ALIX WOOD-WILKINSON X
MASHA MONAHAN
SOMETHING IN THE DEPTHS
That night held such a dreamy, misted quality, I sometimes wonder if any of it were real at all.
I slid out of bed and dressed, shrouded by darkness. Beyond the curtains, the scene was laid out before me like a painting: the waiting moon, and the glittering sea, a swirling, shifting mirror of the stars.
Outside, moisture hung, poised in the air, but the garden vibrated with a pulse of insect’s wing; frog’s bulbous ululations; the growth of foliage, almost tangible. Complicit grass slipped against my shins silently, wet and cool. Unkempt, swaggering tall and wild, it had not been tended since the end of the previous summer. Feral weeds encroached from the woods beyond, their alien buds and blooms intruding like gargoyles or goblins, grinning in illicit anticipation. I clutched the box with a damp palm.
Beyond the gate, the familiar trees crowded expectantly, limbs distorted by darkness so they seemed to reach out for me through the gloom, but I knew they would remain as steadfast as the house itself, which I turned to look at now, once, before the woods swallowed it: dust-coloured bricks, sentinel-turrets, the empty eyes of windows, spectral under the gauzy ghost-light of the moon.
As the growth underfoot gave way to scree, I paused. The trees hung back in the wings of a broad promontory that thrust towards the sucking gurgle of the wide water, a twinkling curtain of darkness.
I freed the boat from its mooring chain, which clunked shyly and without echo: an opaque sound, self-contained and resolved. Then the vessel carved into the night-waters silently and we soared into black liquid glass, twin arcs rising against the prow as black blades. Above, a million stars twinkled their orchestra, and the inky depths below replied with a million movements of phosphorescent glimmers, shifting, refracting, illuminating in their unknown ways.
The stagnant air’s lethargy was forgotten as breezes teased and twirled, winding ribbons as impossible to catch as moths’ whispers. Ahead, the hillside rose and swelled with comforting gravity as I drew nearer. Equidistant from two shores, I slipped the box into the depths.
In morning’s light, I awoke as if from a hundred years of sleep, and touched the space it had once occupied. It was gone.
NEARLY STILL
Rocks, cool as water, moss-jacketed, sit silent amongst the ferns. The breath of the forest hangs in meditative mists and drifts like winter midnight exhalations, festooning branches, so heavy with an ocean of deep shades, weightlessly.
The engravings of the gate are an elliptical code, abstracts of fingerprints’ loops and whorls carved in ancient stone, dry as paper. Shadows sharp as crows’ beaks painted with the calligrapher’s brush.
Vermillion pillars, parallel, perpendicular, angular, softly invite your hand to encircle their girth. As bright as a hibiscus bloom against leaves’ shadows. Not the incongruous lipstick kiss you might expect; instead, a ribbon on a silken gift.
Tread the edges, as quietly as time, in the steps of a thousand thousand thousand before. Cast a prayer, or a whispered wish with the weight of dew and the light that floats like snow from the canopy.
We visit and make pictures, and delight.
