I feel her presence in the common day,
In that slow dark that widens every eye.

- Theodore Roethke, 'She'

Island Tongues

His food, by the time it reaches the table, is cold but serviceable: the eel sweet and tender, the sake strong. He eats slowly, luxuriatingly. Every morsel savoured as if it is an orphaned stowaway from the place of last things, forgotten names, and paper blossoms.

They are coming back to him, all the simple, unassuming pleasures, one by one.


Fifteen years, he chased her breadcrumb trail of conditional affection, from continent to continent, through desert and caves of ice, running to keep up, never letting her see him struggle for an inch.

Adequate, was ever Irina's unspoken verdict. They were her rules, her standards, not a knife's width of leeway for anybody else's; for mother was god in the eyes of a child, Irina's coppice of changelings.

And you could call it approval, what he was stumbling after, or you could call it respect; he wouldn't have bothered to correct you.

In the old times, the wild animals - the deer and the parrot, the leopard and the porcupine - turned into humans, and back again, and the river changed its path to mirror the dark eyes of a beautiful girl. They needed no excuses to act as they did. The world was too big-hearted, too plural and contradictory, to be understood.


Now, coasting toward Belo Horizonte, hardtop roof down - this is bandit country, after all - and the collateral claimed for breach of (a highly illegal) contract in the briefcase, propped in the passenger seat...

Against the sword sheath.

One last bit of business taken care of, and now he is done. The metal shape of an automatic has become strange and sullen, an object, sliding back into lifelessness, in his hand.


Adam needed no one.

Neither did Irina.

But he looked young, so much younger than she, they were often mistaken for mother and son, and his eyes were bright with something that she thought was innocence, but was actually pleasure at recognising her for what she was.

"Tell me what to do," he offered, and tilted his head irresistably so that it formed a question: the difference between power taken, and power that is freely given.


The scene is familiar, but he is not the same man that he was, who pulled back from the sting of bullets, and whose tongue could be loosened by hurt and despair.

"Your mother really is dead this time," he tells Sydney, almost gently. "Don't look for me again."

If she is at all sensible, she'll listen to him.

The End

26 December 2007