CoCo's Anthology - by Zid - "Through a Darkened Pane"...

by ziddina 45 Replies latest jw friends

ziddina

CoCo's post #7077...
No more words were exchanged between mother and daughter, nor would there ever be.
Theresa, out of long unspoken necessity but presently for the purpose of survival, has put on a new and bold garment: wordless defiance, this in the face of the sudden erosion of Renata Gettleman's supreme confidence (and now dissipating arrogance) that the world was ever in her control, her tight grasp. That grasp is loosening, and she has no say in the matter. She has lost her prized possession ... her child. A perverse love held, but love nonetheless.
The one person over whom Mother had absolute and unchallenged dominion was Daughter. Despite a brittle outward show of motherly affection and concern for her only child, Renata's normally cool demeanor was, to her consternation, warming up to this new creature. Theresa Marie was showing signs her mother's own robust nature. However, we are talking assertive, not aggressive.
Both women knew what had happened so tragically, so unnecessarily mere days before. The younger woman, she who truly suffered the loss, knew, but only in her heart; the remotest possibilities of Renata's untoward behavior, neglect toward her husband was facilely explained away.
(not sure about post #7087...)
CoCo's post #7097...
So much can be said in the silence of the lips. The eyes say what needs to be said: often so eloquently, so scathingly, so very to the point. Yes, the eyes have it.
Theresa, never before seeming to possess a thought of her very own, has been forced to think, to act, without reservation. She was such a child in a number of ways, but her father's brutal execution turned her into an adult overnight. The physical comfort and security of her home could not, of itself, assuage the emptiness she felt, that of herself and of the cavernous mansion.
As Renata approached Theresa, breaking into her daughter's troubled reverie, she put a cold hand upon Theresa's shoulder. She hadn't the emotional capacity to embrace and comfort her daughter wordlessly, as a normal mother might do. Yet, strangely, the readily confident and glib woman had no words. If there had been any, they would have stuck in her throat. Theresa looked into her mother's eyes and said nothing.
The inwardly distraught but poised Mrs. Gettleman sought sympathy from Theresa with her eyes. Traits such as compassion and mercy, typical of any decent human being, were scarcely spiritual waters deep within the well of Renata's soul.
Theresa's awakened eyes saw fear in those of her mother. So unnatural, so untypical for the woman who plowed her way through every obstacle, challenge and person who stood their own shaky ground. With her right hand, warm and utterly feminine, she firmly grasped and removed her mother's hand, still upon her left shoulder, this bold gesture a silent declaration that never more would they touch ...
Nor speak.
Miss Gettleman has left her childhood home for the last time, never to return. The shell of a woman, ghostly in pallor, stands motionless on an upstairs landing and stares at the street below ...
Through a darkened pane....
ziddina

(not sure about this one, but I'm going to put it in anyway...)
CoCo's post #7101...
You once were true. I was your only one.
With no more than the fierce beating of my heart as your signal, you would hasten deliciously into my presence and cherish me as none other. You were so sweet, so delectable. While others were consumed with envy and styled you a villain, the embodiment of mere carnal pleasure let flow, you delicately removed the shackles that imprisoned my heart. You, sweet savior, were a liberator whose glance, whose touch, whose kiss, sent me to Heaven. My window was ever open to you. Upon wings of desire you floated through and lit softly upon my chamber floor.
Where, now, have you and your sweet offerings of love taken up residence?
I am sick with love and can bear my aloneness no longer. Gazing mournfully out the frozen pane that divides you from me, I see you as inattentive and uncaring. For too long a time you have refrained from entering into my presence and gifted me with love's dream fulfilled.
My offerings of tears have not chastened your wandering heart nor opened its deepest chambers on my sorrowing behalf. You are well acquainted with the desire of eyes, the burning blood that courses madly through veins not meant to contain such fire. When again, if ever, will my dream of love become entwined with my corporeal self? With you?
This raging love of mine is pent-up waters behind a crumbling dam of dust and bone....
Where, my errant love, are you?
CoCo's post #7106...
It's through a glass once bright, now dark,
I float inside ... no need the door....
Through a sweep of live oak foliage she peers hungrily toward me from her lodging, distant, yet I uncomfortably within her reach. She is perched upon the ridge, grasping tenaciously with her talons the bare rock of a sinister throne. All but one pane is hidden by camouflaging grayish green, her glaring eye focusing squarely upon me, though this bad house on the hill is so great a number of leagues away.
(Okay, the next posts appear to be a separate story...
Perhaps I should start a separate thread for this one...)
ziddina

