Warm sea mist covers his icy countenance as his falling body lands. We hear no thud, no clatter, no crash. Only a lingering stark silence and a whistling wind leaping from a pursed rock. Clear as guilt in a child's eye, it sings of a forgotten school day, a forgotten dream, a forgotten journey that forsook its destination. The rocky precipice below begins to blush deeply at the bastion. Macabre love. One thousand and four miles away lays his house. In fiery tranquillity. Black, opaque vicissitudes lays in wake; Chopin's etude Op. 10, No. 5 plays. A sudden expected gust, as naive as a father's disciplinary hand, forces ajar the garden door. A nearby orchid sheds a pair of red and black petals. The Red Admiral throws a sweet fatal tantrum: naive fiery angel. The gritted sigh now traverses homeward, inward, razing upwards the musty dust in the gap between floorboards, atop the grandfather clock, on the Buddha's head ( and so bald again ), on the second to last note of the upright Steinway, on the New Testament, on the A to Z. The silver dust waltzes like stars freed from their canvas in the sky, not to Chopin, but to the floorboards making the soft thud on the New Testament and the A to Z, and to the clatter of the grandfather clock as the cuckoo gets a beak full of birch starved of it's veneer, and to the crash of Buddha as he is freed of the worry of his head ( and his body for that matter ), and to the A# made to whistle as it is squeezed in a motherly embrace by the wind. The red striped black spider once known to always perch by the dusty windowsill has left- become latent. Fear touches once adorned memories. A forgotten journey forsakes it's destination; we have forgotten how the story ends.
