The long silence of sand and stone
Whispers into the dark belonging to the night birds.
Waves glint with inner timeless wisdom,
And a crown of cloud-frost haloes the moon.
Eternal spirals twist restlessly in forgotten shells.

Sea-phantom forms writhe into the pearled shell-depths;
Living stones, striving in the muck
Under the unblinking eye of a summer moon.
The delicacies hide from the sun and its hungry bird-maws –
A Strong rationale, the wisdom of the unseen.

Wisdom,
Shells,
The wild cries of birds,
And the singing, silent stones –
Yes, these things gather under moon and sun.

Sun and moon – locked forever in chase,
Never growing wise to the mortal strivings
Of stones turning to sand,
Of shells, empty and hollow,
Of the broken pinions of weary, frail birds.

Memories haunt the night, like the fragile birds –
Calling themselves together in moonlight,
Curling themselves into shell-spirals,
Piling their wisdoms together
Into little cairns of stone bravery in the surf.

Soon the stones become birds,
And the wisdoms rub smooth into moon-pearls, hidden in shells.

She can hear the moths breathing feebly, struggling sluggishly against the glass of the kitchen windows. Perhaps she will find them later, lying like morose faeries in the dawn’s wet grass.

Once, she’d found the wing of a bluebird perfectly separated from its little azure body — undoubtedly the work of one of the many hopeful cats that continuously prowl around the kitchen courtyard. She’d gathered the immaculate wing into her apron; a secret prize she later hung with a piece of stolen butcher’s twine from the ceiling of her small and stony room.

Salamanca turns her attention to the sky and sighs distractedly. Soon it will be light enough to start her most hated chore, the picking of slugs from the kitchen’s gardens. Instead, she decides to treat herself to a quick round of dusting.

Dusting is far better than any of the other chores allotted to Salamanca; even better than making up the beds with perfumed linens and downy coverlets. The silence and ease of the never-ending chore always soothes her, plus it is an honest enough pretext for wandering in the château should anyone happen to question her.

She grabs the few articles needed for the task, and heads for the remote eastern wing. The pictures are there. Especially the one with the serene boy minding the oxen. She loves that one. The others are more intimidating; vanitas paintings piled high with strange objects, steely-eyed family portraits, and murderous looking hunting scenes.

As a much younger girl, she’d been drawn to the fantastic mixture of elements in the still lifes, but not any longer. Not after her childish curiosity had once subconsciously caused her to scamper nimbly up a section of lion-footed balustrade to balance precariously on the handrail for a closer look at a painting. One of her hands eagerly wove slender fingers into the egg-and-dart pattern of the enormous frame for extra purchase. With the other, she’d reached almost reverently towards a moon-sized pearl heaped amongst the other heady treasures of the image, only to nearly dash her brains out on the stairs after recoiling in horror at the painting’s unexpectedly dry, leathery hide.

She didn’t return to the East Wing for weeks after the incident, inwardly convinced all of the paintings would find a way to collapse upon her in revenge for her trespass, smothering her alive with their monstrous, beautifully dead carcasses. When she was finally unable to avoid her duties there any longer, she was on the verge of fainting from her own fervid imaginings that first time she re-entered the wing. Of course being forced into a practical position, she eventually overcame her secret fearful flutterings of spirit to some degree by repeatedly confronting the troublesome issue.

However, the disillusionment from the event lingers with her even now, albeit unbeknownst to her.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

After having paid her brief homage in the East Wing with clear heart and steady mind, Salamanca trots faithfully back to the kitchens to grab the loathesome slug-pail. Her breath comes in satisfactorily steamy puffs in the chill air. Another three weeks and it will probably be too cold for slugs anymore, she thinks to herself as she deftly plucks the oddly muscular offenders from various plants. The usual gathering of clever blackbirds follow Salamanca’s steps hungrily as she takes the slug-pail out of the kitchen courtyard to be emptied at the edge of a nearby pond.

Were she more honest with herself, Salamanca would know that the tiny, bright stares issued from the hard eyes of the blackbirds are what truly bother her about the chore.

