Prague: An Interlude
PG-13. 09/23/2006.

She came to him as if in a dream: in Prague down a crooked alley, lonely icy morning, soft skrishskrish of charcoal as he worked out the sad forms of a building that was praying for death, and his forehead burned as if Elwyn were there again, to laugh in his ear and draw him away from that cold place. But he turned and it was her--her? Features trembling on the brink of masculinity, but yes, her, a woman with chestnut hair and sea-blue eyes, watching his hand where it crouched over his paper.

And it was inevitable from there, from that first coffee they had crouched at a tiny table outside a cafe, his breath coming out in little white cloud-puffs and her in a thin sweater. "I'm not cold, don't fuss," she said, and somehow he knew she was like him, knew she had seen places no human was perhaps ever meant to see. He found himself inviting her back to his rented room, letting her pore over his sketchbooks (that no one saw, not his sisters even, because who among them would not either mock or pity him for his endless drawing of one fey, blonde waif that he had barely known, a lifetime ago? Elwyn surrounded by trees, Elwyn tangled in thorns, Elwyn an extension of cloud or thicket or fountain, in everything...) as he made tea and sandwiches, as they talked about--what? Can he even remember now? Does it matter? History of a city untouched by time, maybe, myths of a place that drew so many great people, but could never hold them in its uneven, eerie horizon.

Her fingertips blue holding the crust of her sandwich to her mouth, and he asked again if she were cold, but no, she was fine. "Perhaps I look cold because I'm lonely," she said, but just in passing, continuing on to other things.

Of course she stayed that night, of course the room that had been so cold seemed swelteringly hot around him with her under him, sweat dripping down his spine and then cooling as they moved, and moved, her like hot wine under him, smooth and blood-thick, making his head spin, making him feel like just a boy with a little blond nymphet in the forest of another world, clumsy and unstable and fragile, and--no, no, he made himself block out the thoughts of that other one, phantom girl he may never see again, and open his eyes to crystalline water-blue, and boyish passionate mouth and pure wet heat. Her whispered words and he couldn't make them out, roaring in his ears until he wailed, and was still in her arms, and slept.

He awoke like death warmed over, heroin-chic face and burns and bruises everywhere, his tongue swollen in his mouth like it wasn't made to fit there.

And alone. His sketchbook open and two pages carefully torn out, latest pages drawn last night of her in Elwyn's Wood, watching the viewer as she combed out Elwyn's hair, or another, drying Elwyn's breasts with her hair after bathing. He hadn't meant her to see those at all, but somehow--he wasn't surprised she was gone, that there was nothing in the room left of her but a faint marshy musky smell, that even what he drew of her was gone. Only what was in his head, rapidly dimming, and a strange drift of soft feathers on the floor.

He didn't leave the room that day, forced himself to drink tea that he couldn't even keep down at first, hunched over his sketchbook and drawing, drawing, drawing, filling it up and starting another, at least a hundred pages of new images that flooded out of his mind, some place he hadn't known was there--owls, flowers, horses and riders and dogs, a vague crystalline city he had never seen but glimpsed on the edges of his consciousness--but mostly the same familiar landscape, that forest, faint glimpses of Fell Andred through the trees, and Elwyn, his Elwyn, who he may never see again.

End.

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