(I've started another thread regarding the cabin... But I'm not sure that these posts should go here, or perhaps start a third story...)
But I'm putting them here, just for the time being...
CoCo's post #7101...
You once were true. I was your only one.
With no more than the fierce beating of my heart as your signal, you would hasten deliciously into my presence and cherish me as none other. You were so sweet, so delectable. While others were consumed with envy and styled you a villain, the embodiment of mere carnal pleasure let flow, you delicately removed the shackles that imprisoned my heart. You, sweet savior, were a liberator whose glance, whose touch, whose kiss, sent me to Heaven. My window was ever open to you. Upon wings of desire you floated through and lit softly upon my chamber floor.
Where, now, have you and your sweet offerings of love taken up residence?
I am sick with love and can bear my aloneness no longer. Gazing mournfully out the frozen pane that divides you from me, I see you as inattentive and uncaring. For too long a time you have refrained from entering into my presence and gifted me with love's dream fulfilled.
My offerings of tears have not chastened your wandering heart nor opened its deepest chambers on my sorrowing behalf. You are well acquainted with the desire of eyes, the burning blood that courses madly through veins not meant to contain such fire. When again, if ever, will my dream of love become entwined with my corporeal self? With you?
This raging love of mine is pent-up waters behind a crumbling dam of dust and bone....
Where, my errant love, are you?
(Not sure where THIS one should go, either...)
CoCo's post #7112...
I have awakened from the strangest and most frightening nightmares imaginable.
Or had I been awake all along, my imagination once again off at an unstoppable gallop, an All Hallows Eve wild ride into the yet undiscovered caverns of a sickened mind morbidly inhabiting a body in advanced stages of decay? [earlier I had been tasting of a musical smorgasbord which offered to my indiscriminate palette an out-of-season dollop of screeching but captivating Halloween music]. Strange dreams of friends redrawn as angry, animated cartoon characters, my lugging a double bed mattress up to a trashed hotel room, a treasure trove of books ablaze at the hand of an insane antagonist in the manner of Fahrenheit 451 and the smell of kerosene (can a dreamer smell?).
I have awakened again - how can this be?
Pain wracks my freezing body, my legs at broken angles one to the other and higher than my cracked head. As I come to and to the realization that I am outside the comfort of my warm and embracing bed, I gather that I am fortunate to have awakened at all: I am at the bottom of the stairway leading from deck to drive, crumpled in an ungainly and disgraced heap. It would seem - as I am now in the capacity to recollect my earlier move to exit the studio to view better the new moon - I had slipped down the icy wooden stairs and spent heaven knows how long on the asphalt.
If I have not broken anything I will struggle to crawl back up the stairs, lick my wounds once inside my home's relative safety and security, and refrain henceforth from attempting to view straight on the moon's beautiful face.
Her exquisite shining light alone - pouring so alluringly through my gently illumined window - will have to suffice for this adventurer.
compound complex

Thank you, Zid:
These mental meanderings through my current neighborhood and those of times past have in common these basics: The unexplained or the ordinary as seen through a pane of glass, now bright, now dark.
That regarding Theresa and her mother, Renata, is based upon The Little Foxes, wherein the daughter flees her mother and the family home, through whose upstairs darkened pane Renata peers downward, longingly, one last time upon her beloved daughter.
CoCo
ziddina

(running a risk still being on here - lightning still crackling...)
CoCo's post #7141...
Andy Vincent's thoughts as he goes through the container of books addressed to Elizabeth Vincent, his deceased mother:
You are my delight ...
Your warm and supple skin delights my touch, and the gliding of my fingers up and down your spine creates within my rising spirit an awareness of Heaven's glory, her gates to knowledge wide open.
Upon revelation of treasures long hid from me, I melt inwardly as your trove of precious thoughts works the wheels of my mind and invests it with renewed inspiration and fresh resolve. Your message is no mere dry statement, rife with boring facts, but, bolder still, an ardent declaration meant for the entire world to read, ponder and act upon.
All men and women seek what is between your covers, though, at first glance, they might not recognize your inherent worth. Not until you, O cherished Book of books, should fall within their own opened palms.
compound complex

Be safe, Ziddy!
Close down ...
CC
ziddina

Okay, I don't know where this one should go...
I think it should be the beginnings of a new story, but I'm going to put it in here - with something to mark it as a possible sprout of a new story...
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CoCo's post #7158....

It is getting dark.

A stiff wind is coming in off the bay and the eucalyptus trees are swaying. The two-story house next door does not block my view of the sea as it is set back a bit. What I can see is partially obscured by a stand of trees. The gentle back-and-forth motion of those graceful eucalyptus causes the light pouring through my window to cut in and out. Hypnotic. Comfortable. Warm.

