(Sarah Speaks in a Quiet Voice)

Erosion incurs a high cost. Leaving incurs none. Stay and endure the slow burn or give it over. The choice not mine but yours. So speak. I do know you after all. You visited years ago. You spoke to me then. Why not now?

Look: Over there: it trails behind it the sigh and rush of a long silken train. Whispers to the shades around. Crooks a finger, winks. A carrion clutch of feral cats roams hectic round this figure, all of them bone, bloody and hacked. This petty demon a friend of yours? A fair imitation, but it doesn’t fool me. You and you and only you and you alone are the real, the breathing, the dying thing.

You were so eloquent once. So ringing and so true. You spoke to me in amber tones. You camped with me, curled up beside me, breathed with me, and as I slept, you whispered each step of your careful instructions. In the morning, I wiped the sleep from my eyes and knew the sin, the how of it and of everything.

But you won’t speak to me now. You’ve gone sullen and still, and even if I listen close, there is no whisper from you, no murmur, no hum.

Why must I wait? Is the reckoning askew? An unpaid debt, a grievance unanswered, an apology missed? These aren’t arguments; deflections only. The act itself dissolves all debt by reason of absence of agency by reason of absence.

As I wait for you to speak, I hear the talk of others around: the breezing on and banter, trade of quips and anecdotes, the: I think you should see this, and the: why not do this and the: why did you think this when clearly it is that. And didn’t you know. And I heard this. And martinis, klieg lights, riff raff, holograms, Christmas lights, words, fractals, the whine of complaint, Norwegian fjords. The endless drag of talk and talk will not end. Not without you. 

So speak.

You close up your arms in blue shadow. Jaws clamp shut. Back now turned.

Look: the colour’s bled out here to slate grey, metallic disc of the sun and long shadows leaching colour like blood. It’s all sunk flat into the dull monochromic. And the more hours, the more grey, the more grey the more grey, and so on and on and on.

Why wait until movement is no longer possible, until pain snakes itself around the will to breathe? Until stumbling purblind from bed to kitchen is an unnameable torture? Until aloneness wrestles solitude to the floor and throttles it? Until sleep shatters into a cataract of knives? And until ancient resentments hunt and rove like packs of hyenas under the pale stare of the moon? Why wait. 

Why?

For that?

No.

I’d rather go with You. You who are kaleidoscopic. Brilliant. Vibrant blue, lightning quick. Vivacious, luminescent and a perfect conversationalist, when you want to be.

So. Speak.

In blue shadow, I see you turn now to face me. I step towards you, you are smiling, and your eyes darken with knowing, with caring. You reach out your hand to me. I take another step.

I’m listening.

Rosalind Goldsmith lives in Toronto. She’s written radio plays for CBC Radio Drama and a play for the Blyth Theatre Festival. She began writing short fiction five years ago and since then, her stories have appeared in journals in the UK, Canada and the USA, including Flash Fiction Magazine, Filling Station, Orca, Litro, Popshot, Spelk, Horla and Burningword Literary Journal, among others.

A Song for Rosalind