Wren Handman's Blog, page 18

The Day We Met

I met my mother for the first time when I was twenty-eight years old, in a faded photograph I found in a small Tiffany-blue box at the back of her closet.

The box held one bottle cap, worn with the constant press of a fingertip. One faded red ribbon, frayed at both ends. One ring, with a tiny diamond fleck on the centre of a pebbled gold band. And, of course, the photograph – four of them, in fact. Each was sepia toned, in the way of old photos, and crinkled around the edges, white border faded to yellow. Each was of the same farm, some years in the past.

Before I explain the photographs, I think I should explain my mother. Before I ever met her, I knew her – as the beautiful woman in the window. Myself with my face pressed to cold glass, one hand stretched out against the dark of some snow-sparkled night. My mother, her face half-turned towards me, one hand carelessly thrown back in a nonchalant wave. She is wearing a gown, maybe black, maybe navy, with pearls or diamonds around her neck. She has a stole, or a coat, wrapped tight against the chill but left loose around her shoulders, to bare her naked skin. That is how I always saw her – leaving, or sometimes, if I snuck out of bed at just the right hour of pre-dawn morning, returning. The woman in the window. I would hear her laughing downstairs, entertaining guests or teasing reporters. Occasionally, if I was very lucky, she would stagger upstairs, giggling, and slip into my room. I always pretended to sleep. Sleeping, I was something precious, something alien. Awake I was just another obligation, another commitment she didn’t quite have time for. Pencilled in at four o’clock. She would sit on the edge of my bed and leave her hand, a dead weight, on the small of my back. Staring. Just staring, for a minute, two. Then she was gone again, downstairs to the world I wasn’t a part of.

The day I found the photographs, I hadn’t spoken to my mother in over a year. The occasional email was all that connected us. When she called me from the hospital and asked me to bring her some things, it took me two full minutes to realise who was calling. I hadn’t known she was sick. She called her doorman and told him to buzz me in, and I walked into her apartment like I was entering a shrine. Followed her instructions and found the bedroom, found the closet, found the box. She asked me not to open it, and then she laughed and said – of course, now you almost have to. I swore I wouldn’t.

But, of course, I did.

The first photograph shows horses – five of them in a row, each in the same white and brown colour palettes, each with varying degrees of colour and shade. They look orderly and yet somehow wild, like there is a spirit in them that can’t be controlled. The trees behind them are barren and tall, slim naked things that whisper of a long winter nearly over. The grass is yellow and batted down, and beyond the dead trees a few lonely spruces grow, green dark against the white woods. There’s the edge of an old worn fence just to the left, hinting at more that we can’t see. The sky is blue – bluer than it seems like it should be in a photo so leeched of colour, blue with puffy white clouds.

The second photograph is clearly the same farm. We see the second and third horse, in a pen. A girl stands on the fence, balanced precariously. I am amazed it can stand her weight, and can almost hear her father yelling at her to get down. She’s wearing an old cotton shirt, brown pants tucked into big black mucking boots. Her brown hair falls into her face, wild and wiping out of its conservative French braid. She’s stretching out a hand to feed one of the horses, and everything in her posture screams that she’s ready to fall, not afraid of it, of the mud below her, of the pain that might follow. She’s smiling – grinning, even, and she has my mother’s eyes.

In the third, it is summertime, and the same forest is in riotous colour. The angle of the picture is different. My mother is at the head of the line of horses, and there is something dejected in her posture. Her shoulders are slumped, her arms hang limply by her sides. She wears a sweet dress, white lace at her neck. She herds the horses beautifully, surrounded by clear skies, not a cloud in sight. She is looking at the photographer, and in her eyes is everything her posture hides. Her defiance, her frustration, her energy barely contained. A life is visible in those eyes, a life I never knew.

In the final photograph, my mother and a woman I assume is my grandmother are making jam. They are too perfect a picture – floral print dresses, hair perfectly tied back, bare feet on the clean tiles. There are ingredients laid out around them, and they are mashing the fruit in long cauldrons. Despite the heat I can see in the sweat dripping down the older woman’s neck, my mother looks calm. But in her left hand, clasped behind her back, invisible to her mother but perfectly captured in the photograph, she holds a feather. It is white, stark against her dark blue skirt, half-crushed by the weight of her fingers.

