She left me with an envelope, intriguing with its tiny swellings, firm and solid. That was typical of Fran. She capered away on her long colt's legs, with a battered holdall swinging from her shoulder, waving and smiling. She turned a cartwheel at the end of the lane, a spinning whirl of striped jumper and trailing scarves. She hitched a lift to the bus stop on the back of a bewildered hunter's ebony horse.
No one can hold Fran back. She is a firecracker, a benign bomb with a ever-glowing touchpaper. Ready to detonate, a crackling sapphire and scarlet Catherine Wheel, the moment anyone tries to check her, own her, love her.
She is travelling again, this time to a hut in a forest. That is all I know. Where the soil is loamy and the streams are foaming with trout, she told me. Where she will build red-hot toasting fires and swim naked in soft, cooling lake water. She might sleep under the stars or in the arms of her guide, but always on velour grass, damp with summer richness, moist and fertile. She will cut her jumpers down to strips and wear them as bandanas. She will peel away the layers of tedium, the ticking of clocks that signal the start and end of office-day.
She will toss aside all the traps that hem her into one spot, including me. I shall wait for her tearful return, when new ground weakens beneath her zealous feet and new love sours in the dank autumn air.
When the stale, tired leaves scatter at our feet again, I shall hold her once more. Just for a short spell.
In the meantime, I have her envelope of beads. All the shades of our shared love are there to be strung together, to hold us tight until she bursts back in a shower of sparkling tears. A Roman candle of regretful tears.
Crimson for our love, lemon for our sunnier times, blue for the way I feel as I let her go once more. The beads cascade from the envelope in a hard welter. I let them fall and disperse on the gravel, where they remain lost, concealed. I walk inside and close the door firmly on the mocking sun. The slamming sends a million startled birds up into the pale sky. They will return later before the sun withers.
Copyright © 2008 Rob Richardson. All Rights Reserved.