By Design

originally posted March 21, 2007

It has been a quiet hand, by design. I thought as much this morning as I cleared away the brak from the front doors of the Boarding House, setting it alight that it would burn itself to ash on the stones. I then washed the pitch myself, scrubbing it down to the white washed wood. This was before dawn, still dark, done before tor-tu-gor had its say and the bars started ringing. Before the people began to crowd the street, laughing and singing and carrying on. I always have trouble transitioning on the first day of En'Kara. There is a switch for some. Somber for five days and then jubilant, quite suddenly. Perhaps it is because I spend much of these five days recollecting the unpleasant things. The things I no longer speak of.
In a few moments, here at Samsara, I will wake the girl, Joy. She is on the woven mat at the foot of my couch in this too-big domicile. I remember Plythias, often, in the morning. He was a Worker of Glass and something of a genius at it. The colored panes that form my window to the garden in back of the house are most beautiful in the morning, when the sun first hits them. I think he once told me the significance of the pattern, but it is something lost to memory. It casts pleasant, colored light on the tiles of my floor, across the face of an auburn-maned thing, causing her to stretch and yawn, not yet aware that I am watching her. She will know what today is. When the sun crests the Great Wall of the city and bars begin to ring, she will paint the door of this domicile green. I will burn the branches.
I've put a few coins in the hands of Darwin, asking him to purchase pastry for the girls kept in the Anbar. It is an indulgence, true, but one I am inclined to make at the start of the year. "Just one small, honeyed cake apiece" I told him.
"For...Tasta...too?" he asked uncertainly.
"If you value your life," I advised him.
It makes me smile as I sit here, imagining the recognition hitting her golden eyes, those of a monster, that she is not receive the indulgence of the girls below her on the chain. Better to sweeten the tongue of the sleen than to be something savory between her teeth. Taken literally or figuratively, those are words to live by.