For five or six days now, he’s been tapping.  Ever since Carolyn put the tulips in a vase on the sill of the kitchen window.  Mistaking the purplish-red of the petals for berries, perhaps.  Or – but no.  It couldn’t be.

When she hears him tapping she rises from her desk in the study down the hallway and ventures to look at him, inching across the kitchen tiles so that she can better see the glint in his sideways-on eye, the space-hopper orange of his beak, the sootiness of his feathering.  He looks wise.  Masterful, even.  They stare at each other, the double panes of glass between them until a sudden gust of wind spooks the bird into taking cover within the laurel hedge which encloses the view from the window.  She leaves the kitchen with the vase of tulips and sets them on her desk.  But still the blackbird comes and taps, two or three times a day.

By the sixth morning, she has quietened and slowed her movements so much that the bird does not flinch even when she puts her fingertip to the glass.  She waits for him to tap his beak against it, but it’s still a shock when he does.  As she feels the glass vibrate against her finger, a feeling of exultation passes through her being.

Each night when Carolyn gets home from work, she steps out of the car and pauses there in the garage, poised between three worlds; the world in her head, and the worlds outside of it, the exterior of work and the interior of home.  The twilit sky is the void between the worlds.  She sees the lights of aircraft pass high across it, and follows the path of one for a while, before looking instead for the emerging patterns of the familiar constellations.  She wishes there was a moon she could wish upon, to transform the blackbird back into the man who is gone, for by now she is quite sure that it is his reincarnation.  Genie or none, tomorrow morning she will open the window, and let the blackbird back into her world.

Quisquose

A definition of ‘quisquose’

She dreamt of chocolate; she dreamt she was chocolate, wrapped in alternating layers of silver and gold foil till she could no longer move a muscle.  The man wrapping her pierced each successive layer at her mouth with his finger so that she could breathe, but otherwise she was entirely contained.  All she felt was a twitching inside of herself.  But that was a physical tic; her mind was at peace, wrapped tight as she was – she had been absolved of all responsibility.  The only thing to do was to wait, drifting on currents of aimless thought and a growing ache.  She was waiting for the man to break her, to snap the brittle parts of her body with the foil still on; slowly to unwrap the pieces of her, putting each in his mouth, feeling her dissolve upon his tongue.  From being tightly wrapped, rigid, she would be made molten, and hers would be a liquidity that he might mould in any way he chose.  She wanted only to be the shape he desired her to be.  While wrapped in silver and gold, while melting about him, she gave up her right to self-determination.  And yet in those endless moments, he was the more subservient – not so much to the greediness of his own desire, but to the fulfilment over and over again of this urgent need of hers, which could only be sated by the cyclical sequence of stilling, breaking, eating, and remoulding.  She was couverture, she was Callebaut.  She was ganache, she was fondant.  She was salted caramel.

Lucky then that the man of her dreams was a chocoholic.

Multifoiled

The afternoon was wan.  The day had gradually lost its colour, as if all the light was being sucked out of the sky.  Hitherto, there had been the definite suggestion of spring, a mildness in the air which allowed long-hunched shoulders to release all their tension at last after a long, cold winter.  But now that daubing warmth from the paintbrush of the sun was as good as a distant memory, and once again he suspected he would remain forever trapped in a one hundred year-winter.

Hitherto

When he hears the call of the tawny owls loud and unmistakeable in the otherwise silent night, he thinks of how if they were Strix aluco, they might spend the nights hunting together, flying silently – ecstatically – on the wing to drop extended talons down on dormouse or vole or beetle, or even the plump succulence of a frog.  Across the woods they would call to each other, first the long note of his drawn out hoooouh, and then the tu-whit tu-whoo of her response.  Once each had its catch, they would return to the Scots pine roost to feast together.  Later there would be the press of feathers in an ivy-curtained hole in the pine’s trunk, and just enough room to preen each other until morning came.

Past midnight, as incapable of switching off his awareness of the night as any nocturnal animal, his thoughts reverberate like the owls’ duet.

Oomingmak