The lamp that had been in the attic, sat boldly on the landing on Sunday. Come Monday it was on the stairs. Come Tuesday it perched next to the frontmost door. No hand had moved it. Then to its base the outline of birds appeared, wings outstretched, beaks open in song. Ariah tapped it. Tip, tippy, tap, tap. With each tap they fluttered to a new space and paused. Magic. It had to be magic. Without any wind at all, the doorway opened wide and out the birds flew, calling to her to follow, to dance a welcome to the new day.
Long-dry raindrop-trails, a web on a twilight pane, whispers louder in the sallow lamplight. Shadows sigh both in curtain creases and unattended laundry heaps. The slow-motion shadows of advancing daylight become locked and still, frozen until dawn. And, all the while, a percussion of unseen traffic drones its melancholy lament. Ariah, touching the lamp's ceramic base, retracts her fingers. Cold can burn. As she cradles them her eyes find her own fingerprints, created as brittle glaze-dandruff, fell.
Skipping light sprung from the lamp, gaily dancing upon the kitchen table. It was the same bonny yellow as the cooking dishes, sunny and warm. Ariah reached for it, dialing it brighter. The room’s hues sang brighter, as a sweet and bonny choir. The nearest curves of chairs and tables glowed in warmest reflection, as their far sides made the most gentle of shadows. After the glare of fluorescent tubes, it soothed as well as an optimistic orchestra, bows bouncing, keys fluttering. If she were to ever move, to make a new place her home, the lamp would move with her.
Into the crepuscular dim edged the lamplight. Tip toeing. Breath held. It was the most strained of beams. Were it a sound, it would be a strangled whisper. Was it a scent, it would be a fading bleach tincture. Ariah crouched, her eyes on it. How long had it been this way, a lone light in ever-grim? To its base insects scurried. To its surround of paper, cobwebs hung. Dust motes paraded in languished twisting drafts. Then her eyes saw the plug, resting on the floor. No power. Her breath caught in her lungs. Cold sweat lay slick on her paling skin. Then what was it? What was this spectral glow?
Come the eventide the lamp shone as night-sky and star made one. Come the morrow’s shine it was mountain-heather gay. That day, the door opened wide, spring air flowed with a generous bouquet of birdsong. Change had come. Out there, where land meets sky, where mountains and oceans chatter, awaited something nobody has ever seen before. Then, lamp no more, yet a metallic pocket flashlight, it awaited my hand. I reached for it, feeling its warmth radiate from skin to bone marrow. Magic. The days of magic had returned. Grass wands were wands once more. Winter was finally over.
Dregs of dying light cast the meanest of raindrop shadows onto the lampshade. The projections, as ghosts, lingered before crying down both pane and shade. Dust motes swirled, mobbing its broken bulb and gnawed wire. Dirty webs, long abandoned, drooped in stale air. To Ariah’s fingers it was cold, midwinter cold, as if it shunned the meagre solar gain of daytime. In the dim it was grey, perhaps when the dawn returned it would be sky blue. Blues. Greys. Dust and insect corpses. Staying here would be foolish, going out would be worse. Tap. Taperty, tap, tap, lamented the slowing percussion of rain, changing the self-erasing twilight-kaleidoscope.
In those days of ebbing winter, as the spring gained strength in thawing earth, the lamp hugged all with cotton-wool light. A sunny hue from base to shade, it was as a dandelion in ambient meadow. In otherwise humble form, its maker sought not to make a statement, not to create a piece to steal the eye, yet to complement any room. And, so in this cozy crowd, it was as at home as it would be in any minimalist expanse. On a side table, or centre stage, it glowed as and when our need arose.
Shrouded in ghoulish cloth, sat the lamp. Its light was not light, yet a seeping ooze more similar bat colony barrage. Eyes open, eyes closed, ‘twas the same. I reached for it, lashing out to strike, to smash, to end it. No avail. Yet it laughed without a sound. With an electrical tingle the room washed grimier. There it was. Tentacles. Tentacles forged of ghostly sludge wrapped around the heads of all. Blind seers. Deaf hearers. In a blink it was chintz, floral and sweet, tentacles fading from view. Music resumed. All was so right it was wrong. Then as a static, as a scratchy rustling creep, the ghoul lamp strobed in and out of view.
As if in mirror-call to the blooms of sister spring, autumn blushed her hearthful hues. Robust greens bowed to these most placid of flames, these tree born butterfly wings.
Upon that well-worn road, came the shadows of blushed leaves. As an old gramophone needle, jogging up and down, vibrating with sombre happiness, they had a story to tell. Perhaps they told it already, whispering it into a whiskey wind.
These headphones are made of birdsong, yes they are. They are woven of magical grass from faraway hills, yes they are. When nobody is looking they portal back to a wonderland to visit the fairy-folk, yes they do. When I wear them my feet grow wheels and take me down roads undiscovered, yes they do. One day they’ll be an airplane and take me over mountains yonder.
That morning it was as if the band of the headphones had become a bridge to someplace special. It was as if I could dance from one side to the other and back again… and yet be in a new place every time I did it. To my fingertips came a frisson of joy. To my steps came a merry bounce. Today would be a good day to discover new things. Maybe, just maybe, I’d finally go beyond my usual hills.