I never knew about the farm. Never heard my mother discuss her life before the movies. I find myself drawn back to the second picture, to the way my mother laughs as her hands stretches out, the fearlessness in her posture. I met my mother the day I held that photograph for the first time, and I never wanted to let it go.

Image courtesy of Hayley Mechelle Bouchard. Her work can be found at Little Cat Photography, and on Our Contributors page.

 

The Forest

Caveat: This is one of the first stories I’ve written that I haven’t been very happy with. But, I think a part of this project is staying true to the idea of the first response: when I see the picture I just let myself write, and come what may. This is what came, so here it is; unvarnished, just a response to a beautiful thing.

Once I walked through forested hills of gold, amber, scarlet, and emerald. Every tree a different shade, every leaf a scream of colour. It was only a place, but somehow I cannot separate the place from the people I knew there, or the way that I became.

People travel for so many reasons. To seek, to escape. To learn, to grow, to shed, to disappear. We reach desperately for difference, and then are comforted only by the sameness that we find across the vales and valleys of foreign climes. We go looking for everything but ourselves, and realise ourselves are the only things that we can never leave behind.

When I remember Sakura, I remember the forest where I saw her first. The smooth plane of her face and the serrated quality of the light through the leaves are one and the same to me now. Her eyes and the dark quiet earth draw in the light with the same intensity.

She mocked me for my clumsiness, for my largeness, for my childish attempts to understand her and her forest. I stumbled over roots and shrubs, make a racket as we hunted deer in the dappled light, stumbled over words and lost the thread of conversations as I stared at the strip of skin beneath her black hair.

We are all the same, here or there. The way skin feels against the rough pads of your callused fingers; the way night air cools the sweat on your back; how little we understand the mysteries of another’s self. Did I love her, or did I only love the landscape, the primality of the place, the intensity that seemed to rival every place I had been until then? Did she love me, or did she love the way she could look into my eyes and see herself reflected in my alien features?

I never knew her. Not really. I never knew the place, but I’ll never forget it. Never forget the way I changed there, the way she changed me. The forest has become one with the story I lived through, and it lives forever in my heart.

Today’s image comes to you courtesy of Rene Blais. Check out his work  on His Facebook Page, and see more about him on Lucid Dreaming’s Contributors Page.

Houses

Houses.

A hundred moments of my life

wild

wanton

like me

A moment in time.

The red duvet on my bed

mother tucked

me in and I

believed in magic

that I would always be safe

in that house

I was.

blue

flowers crept up the wallpaper and

I traced them with my growing fingertip

wondering

if I would ever find the end

black and white tile

in the kitchen where I learned

to tell lies

And a garden behind

the little pink house

I loved that one

Best.

Of all.

Houses where I

grew

wild

wanton

Like me.

 

Image courtesy of April Milne. See her work at her website, or check her out on Our Contributors Page.

The Night of the Wolf

It was a cavernous night, deep into winter, when I set out to fight the wolf.

In summer, people forget their fear of wolves. We see them only at a distance, and they are wary of human noises. Smart creatures, they know the bite of our steel, the crunch of our boots, the flash of our fire. A single wolf is no threat to an armed warrior, and even a pack would be leery of his boiled leather armour, the great reach of his sword, the fierce determination in his eyes.

In winter, the wolves forget their fear of people. Empty stomachs breed courage in men and beasts alike, and desperate creatures will go crazed. A man who has held his slaughtered family in his arms can slay a dozen stronger, better armed men, for he knows no fear of the empty yawning question after life; so too an animal with a hungry Pack and a stretch of white snow beyond him will kill a shepherd for one bite of sweet bloody flesh, and die with fierce joy in his eyes, that he was so lucky as to taste that pleasure one last night.

