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Jun 24, 2020 22:00
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| # ¿ Jan 25, 2025 16:51 |
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Curative 621 words after Joan Miró's Still Life with Old Shoe (1937) https://www.moma.org/collection/works/80555 The glass bottle wasn't much larger than a saltshaker, easily held in one palm, but to Cara, it seemed to grow heavier and heavier each month, even as she slowly drained its contents. It had been three years since she'd been the first in the middle counties in the century to come down with the harvest-blindness. It started with a vague fog lurking just out of the corner of her eye, but that fog eventually wrapped all her sight in vague cotton, leaving only impressions of light and shadow. Sighing, Cara sat down at the table, her practiced, callused seamstress's fingers automatically unstoppering the bottle, its thin, inky contents washing up the sides of the glass, its owner's hands unable to keep from trembling. The bottle had come from the traveling Alchemist, who had taken pity on the woman with the clouded eyes and passed her the bottle and a few whispered instructions. The town elders did not consider him a trustworthy figure, between his western accent and rumors of his cavorting with spirits, devils, and underdressed young men and women of the villages...but nor did they curtail his comings and goings or his custom. Cara tilted her head back, raising the glass rod concealed under the stopper to her right eye, then her left, letting a drop of the liquid splash against her pupils, eyelids reflexively squeezing shut over the intrusion. There were no looking-glasses in Cara's house. They would not have been of much use to her, anyway, as the icy solution drew tears from her once more, as it did every quarter-season, and the medicine gave her back something like her sight, at least for the time. The clouds encroaching upon her vision had again been swept aside by the black liquid, and in their place, objects and their edges shone with the witch-light in the darkness. The colors were most often false, but they were enough to continue to work. To continue to work, and to put food in her belly and keep the tax collectors at bay. To survive. Wiping the last tears from her cheeks, Cara took up her baskets and her purse and left the cottage, for it was market-day and eggs and carrots could not purchase themselves. Walking down the lane, she steeled herself, armoring her demeanor with a smile she did not truly feel, knowing full well what would come next. First, it was the town constable, regarding her with a sneer that went from his moustache to nearly his brow. Then, the smith's boy, Edmund, making the sign to ward off evil at her, threatening to let his dog's leash slip through his hand, to let the snarling and snapping hound to fly at her. By the time the loriner's wife turned her back to her passing, Cara again found herself resigned to the fact that this was her fate, to be cut off from the town and its people, like a diseased branch of an oak. As much as she wished it wasn't so, she at least understood why. The Alchemist had saved her vision, it was true. What he hadn't told her was that the physic he gave her turned her normal pearly eyes to orbs black as velvet. Even as the Harrisons took her coin and gave her the week's worth of vegetable, she could see them doing their best to avoid meeting her dread gaze. Cara had given up on asking God why this was her fate. Now, she merely waited for the return of the Alchemist to ask him instead: Is a life utterly alone a life at all?
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Jun 28, 2020 22:49
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