This article is the first publication of the Stork's Creative Section, a new category dedicated to sharing poetry, short stories, and other creative pieces. Showcase your creativity today by submitting your work through the Stork's Guest Writer link.By Anna Vakrinou
A moment of calm lingers during those early hours of dawn; one might say they’re out of place around these parts of the city. As sleep escapes my eyes, a gleam burns my face and my eyes open. Violent is the sun and the way he greets me, especially if you consider that it is spring. How his kindness caresses both the rose and the nettle, both the daisy and the weeds; yet he playfully torments me, toying with the shadows of the bars behind my window.
I sit up on my bed and stare at the specks of dust travelling outside the window, riding on a boat of light. The mountain range on the horizon has folded away its snowy blanket. The green trees peek out timidly at its surface, admiring their beauty on the sea’s mirror as the wind caresses them with its passing. May has probably arrived.
I get up and walk to the window. I put my fingers on the narrow sill, to touch the edge of the world. An intoxicating smell of gorse flooded my nostrils and everything seemed more beautiful. The sun calmed down and turned his cruelty away from me, now covered with clouds. So Easter has arrived. So much grandeur in just a few lines, just a few pages of the book we call the world; and now nature, reborn, adorns the margins of those pages.
I tried to continue the poem I had begun to mentally compile -as a pastime of sorts- but any continuation seemed unnecessary:
And if the sun’s teeth fell out and
instead all existence smiled,
the dust would be suffocating.
And if the mother opened the blinds
and her hands smelled of Easter
my sheet would still have holes.
With words I mend my clothes.
Maybe if I fade with them
I will see a light…
Let it be that of the day.
While I’m looking for an ending to this poem -which would make Shakespeare and Poe roll in their grave- I hear the jingle of the guard’s keys unlocking my door. They are here to get me.
“Hurry up sir” the guard said to my petrified form. My body moved towards him, almost by its own subconscious accord. Slowly, as if the order from my brain to my limbs had been lost in translation, I followed him out of the cell and down the corridor with the rest of the cells. The muffled snoring of my neighbours was proof that once again, I woke up early.
Each of the following moments remains a blur. Bureaucracy, procedures and paperwork. They reminded me of my days at the office, the way the sun lit up my litigation papers, but all I could think of was the pain in my neck. How small everything seemed back then. Each image of my progression, from the role of the lawyer to that of a prisoner, played in reverse as I walked the same spaces in the opposite order.
Every voice was another apology, every face another regret, repentance because they rushed to blame the wrong man. The sound of fingers that reluctantly stop pointing at me and are now falling to the floor in shame is deafeningly eerie. I don’t look at them. I look up. I only hear them and my soul boils with the injustice that, like a blood-stained carpet, will never be washed clean from my neck. There’s that pain again.
“We apologise for your hardships” I hear the unbothered clerk whisper mechanically as I face my brother in front of the exit door.
The dark circles under his blue eyes matched his suit, a sign that his routine at the law office remained tedious. His beard had grown out and it made him look older. The light from the few windows on the walls behind him made the various shadows of him embrace one another.
He seemed like a messenger. The only message I would bring home with me today, however, would be a crumpled dignity in a world that doesn’t seek it.
His embrace, tight like his hand around the handle of his worn-out briefcase, was still an invariable sensation that recalled our parting at court. That day one was taken to the cell and the other to his home. There is nothing indicating that our destinations would be different this time.
With my hands and pockets filled with my possessions, I silently got into his car and he started the engine. The battered car was carrying, along with two men, a silent atmosphere of a conversation that preferred to spend the journey in the back seat, its hands covering our mouths. How do you continue a thread, a knitwork that you left five whole years ago in a cupboard to collect dust? Chances are, you’ve since forgotten how to knit.
Dust. My eyes focus on the specks of dust and pollen on the edge of the windshield, ignoring the road that ran ahead of us and slowly swallowed us deeper and deeper into reality.
Michael was in a hurry; It was evident from the nervous way he pressed on the clutch, from the slow but rhythmic tapping of his index finger on the steering wheel. After all the scar from when he had cut himself with the knife, while carving the lamb, Easter of ’98, never left his skin. He dropped me off at the entrance of the building, the same place where he picked me up from around the same time five years ago to go to the trial. He hugged me tightly, with an indignation and composure that almost choked me. As if everything fell into place again. He left for work, but his nod indicated he would be back for lunch.
As soon as I unlocked the door and saw the strips of furniture illuminated by the morning sun, a sudden wave of fatigue almost made me lose my step. Unconsciously, through muscle memory alone, I carried myself to the bed I had slept in for so many years and collapsed onto its soft surface. The photo of me and Michael from our university graduation stood majestically on my bedside table. I looked at the white wall opposite of me, now smeared with question marks. What am I going to do with the office? Will they take me back? Who would hire an ex-convict? Will they look at me with pity? With hate? With aversion? Maybe not much has changed, after all.
I unfocused my eyes from the pores of the wall and instead looked at the dust that had been kicked up from my freefall on the lonely mattress. I lay down in an attempt to get some rest. Moments before falling asleep I think back to my poem. I came up with an ending, a closure that seems sufficient for now:
[….] and blind as I walk
with her warm grace,
I will see only dust
and as spring is lurking
my burned skin
will bear witness to the legend
the leaves believed in,
that was written by the clams.
She rubs salt in my wounds…
Oh, spring.
I shall remain her slave.
And though the pines call me free,
They don’t offer me shade.
It seems very prosaic to me… but Morpheus takes me by the hand before I aknowledge the poem and how much its ending disappoints me. Maybe I am both the poem and the disappointment. Maybe the dust believes I’m worthy and that’s why it perpetually follows me.
Maybe nothing has changed after all.
Featured image courtesy of Anna Vakrinou
