From the Dust Returned

And Timothy indeed saw the miracle, this daughter of time, with a face of youngness which became younger, yes, and even younger as he stared. It was as if she lay beneath a smoothly flowing, slowly passing stream of clear water which washed her cheeks with shadows and light and trembled her eyelids and purified her flesh.

Angelina Marguerite at this moment opened her eyes. They were the soft blue of the delicate veins in her temples.

“Well,” she whispered. “Is this birth, or rebirth?”

Quiet laughter from all.

“One or the other. Other or none.” Timothy’s mother reached out. “Welcome. Stay. Soon enough you will leave for your sublime destiny.”

“But,” Timothy protested yet again.

“Never doubt. Simply be.”

An hour younger than a minute ago, Angelina Marguerite took Mother’s hand.

“Is there a cake with candles? Is this my first birthday or my nine hundred and ninety-ninth?”

Seeking the answer, more wine was poured.

Sunsets are loved because they vanish.

Flowers are loved because they go.

The dogs of the field and the cats of the kitchen are loved because soon they must depart.

These are not the sole reasons, but at the heart of morning welcomes and afternoon laughters is the promise of farewell. In the gray muzzle of an old dog we see goodbye. In the tired face of an old friend we read long journeys beyond returns.

So it was with Angelina Marguerite and the Family, but most of all with Timothy.

Make haste to live was the motto embroidered on a great hall carpet over which they walked or ran each minute of each hour of the day that the lovely maid occupied their lives. For she was diminishing from nineteen to eighteen-and-one-half to eighteen-and-one-quarter, even as they stared and put out their hands to quell this endless yet beautiful retrogression.

“Wait for me!” Timothy cried one day, seeing her face and body melt from beauty to beauty, like a candle lit and never ceasing.

“Catch me if you can!” And Angelina Marguerite ran down across a meadow with Timothy weeping in pursuit.

Exhausted, with a great laugh, she fell and waited for him to drop near.

“Caught,” he cried. “Trapped!”

“No,” she said, gently, and took his hand. “Never, dear cousin. Listen.”

Then she explained:

“I shall be this, eighteen, for a little while, and then seventeen and sixteen a small while, and oh, Timothy, while I am this and then that age, I must find me a quick love, a swift romance, in the town below, and not let them know I come down from this hill or this House, and release myself to jo

y for a little while before I am fifteen and fourteen and thirteen and then the innocence of twelve before the pulses start and the blood manifests, and then eleven and ignorant but happy, and ten—even happier. And then again, Timothy, if only somewhere along the way backward, you and I could conjoin, clasp hands in friendship, clasp bodies in joy, how fine, yes?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“How old are you, Timothy?”

“Ten, I guess.”

“Ah, yes. So you don’t know what I say.”

She leaned forward suddenly and gave him such a kiss on his mouth that his eardrums fractured and the soft spot on his skull ached.

“Does that give you a small idea of what you’ll miss by not loving me?” she said.