At the Window

by Helena Krobath

The window here is a little grubby, and outside stands a thin row of trees, right now thin and breathless and motionless as carbon sketches. The wind, that rogue, slips in like a serpent and excites my skin. The cars hum. The neighbour smokes. I sit. I imagine.

I am not old, but I can see the way time works, a trickster making us believe in lines. It fools me into thinking my skin is a little looser under the eyes today instead of fixed like a carbon sketch. I go through bodies like kleenex. I’m on my fifth one.

I had a thought . . . I can’t remember. It's in the eyes of everyone I see, wistful, bemused, uncertain. The forgotten thought.

Then it comes to me. You are in a deep black ocean. You're surfacing and diving and surfacing. When you surface, you remember. You see the breadth of the ocean and all across it the faces of other people surfacing.

Some of them are people you know very well, your souls, who, when you were under last, seemed distorted and foreign like your own face in a mirror when you've lost your mind.

And surfacing, you have a good laugh about how, back underneath, where memory doesn’t exist, you were enemies, with uneasy feelings of not knowing something that should be known.

And so you killed their children. Blind deaf impotent like a lion in a cage or a shark on the sand, you lashed out. It was all wrong and unfair. Everywhere the same guarded looks, the same hooded eyes. Night music and cries of rage.

Until you break the surface and the cold thick ink of the void surrounds you and you feel safer floating in that endless sea than you ever felt on earth traveling the paths of men. All around you, faces are coming up and eyes opening.

Oh, it’s you, you say. I thought you were just a stranger at the airport! That was you! I thought you were just a face in a window.

And then you hold them all, wet with the dark water, and laugh, laugh, laugh. Should we go under again? See if we can get ourselves born somewhere really grand? And this time we won't forget each other. We'll know ourselves and the mystery we come from.

What the hell, they say, and you dive under, find yourselves born on opposite ends of an alien planet, them with grey skin and you with blue, both miserable in your adventure because you think it’s real, the end, the fullness of time, your identity. Who am I? you ask yourself. Why am I here?

Apocalypse Morning

It was apocalyptically still this morning. The kind of apocalypse that really frightens me--forget all the Hollywood bullshit, with hobos in tatters shrieking hellfire as soldiers in Hummers blast the streets. No, this apocalypse was not like that at all.

In this sort of apocalypse, there is no immediate change, except an unnatural stillness. The trees don't move. The air is breathless and thin. If you come to the window at a moment when there are no cars or people passing, you sense something deeply frightening: perfect emptiness. The longing that used to emanate from the world--the link to the spirit world, if you look at it that way--is gone. All that's left are the shadows of things. Shadow trees, shadow streetlights, shadow grass, shadow clouds. Even the people seem to be shadow people. Doing their shadow work and playing their shadow play.

But somehow, trapped deep inside, you are not yet a shadow. There is enough of you left to realize that. You also feel that, if you travelled to the peak of the highest mountain or to the depths of the ocean, you might still find a trace of spirit in the world.

Then, when the next car passes or the next wind stirs, you shudder at what you have been pondering, and laugh a little at your own silliness. Everything feels familiar again. You get used to the slight chill that remains, or maybe you pretend it's not there. So little by little, the world gets colder, and you try not to notice. Of course, trying not to notice turns into really not noticing, until you, too, are a shadow.

Well, I watched the stillness from my window, just to see how long it would last. I waited until the wind materialized in the room with me. Then I poured a cup of coffee and put on a sweater to keep off the chill, except for on my cheeks, where I liked to feel it. Apocalypse. Don't let it happen to you. Seize the fire. Don't be a shadow.



h.