703. red ink

In the mornings, after coffee, they would clean the table, which sat before morning sun, beams slatting though the pane. The table was of wood, old with the scars of time, of others who have lived here, who had breathed this air, seen these woods and, perhaps too, sat across from each other in the mornings, content in silent company. Upon this table she would lay parchment and he would gather his pens, some of blue ink, some black, but his favorite was red and with red ink he would write. He preferred red he said because words were living things and ink, he felt, was as blood to this life, to their ability to stir the imagination, to inspire, to make, he once said, one fall in love with life, all of life and death too.

Upon the table, cleaned of breakfast, if breakfast had been eaten, and often, it was not--just coffee. But upon this table of wood, as if the beams held history or story within their beams and to sit before them, to rest arm and hand as upon a pier, there would be an opening, a gateway to a thought. And that thought, like a seed, would be all that was needed. Just that. Just a little push to get the blood flowing. She watched all this with the patience of a spider, watching the furrow on his brow, the movement of hand, the painterly way his fingers held quill, and quill she thought was appropriate for what she saw was as flight, of hand or imagination or both, there seemed to be what she could only describe as a concert in how he wrote and he seemed as absorbed as a conductor, aware of his audience only before and only after but so consumed in the writing as to be other, someplace she could only imagine, someplace where magic happened, someplace she knew, not from words, not even his pen.

She knew this magic, this place from mood and gait and smile and ease and hug and kiss and the gentle way he looked upon her as one looks upon the only object of desire, and he felt childlike, as she did, in this looking, as if the weight and gravity of age were suspended, as if they had entered a room off to the side, as if in this room they were stealing kisses to the sound of distant voices and the picking up of plates and the sound of silverware finishing dessert. In this place, she felt his soft lips part and the tenderness of that touch, that moment, of his warm and subtle wetness of life, as his tongue traced the outline of her lip and their breath felt warm in the confined space, but above all, she felt his touch not in flesh, but in the choice, the presence, not in the holding but of the holding and it felt alive, she felt alive as she did not when he was not there, not holding her, not looking upon her and this life felt as if a light was shining, the way one feels a warm light in winter, the amber glow of casement from a distant cottage as snow falls upon the sleigh and horses bray and neigh and the feeling of movement by horse feels of life, unlike movement by mechanicals. Watching him felt like that. Warm as wool. As wool dusted with snow. As hands held under blanket, in the back of a sleigh.