#sweetbriar

[from chapter 6 of arcadia]

“Don’t look behind you,” he says, with a peck on your cheek as he walks past. And so a bit perplexed you look ahead, where the unbroken surface of the lake reflects the world, the upside-down pines along the shore, the bluest sky, the knuckled boulders holding on at the water’s edge, and the distant white walls and arched verandas of the mission obscured by the atmosphere and the pines and far enough away now that in its distance it already seems like a place you visited long ago.

“Now?” You startle at the nearby rattling call of a kingfisher in the low branches.

“Not yet.” His voice is farther away. In the shadow of the dock, a formation of minnows switches to and fro, and then bows inward at the intrusion in their midst of a small bluegill, and they scatter like a drip of dye curling and spreading in water.

“Now?” you call. 

There is a pause. You almost turn. You want to turn and do not turn; the stories you know about turning too soon always end in tragedy. You wait. The minnows regather. The water laps the shore. The pines across the lake stand stalwart and their reflections point your way. 

“Okay.” His voice now far away. You turn.

At your feet, in a pearly shell the size of a cupped hand, a small candle stands lit, like the ones in the hillside chapel. In fact the very ones.

Ten steps ahead, another flame sways in its halfshell, and another; a crooked strand of little glowing cups leads up the shaded path. Something alert and skittish arises inside like a ruffled songbird, a little flustered at this gesture as you follow this trail of stolen candles into the interior of the island, up the mossy path, and toward the small pillared structure there. 

It is smaller than you expected. You don’t know what you expected. It is tidier. The stone pillars are chipped from many seasons, and hold up the low roof. Three steps up to the porch, and through the open door. Inside, a bed. A worn and faded tufted chair. A small hearth. Candles lit and flickering in their shells.

You pass through the little room to the doors on the other side that open to the grove of the trees you suspected were there all along, in the late days of their flower, and petals falling, falling to the moss and stones underfoot. 

When you turn, he’s leaning against the porch post, watching, and you feel like you haven’t felt since the first days you knew him. When he would find you on the overlook, shedding his belts and his hat with a shine in his eyes like he had been polishing his thoughts of you until he could get there. 

[and one from chapter 9 of sweetbriar]

From the hotel, he hails a cab - never could drive in this country. He can play left-handed on the fly but he’s discoordinated as a mad steer if he tries to drive on the opposite side of the road.

After half an hour, when the city turns to industry and then tight-packed houses gradually spreading farther apart, they eventually pass a rolling green field bordered by tall leafy plane trees and a stone wall, a hill in the distance.

“Can you let me off here?”

“Here? It’s the middle of nowhere mate.”

“I know where I’m at.”

He stands at the roadside without a coat or umbrella if it rains the way it wants to, and pretends to walk up the road until the cab is out of sight, and then he hops the wall and starts hiking across that impeccable field. A light mist clouds the air.

Thinking of a night in September.

“A cowboy in London, my my. Are you lost, cowboy?”

He stepped out of the way of a roadie pushing a stack of touring cases down the tunnel. “I must be.” 

She laughed with her friends. 

When he gets to the stream, he follows it north, and through the mist he can eventually make out the verdigris roof of the orangerie in the distance, the vane on the stables. And finally the willows on the soft banks. 

Under the largest one, a polished black granite stone stands, three feet by five feet. Not the mausoleum he fought against. She would’ve hated it. It would’ve terrified their boy. If they had to be here, let them feel the sunlight, rare as it was. In gold lettering, 

Elizabeth Rose ✝ Isaac Christopher MORGAN

Memory was forever embedded in his hands. The warm, quivering heft of seven pounds six ounces – Support his head – as he kissed that wrinkly forehead again and again and again and smelled his baby hair. 

And the true meaning of motionless. The hardness of a steel table.

Fuck, his chest hurts. He doesn’t want to let himself forget it as if he would wake up one day to find them gone from his heart. Just breathe. Sit with them. On the ground. 

So he sits, and haltingly leans against the cold granite, and combs his fingers through the grass like hair.

“Figured while I’m here I oughta see you, try to get this right. I ain't moving on, just like nothin. I’ll never let you go.” He clears his throat. “But I met someone. Who's makin me feel like it's alright to feel this again…in spite of…everything. And, uh, just to be honest with you, I think I love her back. If that means bein unable to stop wantin to be with someone. Sometimes I think I didn't know what it was, before. And if that's true, then I was never good enough for you, and I’m sorry. You deserved better."

He can hardly get out the words.

"Kit, you were born loved, baby. You couldn't help it.”

Not a strangled breath later, there's a zip as his hair wisps off his forehead and a huge dart buries itself halfway up its shaft in the willow trunk. He whips around, holding his head – 

"The hell –”