Shine, Alone After the Setting of the Sun
“Of course.”
“I couldn’t live without your music.”
“I love you too, Annie.”
As soon as I opened the door I knew Annie was gone. The house sighed its emptiness. Entering, I stepped into a calmness, as if a great tension, invisible until now, had been released. It was the relief of looking up at the inky-black, star-pocked sky after a long day under a fierce, unrelenting sun.
The tv was first to draw my attention. It had been on in the background constantly showing Annie’s videos of nature programmes, and was now conspicuous by its silence. Its screen had been caved in, spilling grey-dead chunks of glass onto the carpet. Upstairs, the bedroom mirror had suffered similar damage; and around the house various other items had been smashed or broken.
In the kitchen the late evening sun illuminated a wedge of floor; a hot knife blade of light slicing across the mosaic. Now, at last, I could see the pattern. Why only now? I was dimly aware that I was crying as I began to understand the sense of it.
A scene; so real, so clever. I could almost feel the warmth of the clay road beneath the naked soles of my feet, baked by the polished copper disc of the sun. To the sides of the road, smudged greenery was beginning to sprout from the dark earth, and in the distance a smoky grey forest, restless with quick shadows that echoed with the calls of exotic birds and animals. Off to one side, a cold lake, still and clear as glass, invited me to drink.
In the centre, at the focus of the piece, two of Annie’s string people, one long and one short. Two thin strands composed from slices of silvered glass, shining with the sun’s white-yellow brilliance. I let my fingers trace the warm glass thoughtfully, then the aperture beside the figures, a dark hole similar to them in shape. The only piece of the mosaic that remained to be completed.
Annie had left a note. It lay on the table weighed down by the empty wine bottle from that last meal and a hand-sized rectangular mirror which reflected my face. Puffy, dewy eyes betrayed my sorrow, but there was no-one there to see it. The handwriting was neat, almost childlike. As was her way, it said very little, and it spoke volumes.
Sorry Lorna. So beautiful, couldn’t wait. —A
First I swept up the broken things around the house, and then tidied up in general, washing and scrubbing, brushing, polishing. Erasing. Then, when the house was a place I felt I could live in normally again, I went to the step and broke the glass, selecting appropriate pieces and tidying the rest into the bin. In the kitchen I cemented the pieces into the place reserved for them. They glowed in the sunlight as if lit from the inside, a soulful, bottle green, so deep I could almost hear captured chords strummed softly on an old guitar, remembered music rising with the heat in the shimmering air, echoing far across the lake. And yes, I thought, it was beautiful.
I took pride in that thought. With night falling I grabbed my guitar and went to sit on the step. Sitting under the stars, my seat still surrounded by splinters of glass and china and clay, I rediscovered chords and melodies. I sat and sang all my old songs until they were exhausted, and then, remembering how, I started to make new ones. And, wishing Annie well, wherever she was, I remembered how to take pleasure in myself.
“Shine, Alone After the Setting of the Sun” was first published in The Third Alternative, issue 11 (1997).
Copyright © 1997 by Neil Williamson.
