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#toward the white clouds chrysanthemums by the road breathing their scent
postersbykeith · 3 years
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kamala-laxman · 5 years
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Toward the white clouds - Chrysanthemums by the road Breathing their scent.   Tagami Kikusha
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sidhewrites · 5 years
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CHAPTER 7A. Previous Installment found here. Approx 1800 words. As always, feel free to send Asks or Messages about what’s written or anything you’re curious about.
Jasper wouldn’t stop grinning. He walked besides the little wooden cart, humming a travelling song and constantly looking up at Coriander with a beaming smile. She wasn’t sure if it was a good thing, nor could she quite bring herself to return the gesture herself. Bestina might have agreed that it was ultimately a good idea to see the physician, but it was clear she wasn’t happy about the means. Coriander had never left town before, and an uneasiness weighed her stomach down, even as she looked out as the farmland and flower fields passing by. Waites sat at the front of the cart quietly, humming occasionally when Jasper reached a part he remembered, but ultimately kept his eyes on the road as he drove.
His cart was an old thing, rickety and wobbling on its wheels, but it hadn’t needed a proper repair in almost five years now. His nag pulled it along at an easy pace, stopping all too often to sniff and snack on bits of grass. Mum was an old thing who’d carried the name Chrysanthemum once upon a time, but years of affectionate nicknames and baby-talk had shortened it years ago. She was deaf in one ear, just like Waites himself, but didn’t spook easily, unlike Coriander, who seemed to jump at every bump or rattle in the road.
She’d been no less nervous just an hour before. Her hands had been shaking as she went inside to pack for the short trip, Bestina at her heels critiquing every move she made. Not that dress, not those shoes, do you want to embarrass yourself the first time you ever leave town? How was she supposed to know what to pack? Well -- perhaps she should have. Fate knew she read enough stories about grand adventures anyway. They had never gone into detail about what these heroes and travellers had brought, but perhaps she ought to have intuited it anyway.
Their good-bye had been long and tearful, though Bestina didn’t hesitate to let everyone know what an inconvenience this was, leaving her alone in her house with no-one to care for her for three entire days. It wasn’t fair. Wasn’t right. Was downright cruel. More than once, Coriander had started to say that maybe she ought to just stay behind, but never quite found her voice in time before something else came up and had to be commented on.
So she hugged her mother tightly, hung a bell up in the doorway for good luck, and held back her tears and hid any hint of excitement at the idea of leaving. It was much easier to be anxious, to be fearful of the world outside her front door, and avoid any scrutiny instead.
It wasn’t hard, after all, to be afraid. Coriander had never gone to the edge of the flower fields. It wasn’t terribly noteworthy and far from dangerous, but it was outside of everything she’d ever known. It was the very beginning of the world beyond her small life, everything she’d read about and nothing she dared to dream of seeing. Green moorland rolled all the way to the horizon, with a few copses of trees, and across a small offshoot of the Rhoeing River running by the road that would eventually join the main branch of the river up by Mowry, just barely too far away to see.
Coriander felt ill. Probably looked it, too. She fiddled with the strings of her pack, small and plain, with just a little box of tea leaves and spices as a gift for the physician, and an extra shift and pair of stockings for herself.
“Mint?” Jasper asked. The scent of it filled her nose and tore her attention away from the road just enough to see him holding a few leaves out to her.
“Oh -- n-no, thank you.”
“Are you sure?”
She was absolutely unsure. Inexperienced and anxious, her stomach in knots and her heart in her throat. “I-I’m all right.” She was not.
Jasper’s grin fell for a moment, and he moved in closer to the cart to cast a furtive glance towards Waites before whispering, “Do you think you could pretend for me? You see, I always feel a little green when I first set off anywhere, and I don’t want our helpful guide thinking I’m a bad traveller.”
He was lying. He was singing and laughing no less than he always was. She looked to Waites as well, who seemed determined to look like he wasn’t paying attention, but Coriander relented and took a few leaves to chew on. Jasper thanked her, popped a leaf into his mouth as well, and began his song again.
An old oak tree stood guard at the edge of the fields, looking over the moorland beyond. Three young adults sat in the tree, pulling acorns, from the branches and throwing them at the two on the ground, who dodged them with shrieks of laughter as the oldest among them, stronger built and surlier, looked over a small flock of sheep -- a burgeoning shepherd practising their trade among friends. Mum plodded on, oblivious to everything but the grass in her mouth, but even Jasper seemed to fall quiet as the oak tree drew near.