Coming to, after a brief snooze, I throw a casual glance out the window and, even as I relate this, a shiver goes down my spine. I am unable to catch my breath. What is that on my neighbor's roof? Dark though the sky has become, there is no mistaking what is there. I am frozen ... its unearthly stare is fixed on me.
Its eyes - fitted into huge sockets within a gargoyle's head - are red-hot coals. My entire being is seared by what is about to become, in a matter of swiftly passing moments, an all-consuming conflagration. That considerable distance of seeming, relative safety from rooftop to bedroom affords me no consolation.

Strangely fascinated, I emerge from the initial state of shock and, by rapidly increasing degrees, find myself helplessly captive to full-blown horror. The immediate impulse in any ordinary emergency sort of situation is to reach for the telephone, punch out the requisite 3 digits and then anxiously await the arrival of the community's finest. I, locked into the creature's horrific stare, am incapable of movement. Of rational thought. Of coming to my own defense.

Terror has never been so delicious ...

Entrancement and enchantment each work their singular charm upon me as four eyes remain set in a fixed stare. Outwardly I am silently screaming, my head exploding and letting fly like shrapnel innumerable questions that have no possible answers. And inwardly? Dare I permit my glacial heart to melt at the unimaginable prospect that, perhaps, this otherworldly entity is my dubious savior?

Is he reading my mind?

I'm sinking ever further into this conflict of strange emotions, a tide of angst over which no straight-thinking could hope to prevail. My mind says run for your life, though that, of course, is a physical impossibility.
My foolish heart quietly insists that there is an unseen beauty in this being whose aspect defies all human description. Most would declare this a beast. Regardless, his presence would doubtless cause a brave man to faint. As I am really no beauty myself, I find it, in the beneficent Law of the Cosmos, unfair to consign any of the Great Spirit's creatures to the prison of human bias. Isn't it too ludicrous, that I, a captive audience of one, should render such pious judgment?

Released momentarily from my inward stirrings, I focus once again on the creature's face. His eyes ... they are no longer red but turned the color of the sea. Cool. Calm. Serene.
Is this chimera - whether real or in my brain - reading my mind?

Certainly my heart has not hardened in fear or revulsion. I know that the creature reads my heart, if not my mind. A gradual but, nevertheless, astonishing transformation occurs before me, so clearly visible despite the physical separation that maintains between us. The absurdly misshapen is metamorphosing into a comely form that commands my unbroken, wondering gaze. Scales of a peculiar geometric form fade into the pink smoothness of human skin. A warm glow surrounds what was only mere moments ago a horror of the darkest grotesquerie. What could only have been construed as his mouth has taken the shape of beautifully formed and sensuous lips. While otherwise stock-still for these fleeting yet intolerably protracted moments of physical modifications, my beast has become beauty.
Released from an appearance of suspended animation, my beauty begins to move but in an incredibly drawn-out slow motion. Slowly, very slowly, his right arm rises from his side and reaches upward toward me, his hand extended and beckoning. That mouth, those lips quiver ever so slightly ...

Beauty smiles at me.
I feel an unfamiliar restlessness in my lower body. My mind and heart coax me arise and seek what awaits outside the barrier of glass.
It is no longer a matter of fighting long-entrenched despair. A power beyond all that is humanly possible - even in the most extraordinary of circumstances - seizes hold of atrophy and regenerates what was once officially declared dead. In spite of myself, I arise from my imprisoning bed and, as if it were a completely normal occurrence, glide over to the French windows. I do not touch the handles yet, in the manner of a dream, the doors open before me.
Standing upon the balcony, I observe with the utmost clarity the pure magnificence of celestial beauty. My mind no longer questions the why, the wherefore nor the how ... My heart says I must follow its direction:

I could never lead you astray ...
Something wonderful awaits you.
Return to your room, stand before
Your mirror and close your eyes...
It is still too much to believe that I arose from near total incapacity, hastened to the windows and beheld what dreams are made of. I've cast off all doubt regarding the validity of miracles in modern times. And Beauty - whether angel, alien or demon - convinces me in my heart of hearts that, truly, something wonderful is about to happen ...
Returning to my wardrobe, I momentarily close my eyes. Somehow sensing a subtle change in the direction put upon me, I open my eyes and look into the full-length mirror. I see only myself, no reflection of the room at all. There I stand, tall and erect, as in my vibrant and athletic youth. Now, however, it is as an assured, mature woman. Radiant. Smiling. Possessed, so it would seem, by an inner confidence emanating from my every pore. Behind me I sense a warm and comforting presence. It is he. The aura surrounding his now invisible self does not compete with my inner glow but interplays with it, creating a show of light, not of spectacular brilliance, but of undulating waves of luminescence.
My pounding heart fairly leaps from my chest. In the mirror are the likenesses of two men, one younger, one older. My brain must be playing tricks on me. I gasp. The older - a handsome man of not quite middle age - is clearly my husband, Jonathan. Who can that younger man be, who so resembles Jonathan? Is this father and son? No, it cannot be. Both Jonathan and Quentin were killed in the train ...
It was a lifetime ago.

