BlanketFall surrendered, snow fell, and Ruth’s mother bought a blanket for her daughter’s seventeenth Christmas. It wasn’t a very expensive or spectacular blanket; it was extraordinary only in the fact that it hadn’t been picked mindlessly from a Christmas list but had instead been chosen lovingly and thoughtfully. She knew her daughter was forever chilly and would love the blanket’s fleece side, and she laughed to see that it had snaps just like the blanket she herself had spent her evenings cocooned in when she was Ruth’s age. So she wrapped the blanket more beautifully than the other gifts and set it gently under the tree. / The sun stretched, adults yawned, and Ruth opened her mother’s gift on Christmas morning. At the sight of the blanket, her grandmother’s eyes welled with memories of Ruth’s mother, looking almost identical to how Ruth looked now, wrapped up in her own blanket with the snaps. Ruth admired the gentle color of the blanket’s slick side and stroked the fleece side against her check before setting it on top of the rest of her gifts. She thanked her mother enthusiastically (she’d always been acutely aware of her reaction to gifts in front of their givers) and laughed good-naturedly at her grandmother’s hovering tears before hugging them down her face. / Naked trees shivered, frost iced the landscape, and at her mother’s suggestion Ruth spent the winter with the blanket layered beneath her covers. She nestled beneath it every night, but felt guilty when she couldn’t love it any more than anything else she had in her room, and she never snapped it around herself as her mother had done. She’d tried to wear it like that the day she was given the blanket, but it had made her feel uncomfortable and constrained. So instead she slept with the blanket spread flat beneath her sheets through that winter and into the spring.
DaquesThe most ethereal moments of my childhood were evenings spent astride my young horse’s familiar back. At these times I used no saddle or bridle because I wanted nothing to separate me from my Pegasus. The two of us often didn’t go anywhere or even move at all, instead we stood rooted in the paddock, entranced by the ancient bond that had stupefied girls and their horses for centuries before us. On those quiet summer nights we sat and smelt the earth cooling, heard the breeze’s cryptic secrets, and watched the sun sink lazily into its bed behind the mountains. My senses were sharpened beyond human experience, and I was alerted to everything from my horse outward. I could feel each of the coarse, raw fibers of his mane tangled between my fingers. When he inhaled, the breath that passed through his flared nostrils was the same breath that filled my heart and my lungs with the sheer joy of living. I absorbed every shift of his weight and twitch of his ear and flick of his tail. More than that, I felt the identical pounding of his heart as we shared the dizzying exhilaration of standing completely still while the rest of the world continued to spin on its orbit. In these moments, when I became one with my horse, I also became aware of and synonymous with nature. I felt at once the eternity and transience of time. I appreciated the vastness and the limits of the universe. I realized that I was both infinitely significant and less than a fleeting vapor. But none of this enlightenment frightened me, instead it bewitched me, and I became drunk on the clarity of existence. I gulped this glimpse of nature’s deepest truths until the experience became so dizzying that I feared my lungs or my heart or my soul would burst, and I buried my head in his mane just in time. I breathed in his honest, earthy smell and felt his living heat in my mouth while my consciousness slowly, reluctantly came back to Earth as I was supposed to know it. From this angle, I looked through the glass of my horse’s eye and saw the knowledge that had possessed me for an instant, and I was left gasping for breath and trapped in my mortality.
DemonI do not write to enlighten others or to broadcast my own perspectives. I write neither to remember nor to be remembered. Writing is not my ambition; it is not my escape; it is not my hobby. It is my addiction. I write to stave the shakes and pains that plague me when I do not. Writing indulges the demon fighting inside me, that creature clawing eternally at the bars of my soul. Though I try obediently to contain its groanings, to sit quietly in the verbal single dimension of society, the need cannot be ignored indefinitely. Eventually I must concede, must let it claw and tear gluttonously until what was once blank sheet now bleeds my deepest and most lucid revelations. I know that when this purging is over I will be left hollow, pensive and raw, but once I have begun I can only continue viciously, can only drink the carnage that I pen and savor it on my tongue, gurgling and laughing. Each work I create strengthens the obsession and claims another share of my existence, so that I live shadow-like between writings, playing a half-hearted charade. Like every addict, I secretly pine for the day when the game will reach its peak – when finally my demon will emerge triumphantly, sword in hand, and leave my dry and useless body lying in a gummy puddle of deep red inspiration.
SnowWhen it first falls from clouded skies, snow is beautiful and soft. It hushes the world, and those who watch its progress are content to smile and reminisce. As it accumulates, it covers everything with its purity and its pearl white so that even that which was ugly now sparkles with the magic of a fairytale. Its is the most breathtaking of natural beauty, and none can help but be intoxicated by its presence. All that it falls on is seduced into forgetting the inherent transience of its nature - this is why the sun always shocks when it breaks through the clouds. When crisp and solid beauty melts until it is formless, and then until ugliness begins to peek through it again, and finally until it is reduced to mud and slush that dirties the shoes of busy people and makes them angry. So they curse its ugly remains and wish it would leave entirely. Always their wishes are realized, and the mud and slush dry up and disappear until all that is left of the beauty of the snow is its memory and an empty bitterness and the small hope that perhaps another storm might come. So humanity sits in this way and prays that the clouds would come back, or, more desperately, that they had never left at all.