clouds, crisp like panes of ice.

It was the little motions she made that moved me – like the way, rather than simply press the on/off switch, her thumb slid along the side of her cell phone to wake it. There was a prelude and taper to each gesture, a grace like that I’d only ever found in music.

At these rare moments her body welcomed the sun’s heat, she knew it presaged the fever that would follow, torch through and burn clean.

She raised her left hand to steady her right, and the well-worn familiarity of the gesture touched her like a shadow, a mirror. Not of herself, she realized as she trembled sugar into her coffee, but of her father as he used to sit straight-backed, brushing words onto parchment with the dedication of prayer.

And although he spoke for her, it was her hands that punctuated his voice and her words, her hands that you could not look away from as they translated thought to movement, displaced words out of reason and into passion. Her silence backlit a vitality that eclipsed speech.