It was the winter of my tenth year, one of the worst in memory. The autumn had been a dry one, and crops had wearied and died under the yawning orange sun. A fever crept through our village, seeping like poison in the water, and we battled it with broth and herbs. It took three of our strongest warriors, a woman in her birthing bed and the babe too, six of the elders and a score of centuries of knowledge – and my father. I was still young enough to think that, though others died in raids and fevers, in accidents and arguments, my father could not be slain. He had the strength of an oak tree when he lifted me in his arms, and though I threw myself at his legs with all my strength he never fell like my brothers did. He brought down trees eight times his height, and laughed with a roar that fought the crackling fire of the log in the great-house and won, every time. He was as the sun, as the horizon, as the herds of sheep. A part of the world.

Until he was gone.

And then, amidst this sorrow, the rationed food, the line of dead in white cloths waiting for spring, to be buried, then, came the wolf.

Crazed, they said. Blood-mad, they whispered. Wolves do not hunt in the night, but in the dawn and the dusk, when light is dying or being born, when you feel yourself almost – but not quite – safe. The first time it came, it carried away a sheep; one less for us to survive by, one less to eat, one less to breed, one less. The next time, it took the shepherd. He disappeared, not a single noise to warn us, the only sign of his death a splatter of blood, so white against the red snow it seemed like dye. Mother didn’t want me to see it but I crept close when she was busy with my sisters, hiding their eyes and telling soothing lies. It will be alright. We will be safe. There is nothing to fear.

Two nights later it came again. We were ready for it, warriors in leathers, but who was less afraid? Men with warm wives on the other side of comforting doors, men with children to bounce on their knees and stories to tell of their bravery? Or the wolf, hunger in his children’s eyes, ribs pressed tight against starving flesh? He fought my father’s brother, and took a bite of his leg for the trouble The wound festered, and the leg went with the other bodies, to wait for death.

Soon we whispered the wolf was cursed. It was no normal beast, they said, but a creature from the darkness. It was a man, perhaps, gone mad and become the beast. It was a demon, manifested to punish us for some forgotten slights. It was retribution. It was vengeance. It was the fever, it was the drought, it was one thing too much for us to bear. We brought the herds in close to home, huddled together under skins and next to fires, and pretended not to cry.

And then it happened.

“This would not be happening,” my younger brother said, “if Father were still alive.”

“Aye,” I heard. “True.” “Yes.” “He would have stopped it.” “He would have killed it.” “He would not be afraid.”

It happened one night, in the yawning dark of winter, as a boy of ten summers, that I walked out into the winter, to prove my father lived. He lived in me, in the morals he had taught me, in the strength of my trembling arm. He was the leather of my armour, which, though meant to cover the chest, stretched down past my knees. He was the vision in my squinting eyes, which struggled to see through the swirls of snow, the depth of a wooden night. I thought my family needed me to fight the wolf. I thought I needed to do it, so that I would never lose him. Because he was as constant as the sun, as present as the forest, and he was a part of me.

There is a moment, when you have been alone, before you should be able to see or hear anyone else, when you feel that your solitude is broken. If you have felt it you know what I mean, and if you have not you cannot understand when I say that I felt the wolf that night. I should not have been able to find him, in the great expanse in which he could have lurked, so I suppose it is better to say that he found me. It was not as dark as it might have been, the last of the sun still highlighting the sky in a sullen blue, appearing between the darkness of the bare tree limbs. The wolf was grey, fading into dirty brown, with a white muzzle and soft blue eyes that seemed, rather than furious, to be strangely sad.

Time did not stand still, as I have heard so often that it can. Rather it raced onwards, as soon as I saw the wolf. My breath came faster, and as slow as the footsteps were that I took towards him, the leaves that fell beside me had barely travelled to the ground before I was close enough to touch him. He did not growl, did not move; did not, even, seem to breathe, while I felt myself doing all these things. Loud, clunky, interloper. My father’s sword dragging in the snow behind me, too heavy to properly lift. The snow crunching as I shifted, as the sword weighed against my boy’s thin arms.

Those sad eyes.