The youths waved as they passed. Jasper waved back.
Coriander held her breath.
The cart rolled on.
She looked back as they went, watching the oak and the village beyond slowly begin to slip away.
She had left her home.
“It’s a strange sight, isn’t it?”
“I’m sorry?” Coriander turned to face the front of the cart again.
Waites smiled back at her, easy and comforting. “Knittelnau. You never really realize just how small it is until you’re outside of it.” She turned her head -- and stopped, as Waites spoke again: “I find it’s easier not to look.”
He admired the view for a bit anyway, glancing back to the road but trusting Mum to walk in a straight line. Jasper turned around entirely to walk backwards. She couldn’t resist the urge to turn herself -- but the sight still made her nervous.
“How old were you when you first left?”
“Oh, not much older than ten, I think. My father didn’t like to sit still for long.” Waites told the story as they went on, Jasper asking questions, but Coriander only half listened as she saw the town recede from view. It was slow going, would take nearly an hour until the last buildings moved beyond view.
Jasper broke into a fantastical tale of his own, gesticulating wildly as he went on about sea-faring vessels, three-masted ships with sails so large and white they looked like clouds. He talked about sirens and dangerous things that lurked under blue waters, one he’d managed to harpoon and pull up himself.
The conversation continued on without her. It always did. She wanted to see the hill she’d grown up on as long as she could. The house her father had built as a young man, not much older then than Coriander was now. She wanted to see her home, and she wanted to see it until it was just a speck on the horizon, and gone.
When she finally turned around to face the road again, Coriander gasped.
It was still tiny, barely visible from where they were, but the Rhoeing River that had always lived on the horizon, a distant idea of moving water, had become a clear and blue ribbon, shimmering in the midmorning sun. She could just barely make out a bride running over it, low and grey. Stone, most likely. She’d never seen a stone bridge before. Little wooden ones maybe, crossing creeks or dips in the road, but not stone, not over a river with a name. Something in her was desperate to walk on it.
“And the catch I’d reeled in -- with help of course.” Jasper held up an arm, flexing underneath his shirt in a most unimpressive way. “Do these look like the arms of a strong man to you?” He shook his head and laughed, not waiting for an answer. “I reeled it in and -- would you believe it? A baby water drake had gotten caught in our nets. He was slimy, with stubby little whiskers, and just enough teeth to do this to me.” Jasper turned his arm over, exposing a bite mark that looked like it might have come from a dog as much as it might have come from a water drake.
“Um--” she tried. All eyes were on her instantly, save for Mum, who didn’t care much for anyone unless they were waving a carrot or salt lick in front of her nose. She swallowed, shrank into herself for a moment. Why had she said anything? Stopping would do nothing but cause trouble, and hadn’t she promised to be good a thousand times over?
“Yes?” Waites prompted, almost overly benign in a way that somehow just made her feel worse for speaking up at all.
She mumbled, spoke too quietly, eyes on her hands. “I-I’d like, to, um…” She cleared her throat. “I’d like to walk. If that’s all right.”
It took a bit of negotiating to convince Mum to stop. Jasper had to run to the side of the road and pick some roadweed to wave under her nose. Slowly, she came to a stop and chewed thoughtfully while Waites helped her out of the cart. She stumbled, but righted herself quickly. And suddenly, she was a little larger. A little more important. Or perhaps just a little more foolish. A silly, hopeless girl thinking she was some sort of an adventurer just because she was walking the easy road to the next settlement over for the first time.
She stayed close to the cart, careful to stay on Waites’ right side so he could hear her when she talked, and glanced up every now and then for reassurance.
Jasper stood on her other side, a sort of buffer between her and the moorland beyond. “It seems the princess has come down from her carriage,” he said with a grin. “I tell you, the world is much better seen on foot. You can feel the ground beneath you, and it feels just that much more interesting. Even when you step on a pebble and feel it through your shoe.”
Didn’t that mean he needed new shoes? Coriander glanced down, wondered if he ought to have spoken to Olive before they left. But it was probably too late for that now, and he could meet with someone else in any number of the cities he was going to visit.
