mary june brown

The office was chilly, and she considered turning up the thermostat. Turning in her leather chair, the monitor caught her eye and she swung back to face it. The cursor blinked, staccato, repeating itself. A black vertical line, demanding that she write. Blink, blink, blink.

She inclined her head, eyed the cursor. “Okay. I get it. I should write.” But what?, she wondered. What words could she find to say the myriad things she wanted to say? She closed her eyes, shut the image of the blinking line out of her head, inclined her head again, positioning her hands as a pianist positions their fingers over the smooth ivory keys, and she leaned in, playing.

Come closer, she played. Her dark hair fell in a curtain over one eye as she leaned in, touching her forehead nearly to the keyboard, and she brushed it back, annoyed, losing the tempo of her keystrokes.

Come closer, she played, Give me your arguments and your sweetness, give me your calling out, your hypothesis about a greater moral code, your silly Elvis voice, your playlists and your earnest dialogue about consideration for others. Don’t ease up on me, be softer with me. Everything. Tell me everything you’ve already said again, and tell me everything you wish to say. I want to hear it again, for the first time, in the future, inside the spirit, within the phosphate of my bones, through the ends of my hair, between my eyelashes. Everything. Her fingers tapped softly here, more insistent there, the notes laid upon each other or hammered out as she remembered pieces of conversation. She wanted to record it all. Or let me come closer, into a place where there is a magical fireplace. She laughed aloud, the sound of it in harmony with the music she typed, Or to a place where there is cereal left on the stair and I have hours upon hours in this magical, fiery place. She continued to play, her fingers aflight, the room and it’s chill forgotten. She was warmer now.

###

Bird and Storm.

There was a place of lonesome days.
There, the days were unchanging, one the same after the other.
There, a bird flew low, her abdomen almost touching the ground.
Her feathers had become marred, tattered from skating across rough earth, edged in frayed silk.

(She cried and trilled, until no animal in the forest could distinguish her joy from her trouble. The melody in her music had bled out.)

She stopped, else broken to fly, landing upon mulched and coarse grasses.
The forest floor, loam, dark, all was—Crack! the light flung through the trees!
The light illuminating a starless sky, from beginning to end, the light washing white the grasslands.
The bird’s heart beat fast, painfully within her breast. She tucked her head under a bent and broken wing, on tenterhooks.

(This was a surprise. No trembling in the earth’s floor, no mist in the air had prophesied a Storm.)

The bolt thundered down, voltage-bearing and alive, harsh.
Revealing rays sparked a fire, burning a path through the forest:
Just there, a new-formed corridor, pristine, unwalked, waiting for her steps.
Storm/lightening fostering light. Storm, a welcome rain.

(The little bird opened one eye from behind feathers. All daylight, everywhere, and a lyric hovered in the spray.)

###