A/N: Originally posted September 17, 2007 on my livejournal. The inspiration for this fic comes from a discussion of the poem "in Just" by ee cummings. The actual poem has some awesome spacing things that I can't reproduce on FFN, so you should check it out here, though I will include it here. The discussion was about how, in the poem, eddieandbill and bettyandisbel are those childhood bffs that you're so close to growing up, and the balloonman is the uncertain and ominous arrival of puberty that breaks these bonds. Bettyandisbel and eddieandbill will become BettyandEddie and IsbelandBill. My question was, what happened if Isbel and Bill didn't want to leave Betty and Eddie? I've attempted to answer that question with MelchiorandMoritz and WendlaandAnna.
in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman
whistles far and wee
and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring
when the world is puddle-wonderful
the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing
from hop-scotch and jump-rope and
it's
spring
and
the
goat-footed
balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee
in Just spring
It starts when they're kids and the world is puddle-wonderful. It's playing outside, dancing between pools of sunlight and trying not to get caught. It's nothing, really, to think that maybe Wendla looks very pretty today, or that Melchior's shoulders are broad, his features hardening into something very handsome.
Those sorts of things are just compliments, just things you think about someone you see every day. They don't mean anything.
And so Anna lets Wendla braid her pigtails, and Moritz splashes Melchior in the lake, their shirts soaked until they near invisible, and there's laughter in the spaces between the mottled clumps of sunlight.
.
They start to get fussed at for the mud on their clothes and the time for skinned knees has almost passed, is slipping away from them as the day fades into night, season into season. Her dress dips lower, socks up higher. His socks slip down past his knees but it really isn't all his fault; it's just his luck, see? There's a brink that they're trembling at the edge of, one foot still in childhood and one working its way into the glittering chasm of an unknown, untouchable world, two sizes too big.
And maybe, just maybe there's something different about the way she watches Wendla's arms, graceful and smooth. She watches the other girls when they aren't looking, and Wendla starts to comment on how Anna is so jumpy now, eyes wide in fear of an unnamed threat, a threat she's trying to find out if she shares with the others or if it's private, slinking along in the wake of her shadow.
Her fingers brush Anna's arm, and it's nothing, nothing. She shakes her head, smoothes out her skirt, and she puts on a smile. Natural, normal, nothing—transitory, and she doesn't concern herself with it anymore. She's growing every day, her mama says, and this is something she'll grow out of.
.
It's rough and tumble for the boys, pirates and Indians and cowboys—Melchior is the roguish American and all the boys laugh at how he tilts his cap, cocks his eyebrow. There was a time when there were girls in this too, Ilse and Wendla, and Anna standing to the side with her eyes wide. He thinks he likes it better now, though sometimes a moment will catch him and he'll think of Ilse, hair tangled down her back, her eyes glittering as she dared Moritz to try some dangerous new trial. Melchior would join her, would laugh and his eyes would turn harder, would lose the soft gleam of the smile he usually saved for Moritz.
Without Ilse, he does that less. There's still teasing but that's playful and that's just for him, at least. He holds it close, a private possession he never wants to let go of.
But Melchior's his best friend and possessiveness comes with the territory of that, and he's thankful almost that Wendla's gone too because sometimes, sometimes Moritz would see a smile between them, a silent passing of knowledge, and he'd have to turn away, to shut his eyes because that was his.
No, it's better now when it's just the boys because soon Melchior tires of them and they walk home together, alone, in the cool air of fading dusk.
And the tones of Melchior's voice threads through his dreams then, but, well, he listens to him talk enough anyway, doesn't he?
.
It's when Wendla's voice, scandalous, whispers Melchior's name in her ear and her lips brush Anna's cheek that she starts to panic.
For him, it's dreams of dark eyes that mock him, softly, and the searching touch of page-worn hands pulling at his clothes.
.
he whistles far and wee
.
She's just beginning to learn to live/not live with it, shutting her eyes to whatever else steals through her when she seizes a hand, watches dress brush against leg. It's easy to block it out, to ignore it and pretend like it'll just go away, and she talks easily enough of Melchior and boys. She'll get by, maybe, if she never touches it.
It's starting to consume him because there's no getting away from his eyes, hands, voice, and then he fails at school too and Melchior finds Wendla in the woods. He tells Moritz about finding a tree nymph, about how her dress came up just so and how he took her hand, thought of doing more. There's a smile in Melchior's eyes, touching his lips.
Moritz watches him talk, his eyes fixed on a spot in the distance, and he knows. He's lost what was his.
There isn't much else left.
The shot echoes in the night, but it's the quiet slump of his body against the ground that reverberates through the leaves.
.
The ground is muddy under her feet because it rained that morning. She let her window stand open, her elbows getting wet with sprinkles of the cool water, and she tried to shut her eyes, goosebumps on her skin. Maybe she should've thought of something poetic, should've cried her grief with the heavens. Instead her mama called and she got up, shut the window, and pulled her hair into pigtails.
Her shoes squish, sink into the earth, and the flowers in her hand are wet. She remembers standing by the trees, watching Melchior and Wendla and Ilse at their play. Her eyes, round and watchful, would brush against Moritz's and in the unspoken language of their eyes there was something like a hidden conversation.
She never really spoke to him, not anything that mattered, but she remembers the way he trailed behind Melchior, remembers the way she'd find his eyes at the edge of the stream, clothes stuck tight to the others in the water. Sometimes, though the color was different, it felt like a mirror.
Her hand trembles and the flowers fall into the hole.
.
After Moritz, she lets herself look at Wendla, when she can. She's too busy looking to see the lines, the specter of something sinister resting on her shoulders even as Wendla bounces and tells Anna of a hayloft, a stormy day when Anna had been waiting for Wendla to arrive.
She bites her lip and wonders what it would be like to bite Wendla's.
And there are days when maybe, maybe she has the courage.
.
There are tears for Wendla, from the shock of it all. Thea clings to her, Martha sits on the ground to the side, shoulders silently moving in her private display of pain. Ilse returns, then, tears on her face, but she struggles to maintain the boldness she once had, and her smile strains through her features.
Anna's tears slide down her face, quietly. She doesn't wipe at them, just lets them drip down into her hair, onto her dress. Her eyes shut and she feels something inside her tear away.
She might have known what it would have felt like for Wendla's hand to brush them away. Her hands stay wrapped up in Thea's, not daring to profane her face with their touch.
.
It's another black hole yawning at her and more flowers in her hand. There's less of herself at this one, understand, because part of her went with (was) him, and the rest of her rests against the throat of the earth, so she doesn't feel the rain, present again and cold as it slithers down her back, under her dress. She holds her hand out, lets the flowers drop. The thud against the wood whispers through the leaves of the trees above the sound of the rain.
And she thinks, maybe there isn't anything left.
.
in just spring when the world is puddle-wonderful