P

Penelope, it was a name once. Now it is just an echo in the mouth of an accursed mother.

"Emotionally I am as stable as a city of houses, built of cards," she cries. And she does. The soft silvering of her cheek, as the saline drip prances to the tip of her tongue, sparkles. The salty taste a wish in the night. Where was her true love? How she wishes he were here, even if just for a moment. He should be with her, his warm arms embracing her. His chin resting heavily on her shoulder as he whispers quiet secrets to her eager ears. The warmth of him against her back. He isn’t here for he was not her man. He was with her only when he could not find another. The darkness of him stares her in the face. To him she may as well be inflatable and spend the days folded up in the drawer under his bed. Yet she loved him, she loves him, for all of it. For all that he does to her through the moments.

She lies entangled in her sadness and her dream, for up the stairs walks a beast of burden carrying on it the love of. Of. Of something her heart needs to feel. Perhaps? Even the wind in a land of dreams can lead to the truth. Or the lie. A fish swims through the waters of her mind, alone in endless contemplation. Misery floats there waiting to snag the unsuspecting. The man who walks on the water. Though only the lie can feed it, starvation will never blight the foul life it has. Immortal the misery is. Unless the fish turns.

She rolls over tumbling to beneath where she was. The holes worn out of the carpets call to her. Look at what you have done. Silence pours from her mouth. An apology of truth to the lie that rests about her. A sobering scream. So be it. The weevils in the woodwork creep out to devour the floor from under her. Her eyes see the floor, she perceives it, not as it is but as something other. She sees. She sees it as she sees herself, through eyes clouded by her memory. The mists of her mind surround her. Does it surround her friends too? Does everyone see through tainted eyes? She needs to wash them. That is all it needs. Scrub the lie from the windows of her soul. She will see the truth, for all the deceptions that are hidden in it. A little soap, maybe? Will it hurt? Can anything clean a foulness of the spirit? Does anybody care at all? Perhaps no-one else knows. It’s down there; the truth. Buried under the lie. Deep beneath it. Lost in the mind. Found by the eye but lost by the soul. Her mind is leaving her. Or was it never there?

Heaving, she sits. Her arms and legs sprawled about her like a star. She flitters through herself. Dancing up the staircase of her being. Looking at the droplets in her mist. Her vile father by Fortune’s favour now little more than a horrid memory. Her mother. Oh, her mother. The woman who saves up her selflessness in little brown envelopes for the moments when she needs to impress people with it. Her brother, the kind friend. The poor soul fooled by the lie and its mockery to stumble under Fortune’s wheel and be crushed by it. How she misses him.

"Yes, built of cards. On a coffee table with a matchbox at the base of one leg."

She sits. Between the fish and the misery. The man who walks on water. But, she sinks or perhaps she sank, long ago. She is trapped in an instant. She always has been. She will be evermore. Surrounded by the inescapablity of now. She reaches through herself. Her parted mists reveal not what she had thought to find. What was there was not that which she was. "If I am not what I am, what is left of my being, for me to be of?" The entrapments of the lie snap and snarl at the veilless mind. She whispers the words of the truth slowly to her soul. Her eyes see and her mind perceives and her soul believes. The darkness that is the face of the light smiles to her. She embraces its cool shadowy glow.

She sits on the precipice of her mind. On the edge. She sees through clear eyes. The whispers of the wind tug her. She falls, shattering like a porcelain pig full of pennies dropped from a third-storey bedroom window to the brickwork driveway beneath. And all the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.

© Matthew Robertson
1997