A change of pace.

By
Cath
Published: December 2, 2007Posted in: WritingTags: ,
A change of pace.

Virginia Lee, is running AW’s Flash Fiction Carnival the Third. The theme is transformation.

Death of a Muse
by Cath Smith

Rusted leaves float on the surface, bobbing up and down like tiny sail boats on wind-blown waves. I watch them from the front porch, wondering how cold the water felt on her skin, and whether the dying leaves remembered.

It was our favorite place, here on the porch. From the wooden swing seat you can see to the east, out across the lake. On the far side, the mountains rise blue in the mornings, and burn a brilliant red at sunset. We used to watch them together.

I don’t know when it ended. Or I can’t remember.

There’s no one time or place when it stopped, no new beginning, no butterfly transformation. It was a gradual shift, slow as the creeping continents. I almost didn’t notice she was gone.

I try and remember that sweet smell of jasmine. For a blissful moment, I think I have it. I reach out in hope. But it slips, it slithers away. It hovers out of reach, taunting and teasing me with a memory too faint to grasp. The bush behind me lies dead, its barren branches eating into the fragile frame of our nirvana.

She would whisper to me here, tell tales of the breeze murmuring in the tips of the trees, or sing about the birds, circling high above. She gave my world texture, painted it in vibrant hues. She gave me fever, passion, a lust to hear and sense and feel everything – everything there was to know. I devoured it, every tiny sensation, every tingling hair. I knew the embarrassment of love, and the soothing stab of pain. I knew the obsessions of mice and the playfulness of snowflakes. Nothing was beyond my grasp.

But the fevers burned brightly and fast. In a shudder they were gone, and I would tire of her stories, told over and again. They lost the sweet shimmer of morning dew. And then, I’d brush her off. Close her down and walk away. Then come back hungry as the sun broke the sky, thirsting for her and sucking her dry.

And it strikes me only now, after all this time, that I never once gave anything back. Like the jasmine, she remained untamed, cared for only by the weather and the open skies.

I always knew she would leave. Or I think now that I did. Perhaps that is why I hungered; perhaps that is why I drank so fast. Perhaps, in some tiny corner of my soul, I knew her time was brief.

Or perhaps I drove her away. Perhaps my moods and my insolence became too much to bear. Perhaps I devoured her too fast.

And perhaps it doesn’t matter any more.

Because it’s too late for apologies.

I never saw her leave, not really. I only saw the ripples on the lake and half-wondered at the fractured reflections. And I pretended to hear her voice.

But it was only an echo.

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