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Aquila in Repose
And d'you know, that's as good a place as any to stop.
"Sing, like a little canary," she said.
And I did.
I sang, like a canary that hadn't quite copped on to the whole concept of being in tune. I wasn't entirely sure if it was a little canary I was singing like, but most certainly it was a canary that would get picked on, certainly, and if it were big it would be the sort of large canary that's ashamed of it's size and slouches down when it enters a roomful of other birds (as I suppose canaries would like to get out and mingle with birds of different types, gain a degree of perspective on the world and everything). The singing started out like a large, awkward canary, a bit ashamed and finding it difficult going singing with their head tucked down in their chest as they slouched around, somewhat embarrassed by something that couldn't be helped, really, but I like to think it got better (if still a bit out of tune), eventually, maybe in some quantum theory kind of way, in that if you followed my progression to it's logical conclusion if it didn't wavily go into infinity and so forth that you would have a beautiful song at the end, the end which I never reached, because I stopped singing when it was still probably quite bad. If I was to be honest with myself.
This was all fine and good, back when it was getting dark like it does in "A Painful Case", only we had some idiot (me) singing like a canary because some idiot (her) requested it. Or demanded. One of the two.
We stood stock still after my canary impression faded across the water, but of course I couldn't hear it fade across the water, nor could she, so far as I could tell, her with a slight twist to her mouth, not a happy one, one that extended to her cheek and crinkled up eyes. I remember her hand and the flesh above her wrist most distinctly, bare, small hairs waving in the breeze off the river. The hairs waving were in the same state as the fading song, they may have been, they may not have been, but in a certain frame of mind, at least, they most definitely were. In the more realistic sense of the image, they probably weren't, neither of them.
It was later I realised what she'd really wanted me to do. And later it hit me I probably would have, had I realised earlier.
A rain of some sort or another, possibly gentle, I would let you get away with calling it, fell on to the city streets and the river schlurping it's way along towards the sea with banks like large slabs of stone, because that's what they were, large stone slab banks maybe put in by some workers hundreds of years ago. Well, of course they were workers, they wouldn't very likely be enjoying themselves, hefting all that stone around and slapping it down on the side of the river. It certainly wouldn't be fun, I can say that with a certain degree of certainty, having to have spent far too much time that time sloshing about in the river carrying heavy things (but by no means large slabs of stone, which I imagine would probably be heavier, so I had it easy, if you look at it in relative terms.
She and I had stood in the river, half bent over with our arms in deep, and I had to smile at how ridiculous we looked. She smiled back.
I imagined it taking place like it might have on Easter Island, had the islanders on Easter Island decided not to put the giant slabs of stone they'd just spent all that time hewing out of the ground on the side of the hill, overlooking the sea, but brought them all the way down to the beach and put them in the water. Whether they'd do this or a practical joke on the guy who'd commissioned the statues or whether they decided, after arriving at the hillside, that they'd rather have the hill as it was, so their kids could roll down it all the way from the top, like they used to when they were kids, and they could show their kids the best way to roll to make sure you made it the furthest way down the hill and got the dizziest, so they put the statues, which they couldn't at first figure out what to do with them, now that they didn't want them any more, in the water at the edge, which unfortunately made bathing in the sea a bit of a problem, but hey, they were an island, after all, and they could just go swimming over the other side if they really wanted to, still.
I had left out one minor detail-- sooner or later the wood would waterlog (as it does under water) and, unable to bury itself in the silt, which never lay very thick on the bottom anyway, would float under the water to the river's mouth, and out into the ocean, and, like Ice-9, in Cat's Cradle, it would travel quickly through each and every water molecule, perhaps even hitting Easter Island, and though people wouldn't know it, they would still know it. Inadvertent conspiracy like theory.
I liked the idea that if you followed something through for long enough, even if only theoretically (or perhaps especially theoretically), it was bound to come out beautiful.
The dark and the river and suddenly the stars, and the stars in Aquarius and lying across the Milky Way-- the trees stopped the sky, not the river, as I had thought at first, when I was still dripping and wet and sort of cold.
And so it was then that I swore... you know, sometimes you do.
This was a good place to stop. Once. And then you put together your argument based on the merits of standing still v. movement or your argument that your standing still is movement or you can still feel the little waves of movement throughout your body as you've stopped and they either resist or just haven't gotten the message yet or it's all beautiful, even what those out of tune canaries may someday teach you.
disclaimer:
The preceding was also a short story, also included in the forthcoming short story collection from the Head Editor of Sane Magazine, tentatively titled "A Virtuous Horse."
When did a little shameless (or maybe shamless) self-promotion ever hurt anyone?
By the way, all I can say to herself is this: "Thank you."
Well, there is more, but then that's for her to hear.
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