Whilst looking for an empty sketchbook to tote off to Iceland, I happened upon this essay I wrote in college for a course soporifically called “Creative Nonfiction Writing”. The hilarious part of this essay is that about 45% of it *is* actually fiction; I made up parts of it to complete the assignment [at the last minute of course]. Ha!

And yes, I’m still avoiding the onerous task of packing for this trip.

I’ve never liked the color pink. Never. Not even at that tender age when little girls are constantly inundated with All-Things-Pink, as though this is naturally our favorite color. Call it a failing of my societal-role programming, or a genetic flaw, but I’ve had a secret aversion to pink for as long as I can remember. I say secret, because I found out quickly that my shunning of the designated “girl color” was somehow abnormal. To make matters worse, I liked blue — a “boy color.” I was horrified by the stuffed pink bunnies and bears that seemed to be a gift every year at Christmas or Easter. They always glared at me with their little, hard plastic eyes as though they knew I made a distasteful face at them when I climbed into my bed at night. A greater sacrilege to me was the not-so-infrequent placing of blue eyes on some members of the menagerie of fluffy beasties. I would pry these glistening bits of sky from the reprehensible pink carcasses, thinking of myself as a liberator, a righter of incomprehensible wrongs. I would blame the dog, my brother, or mysterious forces of nature when confronted with the eyeless pink monstrosities. I stockpiled blue eyes under my bed and pulled them out to gaze at them forlornly, as though they represented some secret world I would never be allowed to enjoy. My pink aversion didn’t stop with fuzzy animals — it was all encompassing — clothes, food, toys, and crayons were all subject to my secret color editing process. I envied my brother more than any other person on the planet. He had blue everything. My parents didn’t understand, or maybe, they just didn’t notice.

One of the items that I coveted with excessive zeal was my brother’s pair of Star Wars underwear. They were the Holy Grail of my childhood. I knew of the sanctity of underwear — the most private possession of any seven year-old. Of course, mine were pink, or at the very least, covered in some procession of All-Things-Pink. Not my brother’s underwear, oh no, not for him! He had the starry heavens complete with starships and Darth Vader heads to gird his loins. To make matters worse, he seemed unaware of the magnitude of this celestial gift. I couldn’t stand it — so one day, I stole them out of his room.

I was immediately infused with bliss and serenity. I reverently dressed that morning, smiling inwardly at my daring. I had to endure some pink outer garment, of course, but that made little difference now — I was imbued with Star Wars superpower — the power of cerulean swirls and stars! How could boys take this for granted? I climbed into the school bus that morning strutting gleefully. I played hard on the playground at recess, again, somehow invigorated by the magical property of the stolen underwear. The sky smiled down upon me benevolently, content with the success of my clandestine achievement. I ran, giggled, tumbled, and frisked with unadulterated joy. The air was cleaner, grass was softer, indeed, it seemed that everything was better that day.

At that time, I attributed my heightened senses to my brother’s underwear. Later, I realized that my unbounded joy stemmed from something else entirely. It wasn’t the pilfered underwear; it was the sudden seizure of power they represented. I had thrown off the fetters of All-Things-Pink. I had made a choice to eschew the normal, to instead violate one of the most personal possessions of another to redress the injustice I felt at having to comply with what was expected. It was power. I had grasped onto my inner workings in no uncertain terms that day. It was a freedom that no one could revoke, even long after the mandate from on high to return the stolen underwear.

Today, I have made a tentative peace with pink things. As an artist, I can appreciate its uses. I can’t say that it’s my favorite color by any stretch of the imagination, but it has lost some of the nefarious pall that it possessed when I was young. Part of me still envisions pink as a representation of the confining beliefs of others, but another part can see that pink was a threshold I crossed — one that eventually opened up entire universes of personal choices. My pink blues are over, but I realize that if I had never endured them I would not be able to remove the rose-colored glasses that grace the faces of those who unblinkingly accept the visions and expectations of others to the detriment of their own private joys.

*sighs* So amazingly bad, and yet, I still made an A. *evil smirk*

… is coming soon.