When It's Autumn
That autumn, Ilse heard many things. As she walked through town, she heard the whispers of the girls she'd gone to school with years ago, and whom she'd talked to only weeks before, their hushed voices rising and falling in the still air like the flutter of moths' wings, so she caught only snatches.
"Almost never goes home now." That was Anna, huddled in a tight circle with Thea and Martha by the bridge.
"My mother spoke with hers." Thea this time.
"Still living with those artists. Living with them and sharing their beds and who knows what else." Martha.
That one stung a bit. She'd always thought that Martha, at least, understood a little.
As she walked on, out of earshot, she heard the crisp leaves swirling around her bare feet, skittering along the ground and crunching under her soles, grinding into ash that stuck to her skin. It was really getting to cold to be going without shoes, but Ilse didn't care. This way, she could make sure her feet stayed planted on the ground, instead of floating up as they'd like to do, carrying the rest of her off with them to who know where.
When she made it back to the nest of huts and lofts that made up the artists' encampment on the outskirts of town, Ilse heard not leaves and whispers, but the less elusive sounds of brushes dipping into paint and slithering over canvas. The reality of those sounds though, the knowledge that they couldn't fly away in the night like the whispers and the leaves and her own fanciful yearnings, made them that much more sinister.
Ilse sat still as Heinrich or Berlioz or one of the others painted her in a white shift or a green robe, playing the parts or a beggar maid or the Queen of Sheba.
She used to become the parts she was asked to play as she sat there, but not anymore.
Not since him.
With this thought, Ilse couldn't stop her mind from alighting on that confusing, wonderful-horrible afternoon and filling with the image of a boy, a man really. Moritz. It had been two days since she'd climbed the wall beside his grave, over by the side on not-quite-hallowed-but-not-unhallowed ground. A fair compromise.
But you can't ever compromise with the dead, Ilse had learned as she whispered to flowers that never spoke back, no matter how hard she listened. Perhaps even trying was useless.
Besides, it was autumn now, and flowers were harder to find. Ilse felt that if she listened carefully, she could almost hear each petal falling gently to the cold, hard ground.