[Prose] Penelope

2009-01-13 @ 3:21 a.m.

The sun hung suspended in the sky like the eye of a god, white-bright and glowing. The green fields stretched on until they were swallowed up into the thick darkness of the forest, where the stout trees stood proud and ancient and wise, their branches stretching up toward the sky, and over them were haphazardly strewn too many young birds to number, whose awe at the world had yet to be dampened, and whose tiny feet had not yet made tracks in the cruel winter snow. There was a bright orange tabby cat trotting with care along the edge of the wood, her tail lifted high and her whiskers all silver; though she was a stray, her breast gleamed white, and she hunted field mice with the delicacy of queen. The breeze was as soft as the sleeping sigh of a babe on the day that Penelope drowned.

I was perched on the high seat of my serviceable cart, my dun mare steadily driven onward by some inbuilt sense of purpose which I have never understood but for which I have always been grateful. This was the same mare my father had given me the night we had to pull her from her laboring mother's belly, which had been huge and round as a world, damp with sweat and aquiver with the pain of a delivery that nearly never came. The both of them made it through, and three days after the birth, the mother mare broke her leg and my father shot her through the head with all the ceremony with which one tears open a sack of white flour.

"It's an act of mercy," he said, and he patted my shoulder with a firmness and a braveness that I've never forgotten.

Even now I remember what she looked like, my Penelope, floating there like an angel in the water, which stirred and eddied round her in trembling revolutions, sprinkled with glints of light. Her hair was like gold, like God, and it gleamed for me in a way nothing had ever gleamed before, nothing has since, and nothing ever will.

But I was driving my dun mare along the path under the unstoppable midday sun when I saw her on the edge of the road, wearing a pale dress like a bluebell that was too short for her and showed her little white ankles, for her stockings were in her hand. Her hair, blonde and brilliant, was stirred by the breeze, and I thought that if someone could make a cloth of those tresses, it would be worth more than the palaces of seven of the world's richest kings.

My cart came to a stop and I hailed the girl.

"What is your name?" I asked.

"Penelope," she said.

"Where do you come from?" I asked.

"From Heaven, I suppose," she said.

"Where are you going?" I asked.

"God willing, back to Heaven, again I suppose," she said in reply, and she looked upon me with the largest and clearest eyes I have ever seen, eyes which in one moment reflected the calm blue of the powdery sky, and in the next glinted with the urgent, verdant green of the grass that stretched out around us like God's own carpet.

I climbed down from my cart and I took her by the hand, and I walked with her across the field. We spoke of birds and of cherry tarts, and of books and of burning, and of her sister, who had preceded her in death.

"Why do you say you are going to Heaven?" I asked Penelope at length. "Are you dying?"

"So I am," she said, "and so are you, and so is your fine horse, and so are the flowers at our feet. We're all of us dying; some of us simply do it better than others."

I thought on this for a long time, and then I looked at her with clearer eyes, and she stole my breath away with a kiss.

It was after we had shared our bodies and lay staring up at the sky, with the sun warming our skin and the grass tickling our naked feet, that I lay wrapped up in Penelope's hair, and I felt closer to the golden streets of the sky than I ever had before.

When she looked at me and our eyes met, there were sparks between us that lit the field on fire, and her eyes reflected that blaze, and her eyes reflected the licking heat, and her eyes reflected the hot blood that moved about its business with the same inbuilt sense of purpose in my own veins as that which spurred my dun mare on along the path we had taken together. She, the mare, had long since left Penelope and me behind her, and had gone on to bear her stolen burden through the world until the streets were no more.

Penelope wrapped me up in her arms and her legs and her throat, and most of all, her brilliant hair, and I thought I would die. I told her so, and she said,

"Then you are winning the race."

I loved her, more than I loved my own heartbeat, more than I loved the feet which carried me from place to place each day, more than I loved the spoon that fed me. And so, when we had dressed again, I took her by the wrist and led her toward the stream, led her toward the water as if she were a dun mare who had not the advantage of an inbuilt sense of purpose.

I carried her into the water and knelt on the cold, wet creek stones, and then I plunged her angel's face beneath the water. She blinked up at me calmly through the glassy current, and only when her breath wore out did she struggle. I did not blame her for the scratches on my wrists, for it was simply her body betraying her.

Then when she stared without seeing, I released her, and the stream took her gently from my arms and carried her on its back toward the ocean, with her too-short blue dress billowing round her, and her great big eyes the same glassy, light not-color of the water, and her long gold hair like a school of priceless fish swimming round, and round, and round ...

I still remember her in my dreams, with her eyes of sky and grass and fire and blood and cool, clear water, and and her body full of heat and need, and her heart already cold in the grip of death.

The rope is golden, shining like the rays of a thirteenth sun, shining like the hopes of a child, shining like the light of duty in the eyes of a dun mare, shining like the rippling tresses of the angel on the water. And I'm hanging it from heaven, so that when I leap and my eyes start to stare without seeing, it will be easier for Penelope to draw me up into the clouds.