Another round of traveling songs picked up. Waites joined in now and then while Jasper led, glancing over to Coriander every now and then. She avoided looking back, but every now and then, she managed to squeak out a few lyrics alongside him, and Jasper’s grin only grew wider when she did.
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lizmckague-blog · 6 years
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Excerpt from The Paper Boat
by Elizabeth McKague
O wild west wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing...
        He made them in crafty, rapid gestures, folding the pages of a manuscript he’d carried to the river. Thinking he would read it, he planned to sit on his favorite rock until the mud of the bank crept into his only pair of leather shoes and the October dusk erased what light was left in the sky.          
        The white sheets of paper were slick and delicate. His tiny boats easily drifted from the water’s edge in measured breaths and sailed down river in a balanced breeze. The Arno looked murky and heavy, a green shade in the last pale slants of daylight.   He creased and folded his stanzas and cantos, turning the corners of each page into lips that held a silence. A silence before voyage, a silence released from the futility of whatever permanence he had originally intended by attempting to write the damn thing. He started to work faster in a synchronized fury, setting each paper boat upon the water as soon as it was made. He got a paper cut, then another, and his fingers grew cramped in the sharp, cold air hovering over the river with the approaching night.
        At last he folded his hands together in a buckle around his knees and relaxed. His posture copied the shape of the rock. He stared hypnotically at the flotilla of paper boats he had made. Spreading out along the river’s dreary current, they passed beneath the Ponte Solferino until page one was a white speck in the distance. Then page two and page three, until the entire paper fleet, like defeated warrior ships, slowly disappeared into a blinding mist, moving westward toward the Mediterranean Sea. The sun sped away and the Arno became gray and opaque.
        As a child, he had made paper boats with such concentration that nothing existed in his mind but the movement of his fingers against the sheets of paper. He tore them from a random notebook he had discovered about the house. They felt at once flimsy yet stiff, soft and cold. It was the autumn of 1802. He had left his sisters to their music lesson and wandered out of doors alone. He descended the wide steps in the front of the mansion, crossed the circular drive of gritty stones where the carriages came in, and continued through a maze of clipped green hedges in the courtyard. He was not even aware that he had left the house without a guardian. He remembered a sense of freedom and the sad scent of his mother’s neglected garden. Fading, pink chrysanthemums and frosted white colored roses danced, nonchalantly withering in symmetric rows. He walked beside the white washed fence that was then twice his height and passed the stables without being noticed. The horses were being let out from their stalls into the meadow. He strode over a damp, grassy hill and finally came to Field Place pond. The gray-green water quivered in a slight breeze. He found a flat spot of dry pebbles situated amongst tall yellow reeds at the edge of the pond. He sat down and felt hidden. He watched some fallen maple leaves drift in the water, aimlessly spinning this way then that. He sat there that day for hours, making boats and watching them float. At one point, the sun broke through the late afternoon clouds and illuminated the pond. His paper boats shone. He took a stick and made ripples. He was ten years old.
        Perhaps he was punished for wandering about the Estate alone that day. He didn’t remember. He didn’t remember much from his childhood. Just the boats, the ghost stories he wrote with his eldest sister, the airless smell of the perfumed ladies who visited his mother’s tea room, the fear he felt each time he passed the door to his father’s stale library, a book of poems by Thomas Chatterton and that particular day when he sat at the pond alone. For something happened in the late hour of that afternoon. He sat watching the rings of ripples grow around his tiny spinning boats in the water, listening to the croak of a concealed, lone toad and the hoots of wild geese hunting for their winter home across the gray sky. Then it happened. It lasted for a moment but a moment that appeared to throw away all time.
        He looked up to watch the flock of geese pass by. The black branches of an ominous oak clawed at the sky like some ancient, crippled beast scraping its tentacles against a pane of silver light. He looked down into the water for a sudden burst of light in the atmosphere nearly blinded him. He saw his reflection in the pond. He held his breath or could not breathe, maybe he had shrieked for the image terrified him. He was standing now and could see his entire figure in the water; a thin little boy with messy golden locks and blue eyes like gleaming sapphires and... wings! The whole world seemed upside down. He saw himself as an angel and it horrified him. He dared not look back up into the clouds for he was afraid he’d find a hole through which perhaps his subtle body had fallen. He never saw the angel again.
