It's Still Life

At an Intersection Named After an English King and a Saint
Six Sentence Story: Part 13 A Constellation of Coloured Paper

Connor wanders around my flat in a blind need, as if a return to death is but one short call away – he touches books but not to read – just to hear the ink echo, and then traces his finger across the windowpane hoping his flesh will leave a faint fingerprint —

“What happened to us,” his question is a word, a breath, various levels of hells, and the floor floods with old grief … and I’m wading deep in it.

“Sometimes the Fates hoard the light,” I say in a voice tender enough for his heart, “our wind left no footprints on the grass, and yet, here you are … you come like light pouring into my eyes again.”

Connor smiles but his eyes are still shadow and silence, still filled with two young lovers from Belfast who blew apart like leaves, and he studies a large bouquet of lazy-stemmed peonies that pretend to doze-off (but listen to every word I say), and he pokes at one blossom to see if it’s plastic …

“You’re still cohabiting with flora rather than fauna, I see,” and keeps speaking as if reaffirming his existence isn’t madness.

“Why did you leave Belfast,” he asks, and I say, “I left because there was no comfort in the sun after I buried you – because I was never meant to rust in the stifled streets of empty waste,” and I pause before saying, “and when you died, the world seemed done.”

He picks up two wine glasses left on the coffee table, examines one of them for flecks of lipstick, and says, “You’re sleeping him, aren’t you – you know he burnt the place to the ground,” but I don’t answer, and so he says that silence was his lingering memory of me.

And the evening sky is a constellation of coloured paper as the day shuts down, and Connor says, “I hope you still have your bag of tricks, Brigid, because I’m a ghost tethered to Pierre, and I want you to detach me from him – I’m going to serve-up cold.”

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Previous instalments of this story: Part 1: The Pull Back   Part 2: The Measure of Her    Part 2: The Gatekeeper’s Response  Part 3: The Colour of Walls   Part 4: Tectonic Shifts  Part 5: Out of the Frying Pan  Part 6: How to Break Eggs Part 7: A Moon River  Part 8: Starlight Shines on the Roof  Part 9: Before When  Part: 9.1 Flower Power Part 10: To Trace a Curl   Part 11: I Walk With Ghosts Part 12: Behind Every Lining Is a Cloud Part 13: A Constellation of Coloured Paper

To access all of the instalments on one page, please use this link

Written for Denise’s Six Sentence Story, include the word “faint”. Some artwork is created using Midjourney AI, and is identified as such in the ALT text or captioned. Images are copyright and not to used without permission, which I willingly give when asked, and when not for commercial use. Imagery and poems/prose ©Misky 2006-2024.