Light, you think, is a fragile thing, a rare, breakable thing, something that you are so very lucky to hold for the few hours each day when the sun finally rises slightly higher than the line of the horizon, and then higher and higher still, slowly, over days and weeks.
You marvel at it as it throws glitter onto the white plains, and the crooked skinny iced over branches, and the dangling still grey-from-all-the-coaldust icicles, and you shade your eyes at how brilliantly blinding it is, and you hope that this year winter doesn't bleed into May, and that you'll have enough time before the streets run dirty and gritty and charcoal grey to enjoy it, the light, as it pours into your window in the morning, as it bounces freely, child-like off the snow and the glass and the pale walls.
But it does anyway, and you think of it, the light, as soft as silk, and fragile; cracked porcelain, translucent, transient, gone.
And one day, in a summer, cold and gray and drizzly, and in a place you'd never been to before—a fairy-tale place by the Baltic with much too short a name for any place Russian—you walk into a cathedral.
And you are twelve and an atheist and invincible.
And you had just watched a strange young couple kissing right in front of the cathedral—kissing, and kissing, and kissing and holding hands—and you blushed and you wished there were no light at all, so your great aunt couldn't laugh at you for blushing.
It is dark inside; darker than it ought to be in a place this large. And you scan the impossibly tall, dark ceilings, unadorned, but for the largest organ you had ever seen, brass tubes gleaming in the light, cast in sharp-edged streams through the stained glass windows.
And you know then that it is never soft, the light, but exacting and harsh and the color of blood, and sky, and betrayal.
And you know, in that moment, and you are only twelve and you are not supposed to know any of it yet, but you do know, and it's the color of blush when you kiss for the first time, and it hurts to think about it, so you don't, and you think that maybe Pontius Pilate had the headache after all, from all that light.
And you hear Bach for the first time as it spills through the darkness towards you from the gleaming brass, rendering you silent.
YOU ARE READING
Shards of Porcelain
Short StoryShort vignettes, stories really but shorter than most stories. Some of these are prose poetry, others a tad more narrative stylistically, but in any event they are snippets of life, told in fragments of under 600 words (with very few exceptions).
