Pale Morning Light With Violet Swan by Deborah Reed

Author:Deborah Reed
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780544817418
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

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Violet could go days or weeks without hearing news about the war, without feeling the dark blanket of worry and despair. She could go weeks without speaking to another human being, and when the world belonged only to her, she hopped trains between towns, walked alone on forest trails, down rocky desert roads, and the only other person she had an awareness of was the child growing inside her. She didn’t remember when she’d had her last monthly. Her breasts ached as they had before, and pushed against her small brassiere. When no one else was around, it was only Violet and the child and the trees, cacti, and frenzied birds. It was snakes sidewinding her path, coyotes yipping in the distance. Most of all it was the world at large, a vast and shifting landscape beneath an ever-changing sky that Violet studied and felt in her skin, the churning patterns and palettes as alive as Violet walking the earth. She often stopped to translate what she saw into abstract renderings in her notebook, and because she had only graphite pencils, she wrote in the names of the colors where colors should be. Sage, blood orange, red desert rock, amethyst, peach, gold, and milky blue, rolling sideways off her tongue in the shade of a mesquite tree while she chewed the tree’s pods, and then switched to reading a dime-store paperback she’d acquired along the way, or again, the novel James had given her, feeling luckier than the Joads making their way in the West, and more like the turtle in the story that had been flipped and righted itself. She didn’t know how to feel about Rose of Sharon and her stillborn baby.

Violet had stolen a booklet on foraging in the Sonoran Desert from a train station news rack and studied how to follow the bees and butterflies. In between filching or bartering for bread and apples and cheese, she sucked on flowers and cactus fruits for free. The chuparosa was her favorite, with its tiny red blossoms filled with nectar that was sweet as sugar. She bit down hard and the unmistakable flavor of cucumber was released.

She stumbled into town after town, each one with the strange feel of the last, as if she was constantly arriving in a foreign land and needed to calculate how these people lived. She read the headlines at newsstands and observed the collective strain playing out in the eyes and mouths of strangers, which caused her own struggle to rise up and loom larger in her mind again, a shock after time spent forgetting, reading beneath a tree or scooping out the jelly meat of cactus flowers while butterflies rested on her shoulders and head. Towns were where she saw herself through the eyes of other people, and it seemed as if the world was put together by a series of dark curtains. No sooner did she pull one back to see where she was headed than another dropped down to take its place.

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