Birch Seven Stories

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-953728-35-7
Verlag: Full Court Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 193 Seiten

Reihe: Seven Stories

People exploring the most intimate parts of their lives in exotic locales.

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Autoren/Hrsg.

Birch, Leo

Leseproben

ELEMENTAL

—I’m Ready, My Lord

IF YOU DON’T RETELL A TALE, WHERE DOES IT GO? Is it worth living it? Outside, by the small natural harbor of pale gray water, ospreys are flying. They are beautiful birds of prey.

They fish with their talons only.

He watched as two juveniles were attempting their first flights. A cup of dark tea in a white porcelain mug in his hand, he is back home—while she is still over there, in her vacation home on the small island of Patmos, a dot in the Mediterranean Sea.

The flights of the birds overlap for a moment. They move in unison within his field of view. From a different vantage, they would be moving apart.

The ospreys, he recalls, are the only raptors that can be found on all five continents: a species with a ubiquitous display of adaptability and resilience.

He wages an interesting balance with her. She stays alone over there for a few weeks while he remains working back in the city. She feeds him stories, scripts, scenarios, even the occasional photo. In return, he refrains from seeking his own stories and follies. He lives on them. She knows it. She has seen it. Therefore, she constantly feeds him from the threshold of her distant isle.

It is a balance. They’re like two kids on that plank toy you see in some playgrounds, pivoting around a fixed axis. One up and one down. Always linked.

One of the two juvenile ospreys has grass caught in its claws. The adult, Mom, he guesses, keeps an eye on his flight. The youth makes it back safely to the tremendous nest made of thick twigs, perched high above ground. Each early flight is an adventure. No one will ever remember it unless it is read again.

Water

FAR AWAY ON THE ISLAND, THE WATERS ARE PURE and beautiful in the bay, almost virginal. By chance, the two of them swam towards each other. Light reflects itself, not only on the surface, but also underneath it and it bathed their bodies with indolent colors. She watched his hand disappear in the water with each stroke, shoulders moving smoothly along the axis of his trunk and hips, his skin alternatively tanned and white within the greens and myriads of blues.

They saw themselves as simply swimming.

The moment had a movie-like quality, and it was as if they became even more beautiful under the fictional digital gaze. Although they were swimming towards each other it was towards a point where they actually would not meet. That would be too perfect, and cliché. They were moving and swimming because it was their destiny. And because the souls, sitting close by or in the distance, were willing them to.

ONCE YOU REACH ANOTHER DIMENSION, once you leave the third dimension in which we dwell in on this earth, you enjoy life, or existence really, through the spectrum of earthly human experiences. If you are rewarded in life, you get to thrive on the loving experiences and emotions of living human beings. You get to feel their joys and pleasures as it was for instance when you inhaled the invisible sweet perfume of a rose back on solid Earth.

They swam past each other. She did not like to put her face in the water, and this gave him more time to see her. His gaze lingered on her smiling eyes, and then he went under. With his swimming goggles on, he took a long look at the fantastic shape of her body shimmering between water and light. He surfaced again for air. For her. She was swimming away, though, swimming past him and their possible destiny.

That was when he heard the people on the nearby boat call her name.

“Mara, is that you?” “Yes!” she said.

“Come aboard!” they invited.

He dove back deep in the water and smiled at the beauty of it all even as he shifted his body and swam on his back while watching the sun pierce the top layer of the sea. Eyes open behind the goggles he witnessed the steady stream of bubbles that projected from his mouth and nose, each bubble loaded with the full expression of his joy.

That boat was his.

Those friends of hers were his friends. She was to be his, he thought. It was meant to be.

HER SKIN FELT WARM UNDER THE SUN as she sat among her friends on the emerald green pillows. She stared at his long, slender, and muscular body emerging from the waves and making its way up to the deck. She saw him walk toward her, shaking his wet hair, goggles around his neck, as the teak captured the imprint of each wet step. He wrapped himself in a towel, the same color as hers.

“Hello, swimmer!” he said jokingly.

“Hello, diver!”

Now they had met. The trajectory had been corrected.

They could not unmeet.

She drank a few sips of cold beer with all of them, and a friend took her back to shore on the dinghy. “Come by later today. We’re at the small house—the one in the hill by the beach, you know? Above the herd of goats. We’ll all be there later today,” he told her as he helped her off the boat.

She had lunch with her parents at the family’s house under trees recently pruned that let the sun, and at night the stars, find windows among the branches. The wind blew softly, a whispering sea breeze.

She and her mom cooked with the help of the gardener’s wife. That modicum of help made all the difference. The women could stay seated at the table during the meal and the chores of cleaning up disappeared as the smiling lady helped all.

After lunch, Mara went to the beach near the goat herd and swam one more time in the translucent water. The sun shone directly into the shallows as she walked out. She took a picture with her phone, each dot of white light on the crest of the low waves like a facsimile of human semen on the glimmering surface. She would send that image back to him in New York. He knew, better than anyone, what these signs meant.

Earth

WALKING AWAY FROM THE SHIFTING pebbles and sand, she found solid ground on her way up the hill. She could see the small house ahead. Her girlfriend followed her. She’s the one who snapped the perfectly timed picture of the wind picking up Mara’s silk pareo as it floated up, allegedly in a gust of wind. With gusto! she thought as she looked at the image. Having no replacement for her wet bikini she was naked under the pareo. Maybe, just maybe, she had unconsciously forgotten it. “For being naked is the fundamental attitude of the Greek islands,” she had told him once. She decided to also send that picture to him. When she got to the house, the place was bursting with energy—all the friends from the boat were there and many others as well.

The balancing act between the two of them is quite remarkable. She feeds him plots, stages, and characters, but rarely substance. He then transmutes all her musings into a story, like drawings into a painting—all the while seducing her over and over, day after day, in order to keep her love. For love, even deep love, can be fickle. She could possibly fall for the presence of the flesh, the kisses that are here rather than the promises from a world away.

She did not understand at first. She still does not, really. She is slowly realizing that this balancing act has become an important part of their routine when she is traveling alone. If she does not exude a flow of stories that fulfill his imagination, he may find them elsewhere. And she’s very jealous of that. So she feeds him, hard. And he sublimates this even harder. They work at it. Slowly climbing a fantastic ladder of purely instinctual behavior.

Like an Old Soul, he gathers strength from her emotions. Even from afar, he can feel her breath speeding up as she watches the owner of the boat appear shirtless.

The boy she swam with this morning walked in from the kitchen, carrying a tray of glasses filled with white wine for everyone. This is his house, she finds out from someone else. This and all the land below, down to the pebbles and the beach. He is wearing black pants, a fabric so thin that you can see he is naked under it. She can perceive his fullness with one glance, as if she ran her fingers along it.

She has been coming to this island every August for years now. She has a personal connection with the land. She knows the hidden pathways that lead to the small shepherd sheds, those huts surrounded by olive trees where she can buy the day’s goat cheese, pay with a smile and a wave of her raised hand, and then swing her hips...