Chapter 59
He dreamed of her that night, of course. She was a statue in the dream, a Greek nymph in alabaster marble shot through from hair to sandal with a single vein of blue. Silas went up to her and kissed her cold stone lips, and the blue cracked and crumbled and the statue began to disintegrate…Silas fled and woke gasping in fear.
He mentioned the incident to a couple of friends when they met for a drink. Jonny laughed and wondered aloud if Silas had developed a crush on Sarah, the girl at the coffee shop. Sarah did have a blue tattoo of a sparrow on her shoulder, but she wasn’t the woman with the blue tattoo. Silas told himself that it had only been a hallucination, product of an overstressed imagination. He wore that certainty like armor—but like armor, could never seem to make it fully a part of himself.
He saw her again a month later, at the airport. And then again only a few days after that, in a passing taxi. As in the dreams, the woman’s outward appearance was fluid—but she was always looking at him directly, patiently, as if waiting for him to solve a puzzle.
The dreams became frequent, and then constant, waiting for him the instant his eyes closed. Silas did not believe in oneiromancy, but he wondered constantly who she was and why she haunted him. Was she a ghost? a reincarnation, a life he had lived once before? a time traveler, desperate to catch him at precisely the right moment? a suppressed memory bleeding through the leaves of his subconscious?
He became a man obsessed. He barely ate. He abandoned his friends and his family. He slept almost constantly for months on end—then fought against sleep desperately, wandering the streets and alleys of the city, hoping for a glimpse of her. On the rare occasions his wish was granted, however, it did nothing to soothe or ease him, driving him into more and more of a frenzy of terrified longing.
When he was thirty-eight, Silas spotted the woman with the blue tattoo boarding a bus. He broke into a run, waving and shouting, certain he would catch it at the next block, that his questions would finally all be answered. He ran, stumbled, recovered and kept running, ignoring the cramping in his side and the pain in his legs…
* * * *
There was a shadow, and then there was light. The light was searing, and Silas’s eyes watered, blurring his vision.
He was lying on a cot or maybe a hospital bed. He was too weak to move, even to turn his head away from the light. Too malnourished. Too exhausted. Too sapped of will.
The shadow returned, interposing itself between Silas and the light, but his eyes kept leaking tears all the same.
“Silas,” the shadow said, a soft, slow drawl of the sort you only heard in the deep South, “you ridiculous man. You could have waited.” A gentle scent tickled Silas’ nostrils, a faint smell of honeysuckle and wild roses. “You didn’t have to do all this. It was always going to be you and me, Silas. It was only ever going to be us.”
Silas blinked back his tears, willed his vision to clear, but it remained stubbornly blurry. The woman with the blue tattoo brushed the hair back from Silas’s forehead and then held up a syringe.
How could he see that so clearly, when the woman with the blue tattoo was still only a blurry shadow?
The syringe touched the cradle of his arm, and there was a brief point of pain, andEphemera by Lynn Townsend
The ground by the river is soft, hollowed out by muddy crayfish tunnels. Mud holds no footprints as I bend to touch the water’s surface, feel the cool of the night held tight in its embrace. The sun will be out for hours before the river acknowledges it. I look over my shoulder but there’s nothing to see. Again, I am alone. The flowers that clot the hill wave to me in the breeze, nodding their heads.
That’s right, that’s all right, everything is all right and everything will be all right.
I peel out of the simple sundress and toss it behind me, not caring where it goes. It doesn’t matter. Naked to the dawn light and the few stars that linger with courtesy, I stretch my arms open, giving homage to the sun, to Apollo, god with the golden chariot. The sun touches my face, mapping the lines of my character, giving beauty and youth to this old woman, taking from me fear and shame, taking the darkness until only light remains.
I step into the water, cold and sharp as glass. My toes spasm in the muddy river bottom and quickly go numb. The river murmurs to me, sings me songs of yesterday and today and tomorrow. There will be the river and the sun and the morning, and it is good.