While You Were, I… by Sharon Erby
While you were sewing, you paused. “Stop staring,” you said. I wasn’t staring — not at your face. It was the way your fingers guided the material that mesmerized me. White billowed around you, making you look like you were in a cloud, and I thought any moment you might ascend. The way you were pedaling, playing it like it was an organ in a cathedral, it could’ve happened. I wanted to knock you off that wooden chair and try it.
“Look,” you said. “You’ve got to leave me alone. I can’t concentrate when you’re staring at me. It’s already almost 4:30. Do you want to eat tonight?”
Food wasn’t on my mind.
*******
I left you, as the sewing machine harmonized behind me. I went to my room and fiddled with the radio, thinking your music was better. I imagined you spinning whatever you touched into gold, just like Rumplestiltskin.
“Honey, we all need our own space,” you told me. But you lied. Your need for space was plural. Your fortresses in the upstairs, with your bolted bedroom, and in the downstairs sewing room, with its chair blocking the door knob, kept everyone out.
“No!” I’d reply. “I don’t believe it. Spaces should be filled.” And I replied every chance I got. LikewhenIgotintroubleforhookingallmywordstogetheratschool. Like how I hated division. Spaces should be shared.
*******
You called, “Supper!” When I ran inside, I caught a scent of vanilla—another votive. Then I noticed that you’d moved the sewing supplies to the end of the table and fashioned a bistro. You’d even arranged a vase of flowers from the garden. I would have picked them.
“Sit,’ you said, in that commanding and cajoling tone, “I’m ready for you,” as if you were a queen finally ready to grant an audience.
But no, you were a different incarnation. Something else was sweet-smelling. Syrup – your special recipe. ‘Mapleine,’ you called it. Not as thick as real maple syrup, but infinitely sweeter.
“Your shape, maDAM?” You needed my help.
“A snowman,” I said.
And soon after, there appeared in front of me on a plate dusted with confectioner’s sugar, a plump pancake shaped like a snowman. Another. You turned them out while you were turned away from me.
*******
I imagined taking a star and putting it in your brain when you slept – to turn a light on in that one space that wasn’t filled up with all your comings and goings and doings. I’d go outside, reach into the sky, and pick the right one, the bright one – probably Sirius, since you’d told me it was brightest (on one of those nights when we warped into the Milky Way).
I never did it, though.
Later, after the pancakes, I heard you spinning again. And your music sifted into the upstairs, to me. When I dared to go down, the music had ended; the door was still closed.
When I opened it, you had already gone.
***
image by antique-lens.
-
suddenfiction liked this
-
glossolaliaflash posted this