I lifted the sword, and it fell in an arc that seemed predescribed. The wolf never moved. We stared into each other’s faces, and the sword hit home with the weight of borrowed steel, with the fierceness my trembling arms could never have produced. Blood came hot and fast, droplets striking my face like embers. There was not a sound. No scream, no cry. Just a gentle exhalation of breath, a stillness, and then. Then the slow careful crumpling, the red spreading through the snow, my father’s blood in my hair and salty on my lips, and my own knees hitting the ground, the weight of it dragging me down, sword biting into the frozen ground as I fall.

Those sad eyes, watching me, as life disappeared, and I wondered how hungry you have to be, and how much you have to have lost, to stand silent as the sword falls.

I left my father’s sword in the snow, left the wolf silent and still beside me. I washed myself with snow until my skin was white and I shook with something I could never described and I pretended was the cold. I went home, and I snuck into the house, and crawled into bed with my sisters and my brothers and my mother’s quiet, shaking form. Let my father have killed the wolf, I thought. Let it not have been me.

Those sad, sad eyes.

(yes, I know this is an image of a dog and not a wolf. but when I first saw it, it was so dark it looked wolf-like, and I ran with it) Image courtesy of Hayley Mechelle Bouchard. Her work can be found at Little Cat Photography, and on Our Contributors page.

Welcome to the Bazaar

HellohowcanIhelpyou?Ifthere’ssomethingthatyouneed,restassuredthatIcan

finditforyou.Steprightup,steprightup,comecloser,norequestoosmall,no

productwecan’tfindforyou!

Hello sir, please step closer, what can I find for you? Have you lost your true love and you need another? Want to trade some of those potent memories for a dash of oblivion? How about hats! I have red hats, white hats, blue hats, hats made of live birds, hats you can use to survive in the desert for forty years, hats that look good with any outfit. Even the one you’re wearing right now.

Not right for you? Ah, no, of course, I should have seen by the cut of your ascot that you’re a discerning fellow, forgive me. It’s power that you’re after, I’d bet my left glove on it, got this from a fellow in the far East, they used to belong to the Sultan of Azkabar, don’t ask how it travelled so far, and finding the hat to match was no easy task, but when you put all three together you can create a windstorm large enough to shift a camel from your neighbour’s field to yours and wipe the brand off to boot. Ah, pardon me, I digress, and I see your impatience in the stamp of your boot. Was it not power you wanted?

Destiny, then? Ahh, I see the light has gone on in your eyes, and might I say they are beautiful eyes, I have some glasses here that – but no, you are a determined man, and destiny is a finicky thing, we should begin right away.

Does this strike your fancy? A rod and sceptre from an ancient Mayan king whose name has been lost but whose destiny it was to rule his people wisely and justly. He brought them great prosperity, and was loved in his time, with a wife and many happy children, but his grandchildren had already forgotten his name, and history does not remember him. So too would be your destiny – great love, great respect, but total obscurity after you are gone. No?

Ahh, perhaps you are more interested in infamy than destiny. Strike this gong once, and you will feared as no man has been. Ah, I have piqued your interest, perhaps, though you pretend to turn away? Wives you will have, who will come crying to your bed, and children to sweep the earth with. Wars you will fight, and blood will dye your skin, and when your death comes it will be at the hands of your enemies, screaming, and a thousand years later children will still shiver when they hear your name. Do not look so shocked, sir – many a destiny such as this have I sold, and many men have been feared in their times. No, no, of course, if that is not the destiny you seek – no, please, sir, I am sure I have the destiny for you. Tell me, tell me. A great poet? A famed lover? An old man, dying in his sleep?

Ahh. No, don’t tell me. Let me guess. I see a picture. An old man sits beside a comfortable fire. Beside him, a woman reads a book, turning the pages slowly, a smile on her lips. In the next room are the sounds of children yelling, laughing, and their parents biding them to mind. A cat licks a lazy paw on the window sill, the smell of cooking dinner coming to all three from the next room. There are pictures on the walls, photos on the mantle, knick knacks of long lives on shelves around the room. Ahh, I see your misty eyes, the smile you have been hiding. Is this what you seek, sir?

I do not have it.

