"Once" ~ a fable
Gianno was a sickly boy. His skin was white parchment, small rounded scales on a ground of delicate pink and maroon twining branches. His body was thin and his hair cropped straight. It hung scarcely over his ears and into his eyes. Sierra mostly remembered him tossing back his head to see without a curtain of blond-white strands. From kindergarten through fourth grade they studied in the same class. With his continued weakness then, the school removed him for home tutoring.
Despite his fragility, Gianno was funny in a clear, whimsical way. His voice was low and his skin cool to the touch. Other children didn't bother him much, liked him in a distant way, and chattered separately about a secret treasure, more rumored than seen. It was a chest, they said, small but full of the most fabulous of unknown things. In the way of children and adults, those who knew wouldn't say. The chest had power and the knowing of it had power too.
- - - - - - -
"Why don't you go visit him, dear? He's lonely," her father said.
Sierra picked at the stubbles of her plaid woolen dress. She didn't like sick people.
"Go on. It'll be good for you." Father held out a fleece-lined coat and pushed her toward the door.
Sierra dragged her feet on the sidewalk, listed briefly toward shouts and laughter from their playground down the block, then turned with reluctant obedience.
"I came to see Gianno," she explained to a lithe figure shadowed in the doorway.
"You're a classmate of his?"
"Uh-huh."
"He's in his room. Come, follow me."
The woman headed toward an old oak staircase with square bannisters painted white and with a runner of Persian reds and blues. Her house smelled of dust and medicine, herbal teas.
"Gianno. Gianno! There's someone here to see you!"
They reached a darkened hall lit only by a narrow tall window at its end. The woman knocked, opened the first door on her left into a dim room. He was folded back onto gray-spiralled covers, lank hair and pale head crushed within layers of pillows. A cotton crocheted afgan warmed his legs. On the side table an electrified gas lamp glowed over the gigantic book in his hands.
"What is it?" Sierra asked before she could stop herself.
"What? Oh, the book? Art," Gianno revealed deferently, "paintings by the Old Masters."
His mother turned unnoticed and walked toward the door.
"Can I see it?"
"Sure. Here." He turned the volume sideways for Sierra, pulled now by curiosity to the side of his bed.
Accustomed to her mother's decorations of Early American watercolors and display cases of milkglass cherubs and painted porcelain angels, Sierra was astonished.
"It's beautiful," she breathed.
"It's the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel," he explained.
Sierra turned a page.
"Did you want to stay for dinner, child?"
From the braided rug where she and Gianno sat cross-legged, bent excitedly over bright sheets of wonder, Sierra looked up in surprise. "No, I don't think so." Flustered, she realized by the dusky window that the afternoon had gone. "My mother'll be expecting me home."
Sierra stood and smiled toward Gianno. "Thanks. That was fun."
"Are you coming back?" he asked.
"Yes. Next Tuesday."
Gianno looked back toward the book. "Okay," he murmured. "Next Tuesday."
- - - - - - -
"What are you reading?"
"Aurora Leigh." He laid the tan leather-jacketed volume aside.
"Do you feel well today?"
Gianno was sitting sideways, feet propped up, swinging on the plank loveseat that hung from his mother's porch ceiling by steel chains.
"Yes. It's the sun I think."
It was midsummer, but clear, dry and warm.
"Well enough to walk up the mountain a ways?" Sierra knew a secluded clearing and she wanted to show him its hidden colors and softnesses.
"Yes. I'll try it." Gianno slipped into rubber-soled moccasins and stood. "Shall I bring the chest?" he asked.
She looked up and smiled in surprise.
"Yes. Will you?"
"I'll get it now. Come with me."
Sierra followed him up the stairs and watched as he slid sideways the false top of a mahogany dresser. Gianno lifted out an ebony chest the size of a shoe box and outlined with old brass.
"What's in it?" she whispered.
"You'll see when we get to the mountain."
"Is it heavy?"
"No."
"Okay."
Sierra walked slowly by Gianno's side, pulling him by the hand as their trail came too steep for his shallow, laboring breath. When finally they arrived at the glen, he sank gracefully onto the earth and lay back, covering his stark eyes with frail, sheer skin.
"The chest?" she asked hesitantly.
"Yes," he said. "Open it."
- - - - - - -
During Gianno's evening funeral, Sierra ran on brown, crackling leaves, opened the kitchen door of her brother's home to climb its back stairs on stockinged feet and retrieve the ebony box. Under a blessing of stars, she clambored up the path to their mountain ridge and set down the chest. Sierra opened it once more and ran her fingers through Gianno's rainbows, filigreed hieroglyphics of gold, tiger's eye dates and jars of pomegranate, Indian icons set in silver lace, amethyst vials of Alcasian perfume, celandine from China, fringed streamers from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. For a moment the moon refracted on windchimes of cut crystal and pears of hand-blown sapphirine glass. Sierra closed the brass-bound top and cozied the chest deep into a groundhog hole. Kneeling on grass, she covered it quickly with loose stones, bramble, and dirt till all that remained was a warm bare circle of ground where moss and wildflowers soon would grow.
"Ave"
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam -- Quatrains (verse rhyming on the first, second and fourth lines) of a 12th century mathematician, astronomer, philosopher and poet of Persia.
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