The Power of Prose:
For As Long As We Live: Nine Narratives by Peter Robertson
Part Seven: Somehow We Slept
Somehow we slept, and even through nights of torment, those inner storms that, though of our own making, left us more wasted than sated. And yet, for the lives of us, we could not desist from the tireless reiteration of our hermetically sealed secret, unholy if unveiled, but hallowed, if all too troublingly, to ourselves.
Somehow we slept for all our entanglement until, nakedly entwined, we were duped once again by night's faithless mantle that, as dawn laid siege to darkness, gathered up each shred of its strewn discolored rags.
Somehow, barely, we slept in snatched interludes, soulmates in sin, conjoined in our madness until, torpid as corpses, we were jolted into life by the tumult of morning: the clangorous arrival of some letter, all too soon consigned to oblivion; the strident din of encircling birds; the traffic's raucous symphony.
Somehow we slept on that narrow bed, prone to creaking, that took up only a minute part of the spacious room with its high-domed ceiling, its twin panes flanked by trees that, standing tall, appeared to keep watch like sentinels, as if on alert to repel stray saboteurs.
Felled at twenty-one, you only narrowly scraped through the gates of adulthood but, close-eyed, not even the most futile of vigils in view, we were blind as we slept to the pattern being woven by fate.
More visceral than hunger, I burned to possess you from the moment we first met, at that dinner party punctuated by heavy showers that, lashing against lattice windows, roused us from reverie, to speak above whispers.
More enthralled than perturbed by your woundedness, that I ache to allieve, I pour you wine, my pagan offering, then raise my glass to yours, enslaved by reverence. Conspirators, we toast in unison, seamlessly at one. So why, I ask mute travesties of gods, did our smitten pact turn out the way it did?
The gash to my heart as deep as your knife's incision, I crave, like a vampire, to quench my thirst on your blood, the same that streamed on the hill where you died, flowing in rivulets to fuse with the morning's dew. A heathen brew, unalloyedly bitter, served up alone.
Together we slept, and not like once, when only somehow we slept. And how soundly we slept, and through all that the elements could hurl at us: the thunder that rent a mockery of heaven; the rain that drilled the soil into a sea of submission; the sun that too often scorched; the frost that killed the sap; the snow's redundant coverlet. And still we slept. And through earth's last convulsive ravages we slept.
The International Literary Quarterly
For As Long As We Live: Nine Narratives by Peter Robertson
