a good read, a one-liner, and a drabble

The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen is excellent.


A number of months came to pass before the wearied monarch fell sick with the ailments of old age, and the once-called princess, soon thereafter, was crowned queen.


He wandered into a forest of tangled brush and gnarled wood, darkened by the shadows of trees that had grown too desperately close to one another. In the midst of his dreaming, a finch fluttered briskly through the canopy, a meek and lonely mass. Underfoot, the damp, loose foliage muffled his steps as he took one harrowing lurch nearer and into what appeared to be the gaping mouth of a tomb; so thereupon winter was the draft from a window ajar as he fell silently into perpetuity. By dusk, he awoke a grave and sullen proprietor of fortune, stepping out of bed to close the snow-laden windows.
There were harsh gales threatening the castle walls, that night, and the ancient stone heaved a curse.

Hadley

I'm posting something original, for once:


Morning lurched lazily upon the horizon, transitioning slowly from dark to dawn.
Rubbing drowsy eyes I felt at peace because waking up in darkness reminded me of rising early to catch a plane at O'Hare.

It was so exciting to be going somewhere, but, Hadley, it had sent tremors up my spine all the same.

After years and so much change--and after all those events that transpired between myself and the town--it was nearly impossible to have come back. The air was too familiar, too old. There was something sad about the place and the fact that no one had changed.
The only thing that was different, Hadley, was the news I heard about you, echoed over the telephone by your mother because your little sister hadn't the solace yet to tell me.


I burdened my ungainly legs again with the chore of traveling. I stopped short of my destination because I had no where to go, and I lingered then, without protest, in solitude for a while.
Somewhere in the universe there was the dull echo of a fading pulsar, muffled and prolonged, as if someone deprived it of eternal rest. You wouldn't have believed it, Hadley; I heard it so that when silence came at last, the frigid chill of polar air was worth the numbness of my fingers as dawn returned.

I suppose that the pulsar was never awaiting death, because a pulsar is already death's manifestation of a star--the carcass--whose weak, residual light traipses wearily and slowly down to earth. By now, it had been dead forever ago, all the while we had been treading the Earth.

Now it's only me treading the earth, Hadley. I often worry after you, because your image still lingers about my life, like the blackness from the pulsar not reached Earth, yet.
I remember your voice expelling breath upon the air like a vaporous cloud later to be deposited in the soil like the bulb of a flower.

I realize that I never thanked you for convincing me--for making me feel as though when we die, though the blood within our veins may recede from our limbs, retreating into our cores, we will be like your breath bequeathed unto the wintry air.
Thank you, Hadley, for reminding me that our nerves and muscles will dull and atrophy sooner than our souls do, and that nature spawned us merely to admire her work on otherwise trite creatures.

How very cruel it all is that we must be a species so very driven by fate--so very controlled and drawn indefinitely by and towards it, sometimes even feeling judged by it, as we selfishly opt for agnosticism so that when we die our loved ones are left on Earth to worry after which gates we entered in the afterlife.

Hadley, if you had lived so splendidly and charitably, your only vice a faithless upbringing, then where the hell are you? Please, Hadley, don't tell me you are where they say you are, because then...what will I do?