The table was rickety as it was, being put together from discarded bottle crates with boards nailed on top. A very certain tremor quivered over its surface when he banged his fists and pushed his chair back. The knife clanged on the ceramic plate, in tune with the distant church bells that centuries ago used to warn the villagers when the malevolent Putana prepared to spew smoke and flame and brimstone; that ominous note of dark skies, grey ash and blood red earth. A few crumbs of bread floated off and rested peacably on the table.
Peace.
The tip of the cigarette burnt bright red as he pulled in a drag.
The ash broke off and floated off with the dry desiccating breeze.
His eyes were fixed on the horizon.
She looked elsewhere, searching for an answer. Searching for a reason despite all the illogicalness that shrouded the age. Her nose twitched at the familiar tinge of cigarette smoke carried over by the wind.
Peace.
She sat at the table, brushing that lock of hair off her face. Her fingers ran through her scalp, entangled themselves in that forest of melancholy.
He was inside. Could hear the cupboards being slammed shut. Rustle of papers shoved down into a bag. The sharp click of the lighter as another cigarette was lit. The faint memory of smoke trails out of the shack again.
She did not feel sad. Just a sense of time catching up. An intense feeling of tiredness; like when you sit down halfway through a marathon you did not have the lung to finish. A knowing recognition that they could not outrun time, especially when one of them was perennially straining back and looking over his shoulder.
Peace.
And the the tale of silent evasion.
Of hiding away from time.
Trying to find
An island of recluse
From fire, and hell,
And brimstone
And the vicious anger,
Hatred, greed,
And that indefatigably alluring
Hold of ideology
And idealism.
The dream of peace.
She remembered. The tantalizingly melodious sound of the stream. Carving secrets on the pebbles and whispering them to the trees. She remembered his fingers tracing lines on the water; the same way they would draw lines down her back. And her neck.
That distant summer afternoon, long before the paradox of peace confronted them with its brutal banality, she remembered him writing their dreams in the water. She remembered how their dreams seemed to take tangible shape in the dexterousness of his fingers. And how they were washed away. Caught in that flux of time.
When he stepped out of the house, he was the very college boy she had fallen in love with in University.
His eyes were evasive;
Shy.
His face half-turned.
The unkempt hair.
That forest of melancholy.
And the overgrown stubble.
He slung his bag high
Over his shoulders.
Closed his eyes
Not to meet hers.
His footsteps downhill
An ill-tuned verse.
A fly with blue wings
And the leftovers.
When she left out her cry of anguish, he was too far to hear. Too far to turn back. Too far to meet her eyes, hold her waist and kiss her neck. Her voice was a strained violin note trying to drown the silence that engulfed her in that forested melancholy.
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