The Writers Voice
The World's
Favourite Literary Website
The Dawn Fire
by
Paul Grimsley
She leaned into the heat and shine, her hair alight in the radiance of the woken
sun, and she seemed momentarily to have evaporated – to have been absorbed into
the dawn fire. I lay in the muted browns of mucky shadow watching her, trying to
absorb and feed off the visual magic. Artists would have fallen in love with the
light. I was one of those ancient mythical heroes marching in the footsteps of Lugh Iamfota and the other sun gods, growing in strength as old Helios climbed
the stairs to the midday apex. She made the sun stronger: she improved its
appetite. She improved my appetite.
I was afraid to photograph her for a while and I hadn’t even thought of
sketching her likeness. Perhaps – no, definitely – there was a religiosity to
our interactions. I thought that to record the moment or translate its essence
would be to sully both the event and the memory of it. So the charcoal was mute,
the camera shutter never winked its cyclopean eye, and all I had to rely upon
were the strings of proteins that caught and encoded the light in that neural
net in my paper skull. And perhaps, more than once, one memory reduced another
to ashes, but that ash was fertiliser – her presence kept growing in both dream
and recollection.
I touched the lips that framed my dumb mouth to those soft petals of hers and I
was drowning in the Lethean waters of bliss. I peered into her eyes and I was
dragged down deeper. I placed my hand on her perfect breast and her thumping
heartbeat hammered me into precious metal that shined briefly and melted in her
heat.
For so long circumstance had kept us apart. For so long decency shackled me to
the shadows! and made me whisper the poetry of my love only to myself. When I
had forgotten nearly all the words of my litany; when my tongue turned to beef
jerky that helped me not at all; when muteness threatened to bury me under a
landslide of silence forever – that was when she uttered the three word
incantation that frees all lovers.
I drew her then. But I do not need to lift another piece of charcoal ever again.
The photos are fossilised in the album and can be forgotten. They were props for
moments of insecurity. I burned them and from those fires a new universe was
born. The light from those early days is what reaches us now. We live by the
light of our sun.
I lean into her and she leans into me. We embrace and in the heat and shine of
that moment you might be forgiven for thinking that we momentarily evaporated.
Two flames lost amidst the dawn fire.
Critique this work
Click on the book to leave a comment about this work
