A Pending Cataclyst

“Today we will learn about separation,” her father begins.

He spends hours explaining something she cannot comprehend, referring with terrible specificity to elements she has yet to put together. He mentions subjects she will not learn for some time, makes notes of long ago lessons she has difficulty recollecting.

For the practical portion of the lesson, a glass of wine rests on the desk.

She is surprised, for though she knows of his fondness for red wine, he has never drunk during their lessons. He does not, however, lift it to his lips. Instead he pours into it, from the clear decanter on his desk, a portion of water. The wine turns from crimson to fuchsia.

“Is the wine as concentrated as it was?” he asks, gesturing to the glass.

“No, it is diluted,” she says.

“And if I desired the wine to be more concentrated, what must I do?”

“The water must be removed.” She does not think it is possible, the two liquids have swirled together so that they feel, to her, to be the same.

Yet her father feels differently. The watered wine swirls, streaks of red becoming darker as streaks of pink lighten to clarity. The water rises in a stream from the glass, leaving only deep red wine, and returns to the decanter at the other end of the desk.

Her eyes widen.

“The wine and the water are never one, the wine can only be diluted.” He says, carefully setting the glass of wine across the desk, inches from where she stands.

“Practice,” he says as he removes his hand, locking both of them behind his back and he regards her.

She squints at the glass, feeling for the wine, probing for a disturbance in the consistency of the mixture, like a loose thread in a tunic. She cannot find it, though she strains such that she feels dizzy and must hold the edge of the desk.

Her father is silent, but a basin of water appears on the desk, as though it has always been there. He holds out his hand over the water, closed into a fist, his fingers tight together.

“As I’ve said before, practice with something more basic.”

He opens his hand, letting sand fall into a grey heap at the bottom of the basin. It darkens with wetness.

She focuses on the sand and the water, using a control unknown to her until now. She is so preoccupied she does not notice when her father crosses the room to the door, opens it and leaves, letting it swing shut behind him.

In the days that follow, numerous basins are filled with water and sand.

She scribes sequences of familiar symbols, as wells as new ones she takes upon herself to learn, that make the system and the intentions hard to decipher.

She stares at coal grey piles of sand in basins of slowly evaporating water.

It requires a concentration she has never used before, even years ago in the foreign arena, fighting the red-haired girl.

It is over a week later that she emerges from her father’s study. Her fingers are stained with ink and calloused from the pressure with which she has held her pen. Her father is in the professor’s office, a book in his hand. He doesn’t raise his head s she approaches, not when she sets a basin of water on his desk. The water sloshes over the edges, staining his frilled lace cuffs. When she holds out the grey pile of dry sand in her palm, he nods his praise. She has received higher praise from him before, and this minimal reaction from him provokes her the drop the sand directly overtop the pages of the volume he is reading. 

Text by Lucie MacAulay