Adagio 

            The woman sits at the kitchen table in a pool of sunlight. If she would only move to the chair next to her, the one beneath the clock, she wouldn’t have to squint because that’s where the shade starts. But she stays where she is, everything about her suggesting frustrated stubbornness, her head bobbing with hard thoughts as she presses pen to paper.

            If you knocked on her door, she’d answer. If you were to ask who she’s writing to, she’d tell you it’s a letter to a daughter. Oh, a daughter? Yes, a beloved daughter, only she hasn’t seen her in twenty, maybe twenty- five years.

            She loosens a curl from a nest of hair and twists a strand around her finger, watching. The blue of her eyes is no longer guileless; there are barriers inside this woman as high as mountains and, like the ocean, deeper than you think. Breathe easy. One hint of judgement and you’ve lost her.

            Yes, at least twenty years. She doesn’t know why she hasn’t written before. Time has always slipped through her fingers.

            Presently, those fingers are covered with ink, for she’s using a fountain pen. The old kind, with a steel tip and a barrel that unscrews to let one put in a new cartridge. She has an assortment of cartridges laid out before her: marine blue, medium blue, black, and turquoise. If you were to ask her about this, she’d laugh. “They were in a bin. Sale items. I picked them out at random.”

            Clearly, she should avoid sales of this sort, as her fingers are splotched, like the papers before her. A myriad of colors stains the pages. She’s started out in marine blue, switched to medium, changed to black, and now this turquoise. Is it because she’s been so intent that she’s not noticed changing cartridges? Is it impulse? Or is it because this is the hard part, the emotional part, and she wants it loud.

            You’ll never know, for just as you’re about to ask (or just at the moment she’s about to tell you), a figure steps into her sunlight and she looks up.

            Now, you see her clearly, Carmen Amber. Her eyes are bluer than you first thought and reflect what is within. No, she isn’t innately honest, it’s just that she can’t hide anything. She doesn’t have an old face, not an old face at all. She’s forty. No, she’s fifty something. Wait, she’s probably sixty-two. It’s hard to say because Carmen Amber is a visual puzzle. She’s an older woman who gives the impression of youth. The way she holds her head, drums her fingers on the table, sticks out her lower lip and scrunches up her hair while she thinks. She’s plowing through like a teenage girl with a hot date later.

            Then, there’s her face. That’s tricky. Her eyes have clarity, so our minds must add the crow’s feet, the crease that turns down the inside of her right brow. Because her hair is curly, we forget it’s streaked with white. Because she’s bouncy, we realize, minutes later, she’s a little overweight. Not terribly, but she needs an elastic waist. The hands that hold the pen have swollen knuckles. It’s like adding age on a blank- faced doll. Not the usual practice of smoothing out sags, airbrushing lines or whitening teeth turned gray with age. With her it is the reverse. We don’t take away, we slowly realize what was already there.

            A brain teaser.

            “What did you say?” the woman asks the man. Yes, it’s a male presence, but you’re not in the way. You’re no longer there. She’s fixated on him, ready to catch his words.

            “Are you about finished?” he asks.

            “I think I am.” She pushes her hair back from her face, and now we see the sheen of perspiration. She wipes her forehead with the back of her hand, leaving ink. “No, there’s more.”

            “There always will be.” The man’s voice is scratchy. He clears his throat, but the rest of his words are clogged with sleep and you can’t hear them.

            Neither can she.

            “What did you say?” She settles in her chair as one intending to rise. Though it’s well past noon, she’s wearing a loose caftan, sewn with beads around the neck and hem. Her feet are bare, with brightly polished toes. “You said something. I know you did.”

            There’s a lilt in her voice that could fly her across the table if sound were yearning, but she gets up as quickly as a creaky knee will allow, and walks toward the shadowed presence.

            You can go now.

            Carmen has left the letter in the pool of sunlight and the pen tip on the paper. She laughs in answer to something he says, and the turquoise begins to bleed. 

©Joan Heck Spilman. All rights reserved. “Silver Bottle”, in its entirety, is available on Kindle and Amazon