He is made of ashes. Like Kimbo, patted together from the ashes of the world-creation. Like Kimbo, his eyes are full of tricks and mischief, the original fires not yet quite out. Oh, the man is in love with thunder. Last night during the great shakedown from the sky, he took up B’llambe’s short spear with the blade like a palmleaf to end the enemy’s heart at one stroke, and danced, white and naked, in the lighting storm; himself a stroke of fallen starlight.
I must bring to him the blank tablature of my affection, on which he may write his desires. This is the way of all true women; mother has told the story many times. When their ship is repaired, they shall sail far away, to India, to France, blank tablets once, now thick with the dreams of their peoples.
Eat of the Guyana, I said with my hands, and he ate of what my own arms had plucked for him to covet. Our days commence in the charms of detail drawn onto the world by the great fire, each thing of the day waiting for us to touch it rightly, and burn ourselves upon it, and have the burn-scar in our life-memories for always. Each night sinks down to caresses, the last meal and lying like a soul and its shadow before the dying fire of which he was made, until the oblivion enters us, and we are for a timeless time all dream and daring.
He is blushing and getting dark with the days. His eyes pop out white with thoughts of me. I must find a way aboard the floating forest that his compatriots swarm over and thunder at day after day. Last sun, his eyes looked farther away than the moonshine. I am apprehensive, the Guyana fruit is like holding weeping stones from the river in my arms as I come to him. Heavy and wet and mourning the apart-time which must come. Soon, says B’llambe, they go, the great ship little like a dragonfly on the bold line of the world; and then, you blink once, and they sink into never-was. So B’llambe says. “But Patri’ce went,” I say. “She went, and is she nothing now or a Frenchwoman? Have you seen her gossiping at the well, or fetching faggots, or dancing for a man? But she is, she is a tomaade,” I say, remembering the word. B’llambe walked away, but I remember who she talked to at the trading post, the fat man in his white suit. I will go too. I will ride the ocean, and cross the bold line of the world.
I go to the fat man, but he will not help to send me over the seas. He says “wait here,” and the sailors come and bring me to a yard full of smelly boxes. They lock me, dressed in a long cloth made all of scratches, into one of the boxes. They say I am “too in love” with “Shaarl”. How can it be? I see him only once a day in a hurry in the magic glass in the wall. Is this what it is to be “mad?“
My stomach levers around like watching a fly too long with your whole head, turning your whole head this way and that with every zig-zag of the speedy fly, and not wisely following him with just your eyes. Ah, mother, have I been unwise?
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