Brass Clocks and Green Eyes

The ticking of the clock began in her head, echoing against her cranium. It is the ticking of something old, the sound of pounding earth and pendulums moving in empty space, huge and brass. Behind her eyes copper cogs blossom like flowers, ridges of gears as shapely as the tips of petals. As she adjusts to the darkness she realizes the ticking of the clock comes from outside her head, and the darkness is the darkness behind her eyelids. And with the ticking of the clock, there are other sounds. Glasses clinking together, voices sharp and soft, the voices of kings and lovers, laughter, rising above the noise and ebbing, and jazz that sounded like gold. The clock is loudest of the symphony of sound and its face rises behind her eyelids, ivory with honey gold stars, the frame ember coloured with the tint of the colour-treated lights in the room. Stark black hands ticking away over pearlescent numbers in roman numerals.

She opens her eyes to the clock above her. And the rest of the room comes into view. 

Little has changed. Little ever changes. Teardrop chandeliers hang from the cieling, crystals strung along bows of ivory and iron, contours dappled with refracted light. Plush black daybeds with embroidered and beaded pillows, like the one on which she rests, and covered with blankets of dark violet feathers. Velvet curtains, rich as wine, edges grey with dust that shimmers in the undulating light.

Three of the five walls lead to other rooms, into the complex of the house she has never found an end to. She recognizes the room to her right as the music room and the music drifting from there has changed, subtly, to waltz-like jazz buffeted with trumpets and celestas. 

She stands slowly, conscious of the warmth buzzing in her veins and the smoothness of her limbs, like she has drunk too much of the wine held in crystal glases in gloved hands by those mingling and whirling around. 

No one takes notice of her immediately. She does not know most of the dancers and party-goers, but she if familiar with a few, who nod as she passes and enters the music room. 

The musicians are among her closes friends here, which is why she notices immediately when someone new stands on the low stage. 

He has gold hair, the first thing she notices in his appearance as the musicians who flank him have shorter brown hair. He stands in the same black suit, gloved hands wrapped around a saxophone, eyes closed as her plays. When he opens them he looks straight at her and the vivid green of his gaze causes her to step back. Into a dancer. 

She murmers an apology and continues on, glancing back occasionally through the crowd to see his green eyes following her. Only when she reaches the patio doors do his eyes slip shut and when she turns to the outside world, takes in the flaming white wings stretching far beyond the width of the doorway and the burning eyes in the face she knows as well as her own, does she understand why. He is too brilliant and for a moment she shuts her eyes. 

When she opens them again, his wings have vanished, vanished from the air, the view of the gardens beyond his unobscured. They were there and now they simply aren't. 

It has always amazed her that he can hide a part of himself so beautiful and breathtaking, so simply. 

"Hello Mira," he greets her, and his voice is warm and spicy. And wonderfullly familiar, but dark as secrets in shadows. 

"Hi Valentine."

Text by Lucie MacAulay