Dancing With the Wind

Her father allows her outside, provided she stays within the confines of the beach nearest the study and the rest of the building.

The waves are topped with frost, like sugar dusted cake, the grey sand blanketed with crystalline snow.

Her sketches have grown more elaborate; whole nests of ravens drawn in excruciating detail.

The pages flutter in the wind on the beach as she arranges them like a blanket on the snow.

Her feet are frozen, she cannot feel them, and when she glances down they are raw and red. Her arms are chapped from the wind. She thinks perhaps she should have thought to bring a sweater, but she is too excited to postpone her plans to return and get one.

She weighs the papers down with an assortment of objects she has pilfered from her father’s study. A collection of items she is sure he will not miss: a paperweight, a cracked skull, the weights for a scale, a broken compass and an old glove.

Carefully she stands, watching the papers flit in the wind, but they do not escape their holds.

She takes several steps away, closing her eyes to focus on the chilled wind as it hits her skin in tiny pinpricks.

She slowly begins to dance, a smooth movement of spinning on one foot, holding her arms out for balance. She sinks into the snow, and leaps farther away from the pictures.

Ravens pick their way from parchment, some knocking over their paperweights, the pages under them swooping away in the breeze.

They make their way toward her, flapping against the wind. Stray feathers turn to pools of ink on the snow. They stain her feet when she dances into them, though she does not notice.

The rather nip at the ribbons fluttering on her wrist. They nestle in her hair for only seconds before she spins, dislodging them as they catch their talons in her hair.

She pays them no attention, but they stay with her, weaving around her as she dances.

To her there is only the brightness behind her eyelids of sunlight glinting on snow.

Were anyone else able to see her, they would see a silhouette against the virgin snow, dancing lightly, almost suspended amidst a crowd of ravens, enjoying the blinding white sun.

Text by Lucie MacAulay