Jrzdvlz by Lee Klein

Author:Lee Klein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sagging Meniscus Press
Published: 2017-05-24T04:00:00+00:00

Phenomenal Week

LYING THROUGH SNOW at night, each fugitive streak evokes an image, events recalled in associative order, fragments of speech, insubstantial meteors in a rush across the void. The flight to Stearns’s estate was ecstatic passage back to the world of men. Snow seemed to fall harder, come faster. I folded my wings. Gravity shot me toward my target like a sentient missile. Unfortunate encounters loomed, the fear of them at least, or if not fear then shaky expectation, the sense that only in flight could I achieve a stable foothold.

Fight terror with terror. No matter how odious Stearns might be I must restrain myself. No need to eliminate anyone. Keep in mind the inevitable necessity of redemption. Do not believe the plans of Braddock, Vermeule, and Wharton are indubitable. Stearns may be the one who envisions a better world and makes it happen.

I descended toward geometric hedge work unlike anything seen in nature. The house itself was not immodest. Covered in snow, light from within it emitted warmth, hospitality, a memory of cups of chocolate Larner had made on winter evenings.

Behind the house on a patio covered in snow someone bundled against the cold. Like my beloved wedding dress once did, she held a small lantern. The snow had tapered to an icy dust. Each bit sparkled as it neared her light.

I took a position behind a sculpture of a rearing horse and its youthful rider aiming a sword at the heavens. The woman with the lantern was not singing, but there was a melody to her voice, a lightness and rhythm like the snowfall. She stood before a sculpture of snow nearly as tall as she was. It must have taken a day’s work, an obsessive creation. I held my breath to better hear what she said. Her speech was an unintelligible sing-song muttering, not intended for anyone’s ears. Snatches of phrases seemed like a story more than audible rumination.

Fire, brothers, beast, river.

Perhaps it was the ice on my wings and in the crevices of my hooves, but, although seeing her warmed me, I froze to the spot, unable to conceive a harmless introduction. If I approached from behind… From in front or the side… if I said her name, kept wings down, and instructed her as softly as possible not to fear… if I hovered above the ground just beyond the sculpture, wings spread—the most dramatic choice, the one most likely to alarm her.

As I hesitated, she ended whatever nocturnal confession she enjoyed with the snow sculpture and joined the light from her lantern with that of others inside.

I emerged from my spot behind the statue and stood where she had stood, my hooves on the matted areas her feet had made moments ago. Snow had softened the sculpture’s details. The wings were swept across its back, tense and ready and strong, the horns full and spiraling and intact, the noble horse’s head and smiling canine face, the tail coiled behind legs rising from a block of well-packed snow.

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