        A discarded light from the street lamps along the quay beside the Arno made sharp arrows over the river that had by now gone black. Shelley rose and ascended the bank, snatching his long gray coat at the collar where buttons were lost and tried to bow his head under the harsh current of the wind.
        He reached the Piazza Solferino where the very last rays of a tangerine sunset seemed to singe the edges of brown leaves drifting clumsily off chestnut trees. The square was fairly empty. A few parked carriages, a street musician wrapping his guitar in a tattered wool cloth, the shadowy lamplighter making his rounds and the rose colored glow in the two tall windows of a crowded restaurant. The bells of San Nicola struck at six o’clock. He stopped to listen, a habit he had developed since his exile into Italy, to simply stop and stand still for those few moments of ringing. He didn’t pray, he didn’t think, he didn’t speak, just breathed and listened. San Sepolcro, Santa Croce, Saint Marks, Saint Peters, San Giorgino Maggiore; the bells of each church unique to his attention. The bells of Westminster Abbey or any cathedral he’d lived by in England only reminded him of time, wrung his nerves, made him worry. A sort of bell toll anxiety he experienced even on his wedding day, or rather, both wedding days.
        He turned onto the Lungarno Pacinotti, a wide avenue that traced the river. The chilly air forced him to quicken his stride. He watched a fisherman ahead, dragging his net out of the water and onto the shore. It was filled with silver perch flapping away. But that’s not what Shelley saw. He saw a woman’s body; silver, bloated, frozen, dead. The same body he saw in his mind when Mary returned from the post that afternoon and read him the letter, the only way she could, quickly, without expression, her voice laden, calm and dry.
        “Harriet Westbrook, age 26, found drowned in the Serpentine. Cause of death, suicide.”
        He had neither seen nor communicated with his ex-wife for ten years. The news did not shock him and his demeanor remained as blank as Mary’s. He went into his attic den alone for an hour. Then tucking the manuscript in his jacket left the apartment quietly, telling her he was off to Byron’s early. Instead, he went to the river, knowing ‘the haunting’ was about to return. He had seen ghosts all over Field Place as a child. He even discovered their hideouts and would often sneak into the pantry, the coal cellar or beneath the stair just to sit with them for the moments before he was found out. In college, in London, in Whales, in Ireland... wherever he’d traveled since, the ghosts would follow. By now such episodes had become a kind of state that was so familiar, that although it made him ache, like bouts of loneliness or sadness, he saw the spectral visitors as natural invitations into the enigma of the mind. He accepted his visions as markers or signs, invisible notices of eviction from one house of the spirit into another. The doctors called his visions ‘hallucinations,” but Shelley believed more in the ghosts than the doctors.
        “Good evening!” The happy fisherman called up to Shelley who was scuffling along the road above the riverbank.
        “Good evening.” Shelley echoed, “Looks like you have a good catch there.”
        “A very good catch. Buona sera, Signore.”
He felt free of the haunting as he crossed the Ponte della Fortezza where the reflection of the street lamps blurred on the dark river. He walked on until he reached the steps of the Palazzo Lanfranchi, which he had named, “Lord Byron’s Circean Palace,” for the enormous rooms were forever littered, with not only a tropical menagerie of plants but also all kinds of exceptional animals.
           “What a sorcerer you are, my Lord.” Shelley had commented when he first encountered Byron’s collection of pets in Ravenna, “I see you’ve brought Cicero back from the underworld in the form of a ferret and metamorphosed the old stoic Seneca into an owl!”
           Byron had laughed, then added quite seriously, “You know, when I was at Cambridge I kept a grizzly bear in my rooms and I must confess that at one point I truly believed he was Marcus Aurelius Antonius himself.”
           Although the bear was no longer a part of Byron’s zoo, the spectacle of his domesticated animals never ceased to amaze Shelley. As he crossed the Palace’s threshold, even though he’d done so one hundred times before, the scenery helped to lighten his thoughts and soon enough he became almost giddy.          