No, sir, I have told you that I have everything, and it is true that everything is for sale. I can sell you a wife, sir, who will love you as no other can, or a home, sir, that you can say you have built with your bare hands. I can sell you potency to bring you children, money to bring you comfort, but I cannot sell you a life well lived. It is happiness you seek, sir, from knowing you have done well, lived well, and that, sir, only you can bring.

Thank you for shopping, sir, and I wish you well. Before you go – can I recommend a hat?

 

Image courtesy of Kieran Macanulty. Check out Kieran’s website, Purple Sock Studios, or read more about him on Our Contributors Page.

Listen

You fill the world with music.

I tell you, be silent, and listen.

The world is music.

Close your eyes. Lift your hand. Lay it upon me, supplicant, and hear. Steady, quiet, deeper than your heartbeat, sweeter than your blood. Wind touches us and we tell our secrets. Creatures hide in our skin, home and haven, battleground and cemetery. Lives are lived here, and those lives are not silent. Listen. Dark bark and growing moss, the steady crunch of green things. Thrum. The quick beat of a bird’s wings, launching from my sister’s shelter. Crack. A fallen piece of my brother beneath uncaring hooves. You have your violins, bow on string that teases beauty from man-made instruments, notes that transcend your glass and metal shells. We have breath. My brothers and sisters take in the air, release it to you cleansed, new-made, sounds you claim are silent but you could hear them if you were only not so loud yourselves. Listen. You have drums, hide stretched taut over empty holes, deep reverberation that echoes the beating of your own hearts. We have fire. Tears through us, flicker, crunch, lick, swallow, burn. Faster than we can think, faster than our blood moves, it boils us where we stand, reduces us. We become the next generation, our blood feeding new blood, our bones turned to mulch and silt and giving way for greater strength. Listen. You have trumpets, shouting voices announcing your presence to the uncaring, empty world. We have canopies, groves, orchards, forests. We have jungles and ravines and wilderness. We have sleeping, pregnant nights and cautious, predatory days. We do not need to prove our existence in order for it to be so. Our voices are our presence. We are. Listen.

There is sound in the silence.

Music in the quietest moments.

Listen. Touch me.

And listen.

 

Today’s image comes to you courtesy of Rene Blais. Check out his work  on His Facebook Page, and see more about him on Lucid Dreaming’s Contributors Page.

For Caitlin

This week’s story is a slight diversion from the new norm, because the image isn’t by a friend of mine. I found it on the internet, to illustrate a real event. This story is for you, Caitlin. All the love.

Sometimes, I think things can only be beautiful when they’re unexpected. Or maybe that’s not right. Maybe it’s just that beauty is magnified when it slips up on you unawares. Beauty surrounds us every day, and we never see it; but then, something makes you look again. Something highlights, changes, draws your eye, and it becomes the focus of a world made new, made beautiful around you.

It was a cold night, as I think it has to be. The dead of winter, and we were tired, lethargic, active but not engaged in a mundane activity. I was standing on the roof of a building, with the lights of Vancouver stretched out below me, paying no attention to their twinkling, or the music of the cars below us. Not seeing the way wisps of clouds scudded across a sky that was still reflecting borrowed light long after its own had gone. I paid no attention to the stars, whispering for my attention in their velvet prison. It was just a backdrop, a weekly familiarity.

And then it happened.

There was a flash, or a sparking, a lighting. The sky was suddenly alive in a way I had never seen. There was a green line snaking across the upper horizon, and wisps of colour came off it like a sparkler. Beautiful. Enchanting. We all screamed and everyone streamed outside, wearing socks or bare feet on the cold concrete, hugging our naked arms and each other for warmth, mouths open in silent awe.

Dumbstruck.

The lights were gentle but bright, a strange and hard to explain contrast, and they were… otherworldly. Unlike anything I had seen. Nothing like the stars, nothing like a sunrise or a sunset, they are a light that seems painted onto the canvas of the night. They are apart from the world around them, and yet suddenly my eye was drawn to the beauty that they were a part of. The stars above us, the mirrored human lights below. The dark swathes of forest in the distance and the concrete buildings surrounding us that made dark patches against the warm yellow light. The warmth and presence of my friends around me became a part of the experience, and I felt… blessed. Like I was the first person in the world to see them. The only person to have watched them dance.

