Stranger at the Door by Gil Meynier

Author:Gil Meynier
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789129458
Publisher: Phocion Publishing
Published: 2019-10-30T16:00:00+00:00

13

INDIFFERENT is the earth beneath the passing storms. Indifferent, on its course, it endures while ephemeral growths and humans shiver, fret and grope. Between acceptance and rebellion the minds of humans waver. Acceptance, the patient landscape and rebellion, the blowing wind, the lashing storm.

In Jard, rebellion is a frowning, a shaking of the head, a small defiant gesture. The gesture that makes her pack hurriedly, muttering: “They can’t keep her. She must be with someone who understands her, poor thing. I’m going to take her to my little farm. They can’t stop me.” A gesture that extends as far as the center of town, as far as whatever it is that is holding Mrs. Fred in its grip. Jard will go down there and tell them they can’t keep her. The order of things, whatever it is, will have to be changed so that Jard, her arm around Mrs. Fred, can take her down the road to the little farm. It is frightening to think that she may get lost in official corridors she does not understand, but Jard is going to fight. Rebellion hovers close to acceptance when she stops packing for a moment and thinks: Isn’t it a shame people don’t have better luck than they have! She isn’t thinking of herself. Poor Mr. Mayhew.

In Dorry, acceptance of things as they are is a fertile, rolling field because things as they are are human, people are good and bad, love is warm and alive, and sad, too. Rebellion is not against the nature of laws, not against what is not understood, but against what people make you do as they look blindly past you into their own problems. She does not rebel against her trouble, nor does she rebel against the acceptance of trouble. She rebels at the loneliness of human beings when they feel human. She thinks: Oh, why is it so difficult to be happy when it is so easy. She smiles because she knows that she is capable of being happy. Then she thinks: Poor Mr. Mayhew...so pink...I wonder if he was happy. And she feels sad, sad as if she had really known him, because she knows that life is warm and it is sad when life withdraws and the warmth goes away.

Mayhew. In him rebellion was a tiny plume he wore in the band of his hat. His lifeless body, as it lay briefly in the mud, was where it had always been, close to the patient earth while the twinkling plume fluttered in the wind. He had never rebelled at the inevitable. He had chuckled at it. He had been mildly rebellious at the humdrumness of life until he discovered that accepting it without revolt was sufficient rebellion. Nimini pimini, he used to say, shrugging his shoulders, refusing to rebel is rebellion enough.

Mrs. Fred had no thoughts on the subject but, actively she struggled against the inexplicable changes brought on by the passage of time. That fence, it was new just a

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