In the foyer he was greeted by two German shepherds, composed as the Queen’s guards, while a majestic falcon perched on the head of a statue of Hermes in its center. Next, in the front hall, he paraded past an army of cats curled up upon the embroidered cushions of French rococo chairs that were set flush against the long frescoed wall. Byron’s three white monkeys were swinging in mocking gaiety from a monstrous glass chandelier. One of the monkeys bounced down into the corridor and the cats hunched up and hissed. He turned into a gallery where he was spied upon by the incandescent eyes of peacocks opening their feathers like a lady’s fan and when he reached the stairs to the second story, he was forced to experience a philosophical confrontation with a wandering Egyptian crane. At the entry to Byron’s private lodgings, a set of purebred Russian wolfhounds lounged on wooden benches at either end of an enormous hearth, perpetually oblivious to the sporadic swarms of yellow canaries flying in and out of the lush green ferns of potted plants. And finally, as he climbed the stairs, the echoes of fiery red and mint blue parrots aligned along the banister sang out in scratchy harmony, “The King is dead! The King is dead!”
           Byron’s butler informed Shelley that the gentlemen were in the billiard room. He entered through the open door very quietly, clinging to the shadows elongated against a paneled wall by a blazing fire. They were playing a close game, Williams and Byron against Trelawny and Robert Southey. He sat down in a green velvet chair that was tucked into a discreet corner. Across the room sat Thomas Moore, crouched on the sofa, reading the fresh ink of Byron’s newest poem with a crinkled brow. They were all sipping sherry out of thin crystal glasses whilst Robert Southey captivated them with an animated review of his recent encounter in Switzerland.
           “And just as we were leaving the hotel with the predicted blizzard upon us, Mr. Wordsworth wrapped his scarf around his long neck and ended our conversation about ‘Mad Shelley’ by saying, ‘A poet who has not produced a good poem before the age of twenty five, we may conclude, cannot and never will do so.’ In all earnest, I mentioned Shelley’s Queen Mab but Mr. Wordsworth just growled and said, ‘Won’t do. This hairy fellow is our flea trap!’ The words of William Wordsworth I tell you! Straight from the mouth of the man who is sure to be England’s next poet laureate.” He then grew silent to watch Byron nudge his last ball just to the edge of the middle bumper. Southey grinned, tapped his cue stick three times on the floor, then bent over the table, squinting through his awkward monocle and biting a mole that hung, gathering spittle upon the bulb of his lower lip as he muttered, “Sorry, old man,” and pounced forward on his stick to win the game. The rest of the group laughed at the amusement but Byron did not. He rolled his dark eyes about the smoky room and noticed his friend hiding in the green chair and limped toward it instantly.                      
“Shelley! We didn’t hear you come in.”        
           “I didn’t want to disturb your game.” He stood and took a deep breath. The room was stuffy and smelled of burnished wood.
           “Southey here had a run-in with Wordsworth in Geneva.” Byron gripped Shelley's slim wrist.
           “I heard.” He warmly shook his hand.
           Robert rushed to meet the young poet, his face pink with embarrassment, “I don’t think he’s ever even read your work, really. And the weather was abominable that day, we were all out of our wits, truly.”
           “Pleased to see you again too, Robert.” Shelley bowed his head slightly, “But my dear sir, there is no need to apologize. Now I know what England’s finest contemporary poet has to say about my work and I respect him all the more for it.” He leaned toward Southey’s quivering shoulders and whispered bitterly, “As a matter of fact I never did write a good poem before I was twenty-five. I suppose that means the last four years have been quite a waste of time.” Shelley straightened his posture and tugged at his waistcoat as he turned to Byron with a clandestine wink and announced, “You know, I do believe that as of this very moment I shall throw away my quill and commit my life’s work to perfecting the art of bird watching.”
           Southey’s meaty shoulders began to shake. Byron chummily slapped his back, “Come now ol’ chap, let’s don’t get unruffled. Shelley is teasing us. Let Wordsworth have his say! Our boy here probably doesn’t give a damn!”
           Robert’s eyes widened then narrowed into slits like a snake before its prey. Byron quickly leapt between them and challenged Robert to another game. Trelawny offered Shelley a glass of sherry that he declined. Instead he accepted the loose pages Tom had finished reading, the seventh canto of Byron’s Don Juan, which he took to the green velvet chair with a sense of relief. But as he settled down to read it, Byron, who had crossed the room to obtain a better cue stick, stopped abruptly behind Shelley’s chair and whispered, “Shall we throw him to the dogs?”
Shelley grinned, “No. Let the monkeys have him.”
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