That was the night I saw the Northern Lights, and when I think of beauty, I will always think of it.

Small Hiatus and Big Changes

Hello loyal (and casual) readers!

You have probably noticed a distinct lack of posts for the past two Mondays. I apologize for that, but I have a really good excuse! Okay, I have a middling excuse. My beautiful contributors, who have been serving me so faithfully throughout this project, are getting a little snowed under what with work and school and families and relatioships – you know, the stuff of life. And the bi-weekly update schedule is a little taxing.

But I know how much you, gentle loving loyal readers, love reading new posts every week (surely you do!), so I’m resolving to change up my formula a little bit in order to make sure my contributors don’t, you know, go insane, while also letting me update every week.

I’m taking two more weeks off (a whole month, I know, how indulgent!), and when we return you’ll be seeing a lot of new faces. Every week you’ll see a new piece by one of my many contributors. Each contributor will come and go. Some may submit once a year, some may have pieces surfacing every month. Each contributor will be listed at the end of their piece, and I’ll probably also try to put together a “Who’s Who” of my regular contributors (anyone who has put in more than three pieces).

I hope to see you all very soon. Don’t give up, come on back soon!

-The Author (that’s me!)

That Sunny Summer Day

I remember plants growing wild like weeds, green and yellow under the late summer sun. My fingers, still smooth and nimble, would dismantle them leaf by leaf. I remember a porch, the wood turned grey with age and weather. Why is it that age turns everything grey? Colour seems now like that loyal dog you never thought would leave you, though of course you know even the best of friends must leave one day. Time seems to steal something from us, a vibrancy that cannot be quantified, until the past that was once so murky becomes so bright in comparison that it eclipses the present. That is why we forget. Not neurons or entropy or a lack of aluminium in the brain, but only because we were so much more alive in the past, and we cannot quite believe we are not still.

Yesterday my son took me to a little park by his apartment, and I suppose we fed the ducks or some such, but I cannot quite recall. I remember the joint of the porch, the way the wood was still brown in a patch protected from the wind. There was a household cat, you could tell by the lustre of its fur, who took to sitting in the shade of the porch when I would come to visit. It had brilliant golden eyes and the blackest fur you can imagine; blacker far than night, which we all know is shot with colours, stars and planets and now the city lights that never seem to die.

Last week my daughter came to visit me, and I called her by an old forgotten name. She laughed and held my fingers in her hand like the bones were brittle, and I made her laugh with stories of my childhood. She thought I didn’t hear her crying in the kitchen as she poured the water for the tea, but I heard. I remembered the sound, have heard it a hundred times before; the quiet tears of a sorrow too great to quantify, and too inevitable to fight. I remember the sound the wind made in the trees, the forest just steps from the door. Overgrown in that magical way that lent mystery rather than fear, an enchanted forest rather than a haunted one, where I would play with the other children and we would make up stories of how are lives would be. I remember those stories better, sometimes, than the truth that followed. How I would be a great adventurer and fight terrible battles in the jungles of an as-yet-undiscovered tropical island; or perhaps I would invent a machine that would stop all wars, and bring our fathers home. I remember those make believe battles that I longed to fight, and bless the forgetting that dulls the pain of the real ones I endured. Remember the red-skinned women I would save and take into my arms, though my loving wife is some days only a shadow, an ache, a missing limb.

I remember that porch, those plants, that cat, those trees, though I cannot tell you the place they were, or why I was there. I remember the sky and the smell of the grass, though there are days I cannot even remember my name.

Image by: Hayley Bouchard

You may have noticed that photographs have begun to appear amidst the other works of art. My contributors schedules are fluctuating, so I’ve decided to bring in a monthly high-light! You may see these names and faces appear more than once, or this might be it. So please check out their websites and see what other projects they’re working on.

This week, meet Hayley! Check out her other work at Little Cat Photography.