Within a crumpled paper bag, cold rain soaking it to slush, emerged the outline of a pair of headphones. Though they should have, by rights, been silent, a violin music played on and on. Ariah picked them up, unsure what to make of them. It was as if every sorrow from her heart was being played as an orchestral serenade. She checked her phone, nothing to pair with. She checked for buttons, none. Then at once they become white, as white as any cloud. Whatever in the world were they?
Rain splattered, the storm cloud grey headphones perched half in and out of the backpack. The bluetooth moving out of range, their sound was an inconsistent dribble to the beat of rain on the closeby pane. Quieter they grew. Splutter. Splutter. Silence. Connection dead. And so they sat there, rested, wrested from the demands of the phone. Silence. Silence.
My headphones were ear-warmers too, each side a fluffy curled up kitten. I was always careful with them in the snowy weather, for white as they were they’d be so very camouflaged. I’d named them too, Marsh and Mallow. Somehow they suit the New Year's Eve dances, with their ambiance of an innocent sparky joy. I wonder sometimes about the one who dreamed them up, if they too feel about them the way I do, as if they snuggle and hug.
The headphones were birthday balloon-ish between a rainbow arc. They were the colours of my gummy bear daydreams. Within their happy hug my brain danced to every kind of music. Plastic or not, they were my salve, my medicine, my happy place. Travelling as I am, finding a new home in every port, they and the music they bring is my constant, them and the constellations come nightfall.
Ariah awoke with a scream. The headphones that had been on her bedside table were crawling toward her spider fast. In a blink they’d clamped onto her head, stalagmite teeth digging in, breaking her skin, drawing blood. Crackle spit. Crackle spit. Pain. Pain. Pain. Is it growing into my skull? She roll-tumbled to the mirror. Headphones no more, instead it was a warped plastic mask with a breathing filter. Then it began, a song, a happy song of better days that stuttered and screeched even as the stalagmites grew.
The headphones spluttered on and on in a morbid fickle whisper. Crackle spit. Crackle spit. At times Ariah thought the plastic had melted into a strange arrangement of stalagmites, only for them to reform into the wan scratched cinnamon. She turned them over and over in her hands. Why did they make her sweat? What was that odour? Why were they so much colder than everything else in the room? Crackle spit. Crackle spit. Dropping them, she backed away so fast that her head struck the crumbling wall.
The ink upon the pages stretched as the longest of ladders up the tallest of walls. Ariah held onto the book as if it were her escape route. Reading is escapism, but some need to escape more than others. Boredom is one ignition to imagination, she thought, yet strife and pain are another thing altogether. The past year had been the education she never wanted. From this moment on, with this book, the future will be better.
With a cover of sky-blue and pages cloud-white, Ariah held the book with party-invitation glee. The spring wind came to rustle its pages, to hint at the miles of inky roads within. Ariah, with two hugging hands, clasped it to her heart. At once, a skipping sensation rose from her soles to the very tip-top of her head. This frisson of joy brought an easy grin to her freckled face. Fun. This summer would be fun. She could feel it!
The book had rained onto the park bench one paper-drip at a time, or at least that is how Ariah imagined it. Born of a storm cloud dense enough to cut out all light, she mused. Though all about it the wood was drenched and rotten, from front cover to back, the novel was as dry as it would be on the hottest of summer days. To her adventitious fingertips it was baked to such a searing heat that she retracted her hand with a scream. Sadness. Anger. Danger. What in the world could create a book such as this?
‘Twas typewriter born a time long forgotten; every page had been anger-battered with a casuality of iron rods - clunk-clunk-clunk, clunk-clunk-clunk. The crudest of ink had soaked its pages through and through. Its sepia pages had descended into the most woeful of brittle conditions, fragmenting into rough edged leaves. The only touching fingers came from winter’s hand; at times it was as if the wind howled its prose in spectral fashion, deliberately disregarding the syntax. Perhaps it would have gone on that way for time out of mind, but Ariah came and everything changed.
The book cover could have been woven from the first petals of springtime. Whatever lay within was of such worth to the writer, to their community, that it had been bequeathed this velvety-aromatic protection. Without turning a page her heart made a skippity-skip, a twirl of joy, a fairytale leap! It must be an original, written by a fairy’s hand! Ariah ran; she ran through the misty rain to her treehouse and up the ladder. This would be one to savour, on her cushion, snacks at the ready.
If both page and ink were made of sunny rays, the book couldn’t have been more light. Hundreds of pages though it was, it could have been a daisy on Ariah’s palm. She held it aloft and twirled around. This book was her shangri-la, her doorway into a world made of laughter. In those times of trouble, that book had become her sanctuary and friend. Wherever she was, it was too.
In a cover of scarred animal hyde, every page end was a filthy grey. The once gaudy writing was vanishing in the meanest of twilights. Ariah turned it in her hands before holding it up to the age-bitten mirror. Curious. The book had no reflection. Every ounce of her screamed, Don’t open it! Just don’t open it! But reading books, opening them, was a habit. Creak!
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