Hope
Rebecca Pyle
Nothing would save her except a long sleep.
Hope? There was a place on their way which looked as happy as sleep. Large gold-framed paintings were on its golden walls. The floor was laid with alternating black and white porcelain tiles. The lamps in the ceiling made the light of captured suns.
A river, which she had not seen yet in this town, ran below somewhere. There would have to be persisting and hopeful boats. A long-held belief persisted also in her that a person could throw herself from a bridge into a boat and that boat might merely bob up and down a little, she would be fine, perhaps even landing on her feet, and people on the boat would immediately decide she was the person they had been waiting for, who would draw wry sketches of all the people aboard, somehow suggesting, in the drawings, their life stories. Their destinies.
In every town and city near a river she imagined this. She was already also thinking of paintings she could fashion from memories, just memories, of how the surface of water keeps splitting and resplitting like silk. The Seine was made of green silk and intricate shrubbery and trees at the borders of the water, and the best boats had simple and large panels of insulated glass, cooling systems for summer, and a captain who could take you down to the Musée d’Orsay, with its grand clock at the front, and back again, at twilight. He wouldn’t talk to you unless you felt like talking. There were musicians who would come on board and play for guests and you knew they were good because they also were not interested in talking at all, only sensing how the music sounded near water, and looking for swans in the summer; the sudden sight of them could almost make them break away from the music. But they played on. And as they looked at you as they played you could tell they knew that nothing you would say to anyone would make much difference, but people had to pretend there was a chance of a difference. Speech did not do much; unless exceptional, it was weak, meandering. Only great or good paintings, music, writings, preserved well. Her underwater career, however small it would ever be, would require a pen name, at least for a time, till she was done with the niceties/horrors of a career in government. Today she would think of a pen name, and she would proceed to write as a person with that pen name would write, if she had the right to a boat. A writer should have her own boat, which she had paid for herself: she still dreamed of dropping onto a boat on which she knew no one but would be listened to and cared for and on which she could be given that magic new name.
Rebecca Pyle’s forthcoming work is “ A Frost Fate” (fiction) in Scarlet (Jaded Ibis Press); “River” (fiction) in Writer’s Block Magazine (the Netherlands); “A Record” and “For the Falling” (poems) in Kestrel, and The Hungarian Apartment with the Red Nespresso Machine (a drawing) in Silk Road Review. Rebecca studied art and lit at the University of Kansas. Over the past two years she has been living in Europe, mainly in France and the United Kingdom. See rebeccapyleartist.com.