I feel the gentle touch of a hand upon my shoulder. Rather than startle me, this tactile sensation calms me. As tears stream down my cheeks, I hesitate to confront the dream-like reality that remains unaltered as the mirror's reflection. I lower my head, overcome.

Beauty speaks barely a whisper into my ear:
Look again. There is nothing to fear. It is your husband
Jonathan and your son Quentin. They've come to take
you home.

Looking up once again into the mirror, I smile through my tears and gaze upon the beautiful countenances of father and son. My husband. My son. They reach toward me, bidding me follow them. I step closer toward the mirror ...
The bed that Sarah Gardner had languished upon for so many years is now empty. The eucalyptus continue to sway gracefully, their gentle susurration filling the former occupant's room through open French windows.

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ziddina

Uhm, and I think this is another story...
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CoCo's post #7163...
"The Lord has given us back our Clem, Adam ... He's given us back our Clem," rattled a glassy-eyed mother, bereaved of both her son and her reason.

Laura Withers was fairly rocking back and forth in her ladder-back chair as she stared out the bay window toward an Atlantic alternately beneficent and cruel. Though Adam Withers stood at his deluded mate's side, his large, work-gnarled hand on her bony shoulder, he could not look upon the ravenous sea that had taken their son, Clement Charles Withers. A given name could not have been more wrongly assigned a newborn. Clem was anything but mild or merciful, a difficult child and even more difficult young man. No thought for his good-hearted, simple parents, he ran off to sea at age sixteen without a word or written note of farewell. Two years later, frantic worry and grief having mellowed into a numb resignation, the Withers learned in The Shipping News that the schooner Clem had boarded and signed onto had foundered in the China Sea during a typhoon. No survivors. Upon learning but clearly misinterpreting the miracle of Roberto's reinstatement into life from a sea unwilling to claim him for her own, Laura rallied momentarily from her comatose state, though it's not certain she actually declared Roberto her revivified Clement. Adam knew Roberto was Roberto, not his son Clem. But his grief, unspoken and subdued, nonetheless keened inwardly as he perceived, in visiting one day with the recovered Roberto, that this was truly the son he had never had.
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tec

Oh, awesome job putting these all together, Zid. Gonna read them all through in the morning. Can't keep my eyes open much longer.
*hugs CoCo*
Peace,
tammy
ziddina

Okay.... I think that this next part is primarily a 'character study', but could make the beginnings of another interesting story...
[getting late and I'm getting fuzzy-headed here...]
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CoCo's post #7201...
From my window, I look out upon the street below. There goes my dandy friend, Gottlieb Furioso, Esq., his gait brisk, his temper insouciant. I wonder what efforts he will go through today to maintain his person clean and proper ... I espy an old man about to cross my comrade's path....
An overweening sense of self-importance and the necessity of preserving an immaculate outward appearance prevented the young dandy from initially lending the old man a helping hand.

The elderly gent, ambling along the bumpy cobblestones sufficiently well till one of his ill-fitting shoes caught its toe in a mild depression in the otherwise smooth path worn lustrous by centuries of pedestrian and horse-drawn cart passage, took a forward tumble, landed in a bedraggled heap and let out a tiny yelp that bespoke an expected discomfort but an unanticipated assault on the pauper's innate dignity.

Not so much a heart inured against the suffering of the lower classes as principally a congenital awareness of propriety and decorum about a suave gentleman's look was young Gottlieb Furioso's unspoken but deeply felt concern. Surely, the younger male was schooled in the universal laws of beneficence, particularly that of noblesse oblige. However, the inopportune soiling of his pale doeskin gloves was sufficient reason for restraint and discretion in deciding what looming circumstance amongst the ever-present needy of the world was one of extreme need as opposed to a situation of far lesser gravity.
CoCo's post #7209

THE EYES AS WINDOWS ...
Aleksandr's eyes had a certain vacancy about them; nevertheless, they locked firmly into my own unremitting, wondering gaze. Behind his melancholic stare I sensed a yearning for that faraway land glimpsed and, perhaps, inhabited fleetingly by a fortunate few during the reverie of slumber.
Nostalgic for land and family across the Atlantic, I should think, this newcomer to a nation as alien to him as though he had disembarked from board ship and landed mistakenly on the moon through some wrong turn, appeared to be elsewhere mentally and emotionally.
Certainly I had no way of knowing what was going on in that head capped by a mop of ragged black curls, adorning a face at once both femininely delicate and porcelain and, yet, one absolutely masculine.
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CoCo's Anthology - by Zid - "Through a Darkened Pane"...

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