Invitations

Invitations

They were trying to save her and she was having none of it. One light bulb died, only to be replaced by her slim fingers. Didn’t she know? When her head ached for hours and spider webs of searing white saturated her vision. Didn’t she know it was their doing? She wasn’t made to handle the three of them, trio of lights, nestled just above her sleeping head, congratulating themselves now on her making it through the day, plotting how she would survive the next with all of them powered at full tilt, all of their glass bulb bellies aflicker with electricity. And sometimes their whispering woke her and she lay for minutes in bed, her sheets curled around her like an ocean, her hair a wave’s spray arcing across her deflated pillowcase. Her chest would rise, would fall, her eyes, those weak, betraying eyes, were wet daubs in the darkness, sitting pools of deep water, jelly-like and moist as they acquainted themselves with the dark. They failed her each and every day and only at night could convince themselves it was not their own doing, that it was not the retina or the cords of nerves or mucus but something other outside that was broken, flagging. And then they’d get all slick and slippery, sliding out with their lie and glistening with it. Slowly though, slowly, she was losing things. She was losing sight.

One day she unscrewed all but one light bulb. Later she replaced that with a weaker kind. Outside the sunsets and sunrises, the Sunday flowers and long fingered clouds began to slip, to thin. She sat on her bed once and stared and stared and stared, memorizing the lines and colors of her favorite painting, even now somewhat deadened, its elegance slimmed, diluted by what already her eyes failed to show her. And then it was the mirror, it was her face, her hair, the shape and curve of her ribs into her hips, her breast to her shoulder, the fragile clavicle to the tender base of her throat. She cut her fingers at dinnertime, her blood and moans mingled amongst the carrots and cauliflower. And she couldn’t make out the red-coral-rose of it against the cutting board. And then the house was black, was gray, was unlit and empty. She sat in chairs with blankets and let her hair down, her resigned eyes making out nothing more than the blurred shapes of the basic things. That’s how and where they found her, sitting at her big kitchen table in the twilight, staring at nothingness straight through her eyes. And when she felt arms around her shoulders she cried, tears stinging her eyes and smelling of old things, of dust and betrayal. Outside and inside, all that remained to her was shadow and shadow’s shadow and the dullest and darkest of shades.

And they were trying to save her and she was having none of it. In her sockets, her eyes lay like stones, heavy and cold and dead.

Then, though she saw nothing of it, a slice of sunshine pushed through the window panes, striking first her hand before blushing against her face. Her expression for a moment flickered. Because the feeling of heat across her skin was exquisite, was like the brightest, most colorful of days. She turned into it, turned her cheek against the air and shuddered as it radiated through her flesh.

And they were trying to save her but in all the wrong ways. It wasn’t the lessening of light she needed, but the explosion of it, the diffusion, the devouring tongues of heat, of something like life, soaking into her bones as though she too were a tree straining its leaves towards the sun. And though her eyes lay like stones, she found nothing so hard in herself, nothing so unrelenting as to deny the unspoken invitation of the sun: to spread out her skin and live under the weighted light.