cimorene

a loose fantasy tightly-written set halfway on

devon's front porch and halfway in the front hall of my great aunt and uncle's house in washington, dc.

under the doorframe, she paused, turning to look over her shoulder with some hesitancy. she was still two steps form her shoes lying askew in the entryway, two more from the dark-paned door. movement shivered in the air around us, and i wondered if i should follow. the meter between us could have been a chasm or a deep river. a door banged upstairs and a plume of smoke wound, intertwined with laughter, from the open door of the kitchen in the time it took me to open my mouth. a smile, with eyes sparkling. two steps to the shoes taken, like a watercolor, like the chalk outline of her smeared by a giant thumb in a lazy streak closer to the door.

'yes,' i said irrelevantly, amended it, 'i'll come.' when i put my hand on the doorknob i'd taken five steps over aged wood and grimy, cracked porcelain tile, but i'd stepped somewhere between into another world, and i wondered dazedly where we were going. the door was open; i let myself fall into the night.

another two steps, and the sharp warm scent of it had closed over my head. there were tufts of dead and dying grass int eh shade of a scrawny adolescent oak, hemmed with rough-hewn 4x4s of pine. paint the color of slate on foot-worn wooden steps flaked and splintered on their edges. in the black silence its dull sheen stood out around her and the puddle of her skirt. sitting down--with a creaking protest of belabored boards--was perhaps the bravest thing i'd ever done, but curls of smoke from her cigarette caught in mid-flight soothed me, a bit, with prosaic beauty. there, a spiral, there, a bird, there fading from white to gossamer gray a succulent curve like the shadow behind her jaw. if she tasted like the smoke, i would never know it.