Solid Days

Jane Virgo ©

It was different then. The pavement stayed flat pebbled and grey, and we had six solid walls to put our house in. My bed had four tall posts to frame its darkness so that when the sun dripped sticky beams, I could hide under it and dream of roses without being scratched.

Our house had eleven doors, but three of them did not open into rooms. We had twenty three windows and from two of them pink geraniums dripped onto the cement. The dining table always held black fern dirt for the cat to chase when her lizard was too quiet. We had a red door.

Its other side was white, like the apple I saw in a book, and on days when the sun burnt window frames into hard edged patterns on the carpet, Aunt Sybil would cook apples. Our cherry tree grew cherries that always tasted like cherries, but our door did not always taste like an apple. In the dusky mornings, before the light could firm, my father would come home to tell me what today meant.

He wore a clock on his wrist that always knew when it was time to come or leave, or when the apples were cooked. Aunt Sybil said the earth moved in circles around the sun and that time happened because of that. She said that the circles were not perfect so time was not always the same. I put my head to the ground, but I could never catch it moving. When I ran toward the horizon it always moved faster away. My father said I could run so far that I would come back to where I am, but I still would not catch it. Maybe you can only hear the earth move when you’re not listening.

Summer was because the earth moved. Summer was because there was more light. Summer was when the gypsy earth travelled close to the sun and winter was when it ran away again. Summer was when the light denied secrets, and made me feel as if all of me was only what could be outlined. My sister had a glider.

She flew it off a cliff when the sky was deep blue. My father said everything fell at the same speed, but my sister fell slowly.

Aunt Sybil said that was because air is a something that you can’t see, like water but not so thick. She said that my sister fell down slowly because the air carried her when she moved the right way. My father said people could not fall up, but Aunt Sybil said maybe they could. She said that up and down could change, and that people could fall up if there was a lot of space around them and they were far away from the ground. She said people did not fall down or up, but that they fell to something. When my sister fell down to the beach, where my brother was building a sand bomb, his sand was spilt all over the beach.

My father said sand could measure time by counting its grains, but it had to be caged in glass or you forgot which grains. My brother liked making bombs better than anything else. He liked best to make them in the garage under the house, where the light was dark and vague. He wanted to make all the solid things fly apart so he could see what was behind them, but Aunt Sybil said you couldn’t do it that way, because all you ever found was more solid pieces, only smaller. I had a special friend called Munroe.

She was older than me, like everybody,and she wore her ponytail clasped with a silver elephant. She was not scared of trees or doorways and she always thought of time as now. I showed her how the darkness pooled under my bed, but she said that was only there because the light could not get in. She wanted to lift it up so we could see under, but I would not let her. The darkness trusted me to keep a place where it could hide from the sun. She said it would come back again, but I told her that would be other darkness.

Under my bed was an always winter place and my mother was an always winter person. On nights when there was no moon, Aunt Sybil would take me down twisty streets away from windows and lights, until we reached my mother’s house. We never went the same way, and it always looked different, but we always found it. Inside it was very big.

She lived with lots of other women and slept in a long corridor that always had a shiny floor because somebody rubbed it. She had red hair and she liked clean white dresses. All the walls were made of wire. There were birds in the wire and the big striped orchid on the table never bit me.

My mother had a clock that never knew the time, because she always turned it off when she did something long. That way she could use the time again.

Her skin was very pale because she never went out in the sun because the sun cooked her. She did not like being cooked. She liked black nights and white flowers and winter places like under my bed. Even the moon drew her too strongly. She said that if the sun saw her, she would have to fall up into it and be burnt like a moth. She did not like candles and she wanted to live forever.

On solid days I wanted to stay under the bed, but my father would not let me. I hated it when the ground felt hard and everything was locked down tight. I even had to pick things up to look under them. On those days my father was happy and my brother would have to come up from the garage because everything felt too solid to fly apart. Sometimes we would go to the cliff to watch my sister fall down slowly and my brother would make sand bombs.

On solid days, things had sharper edges and could not run into each other. I felt small because I could only be me and not all the other people I was onother days. The table could only be a table and the door could only be a door, and it could not even taste like an apple.

On those days I wanted to find my mother’s winter place and make her teach me how to fall up, but Aunt Sybil would not take me when the sun was shining, because everything was too only itself and she couldn’t find the way. I went looking for it anyway, but the twisty streets were dry and hot, and the house had moved from where I found it last time.

On those days, only Aunt Sybil was comfortable and vague. She said that things weren’t really solid. She said you could teach the sun to see through you, like my mother had taught it to see through her house. My father said that everything was solid always, but Aunt Sybil said that solid was just little pieces whirling round other little pieces with lots of holes in between them. She said that the littlest pieces were not even there all the time, but blinked here and somewhere like ‘Don’t Walk’ signs. She said they might even blink into the past or the future if they felt like a change.

My father said that couldn’t happen because time always ran at the same speed, but Aunt Sybil said that time changed depending how fast you were going and what you were near. She said time could even run backwards if you went fast enough, but to make it do that, you had to run faster than light, because of the way light glues things down.

I made a blind fold so I could hide from the sun, but Aunt Sybil said that wouldn’t work, because the light could still see me, even if I couldn’t see it. It wasn’t only not looking at light that meant you could be here and not here, or use time again. You had to trick it by moving so fast it couldn’t see you, or by moving so slow it didn’t notice you. A blind fold did not work, because on solid days, you would still stub your toe.

My sister liked the light because she liked to fly her glider. She liked the way light fixed things in one place, so that she always knew where something was. Her skin was cooked brown, and I knew that one day she would get old and die because of that, while my mother would not. My sister said that I was talking nonsense.

She said that mother was dead already.

Aunt Sybil told me not to worry about what my sister said. She told me not to talk to her her about mother again because I would only bother her. My sister liked her outlines to be firm and solid, so she did not understand the dark. She could never find her way in it, and could not understand that when you don’t know where something is, it does not have to there; and that when the light goes, there’s a lot of darkness to find it in.