From the Dust Returned

The old one crammed his eyes tight.

“Open up! Let’s see!”

His eyeballs swiveled.

“Here comes a lovely girl. Quick!”

“Most beautiful girl in the world!”

The mummy couldn’t help but peel one eye.

“Ah!” said everyone. “Right!”

The young woman curved, leaning as the train pushed or pulled her; as pretty as something you won at a carnival by knocking over milk bottles.

“No!” The old one slammed his lids.

“Open wide!”

His eyeballs churned.

“Let go!” he shouted. “Stop!”

The young woman lurched as if to fall on all of them.

“Stop!” cried the old, old person. “Cecy’s with us, all innocence.”

“Innocence!” The inner attic roared.

“Grandpère,” said Cecy softly. “With all my nigh excursions, my traveling, I am not—”

“Innocent!” the four cousins shouted.

“Look here!” protested Grandpère.

“You look,” whispered Cecy. “I have sewn my way through bedroom windows on a thousand summer nights. I have lain in cool snowbeds of white pillows and swum unclothed in rivers on August noons to lie on riverbeds for birds to see—”

“I will not listen!”

“Yes.” Cecy’s voice wandered in meadows of remembrance. “I have lingered in a girl’s summer face to look out at a young man, and I have been in that same man, the same instant, breathing fire at that forever summer girl. I have nested in mating mice, circling lovebirds, bleeding-heart doves, and hid in butterflies fused on a flower.”

“Damn!”

“I’ve run in sleighs on December midnights when snow fell and smoke plumed out of the horses’ pink nostrils and there were fur blankets piled high with six young people hidden warm, delving, wishing, finding—”

“Cease!”

“Brava!” yelled the cousins.

“—and I have lodged in an edifice of bone and flesh—the most beautiful woman in the world …”

Grandpère was stunned.

For now it was as if snow fell to quiet him. He felt a stir of flowers about his brow, and a blowing of July morning wind about his ears, and all through his limbs a burgeoning of warmth, a growth of bosom about his ancient flat chest, a fire struck to bloom in the pit of his stomach. Now, as she talked, his lips softened and colored and knew poetry and might have let it pour forth in incredible rains, and his worn and tomb-dust fingers tumbled in his lap and changed to cream and milk and melting apple-snow. He stared down at them, frozen, and clenched his fists.

“No! Give back my hands! Cleanse my mouth!”

“Enough,” said an inner voice, Philip.