The Peacock Lass
LJ Idol Round 25, Open Topic
It was one in the morning. She should have been asleep. Instead, she lay in her attic bedroom where the warm heavy air pressed the animation out of her and changed her from portrait to still life.
Outside the open window, irrigation sprinklers rotated, ticking out a bomb-like beat as pressure-filled pipes propelled water through their nozzles while crickets shifted forewings to create a chorus. The song of the summer sang her a lullaby of chih-chih-chih-currip-currip...chih-chih-chih-currip-currip.
Their effort was wasted; she could not get the voice of the peacock out of her mind.
Earlier in the evening, before the sun had set, she'd stumbled into another drunken shouting match between her mother and her step-father. Sandals slapping on the steps, she struggled to make it to her bedroom before the tears began. She slammed the door, and, now safely within her sanctuary she ceased to care and the so her sobs slipped from restrained to soft, from light, to gulping, greedy creatures which left her gasping to get her breath back.
She'd needed them. She'd needed to come home as her friends said they did to a place where she could voice the things that were being done to her and confess that she had no more strength with which to fight. She needed help- she needed them to be parents- but they were too busy hiding from their own problems, too busy behaving like angry children themselves to see that one with the chronological right to such behavior was suffering.
So it was that she surrendered her sorrows to cotton sheets softened by sun-drying and age and spilled her tears upon them. The sun had not yet met the hills when her surrender began, but it moved lower in the sky as she continued and neither showed signs of stopping soon.
Bands of curry-colored clouds and haze the same hue of orange as a Tropicana Rose hugged the horizon. Sunset came as expected. When the first cry came from the ridge some miles away, she found herself silenced.
"Hehlp!" She heard him shriek, "Hehlp, help!" His voice rang clear and far, it crossed over the basin and bounced off the hills so many miles away from his cliff-side farm.
He was mournful- a soul in torment- and she wondered what it was that he so desperately sought assistance with. Had the farmer not provided him with access to a meal? Was their a predator in his midst, too? Or did his heart, like hers, long for someone-anyone-one, so long as it wasn't no one who knew what it was he felt? Did he long for a soft touch upon his cheek as well? The reassurance of positive physical interaction between kindred souls?
Oh, she knew that he was fowl while she was not, and yet that didn't stop her from hearing more human emotion in his cries across the hollows than most people she knew had ever displayed in her presence. She knew, but he was a peacock prince with a soul at its breaking point and that made him ever so much more in her mind. That gave him presence in her life.
Slowly, as his cries became more frequent and carried over into the echoes that remained, she began to hear more pain in his admissions than she saw in hers. Her mind's eye watched as he, the Peacock Prince evaluated her suffering as if it were a quest and he found her progress slow and sloppy. He made her- his soul-bound Peacock Lass- feel ashamed to show such weakness when she still had so far to go.
Then he left her- his voice ceased to cry and no longer carried- and she lost herself in self-evaluation as she ruthlessly divested herself of self-pity and worries over her lack of social standing and the standoffish behavior it bred in those surrounding her. By the time the non-existent clock struck one she'd found her peace and put herself back together enough to face another day.
At some point, she would sleep. The crickets must have known; they didn't cease 'til dawn.
Where, though, is she now, this soul-sister of the Peacock Prince?
She lays awake while partner snores, in some rural suburb of some state, this state, this New Jersey. No songs from crickets nor tick of sprinklers, no open window on a summer's night. Still, she tries centering herself so she can find him, hoping to see his regal gaze frown down upon her woes so that she might strip them away once more and find the strength she needs to see things through.
No basin, no cliff, no farm, no cliff's side from which he might speak are where she stays yet still she knows he's there. So where is he, her crested friend, who held her fast when she might slip?
The Peacock Prince holds still holds his court, sending his soul 'cross many rifts. She stole him away upon her departure from orchard's core, through the apple of her eye, and into the broken lands of her suffering heart.
It was one in the morning. She should have been asleep. Instead, she lay in her attic bedroom where the warm heavy air pressed the animation out of her and changed her from portrait to still life.
Outside the open window, irrigation sprinklers rotated, ticking out a bomb-like beat as pressure-filled pipes propelled water through their nozzles while crickets shifted forewings to create a chorus. The song of the summer sang her a lullaby of chih-chih-chih-currip-currip...chih-chih-chih-currip-currip.
Their effort was wasted; she could not get the voice of the peacock out of her mind.
Earlier in the evening, before the sun had set, she'd stumbled into another drunken shouting match between her mother and her step-father. Sandals slapping on the steps, she struggled to make it to her bedroom before the tears began. She slammed the door, and, now safely within her sanctuary she ceased to care and the so her sobs slipped from restrained to soft, from light, to gulping, greedy creatures which left her gasping to get her breath back.
She'd needed them. She'd needed to come home as her friends said they did to a place where she could voice the things that were being done to her and confess that she had no more strength with which to fight. She needed help- she needed them to be parents- but they were too busy hiding from their own problems, too busy behaving like angry children themselves to see that one with the chronological right to such behavior was suffering.
So it was that she surrendered her sorrows to cotton sheets softened by sun-drying and age and spilled her tears upon them. The sun had not yet met the hills when her surrender began, but it moved lower in the sky as she continued and neither showed signs of stopping soon.
Bands of curry-colored clouds and haze the same hue of orange as a Tropicana Rose hugged the horizon. Sunset came as expected. When the first cry came from the ridge some miles away, she found herself silenced.
"Hehlp!" She heard him shriek, "Hehlp, help!" His voice rang clear and far, it crossed over the basin and bounced off the hills so many miles away from his cliff-side farm.
He was mournful- a soul in torment- and she wondered what it was that he so desperately sought assistance with. Had the farmer not provided him with access to a meal? Was their a predator in his midst, too? Or did his heart, like hers, long for someone-anyone-one, so long as it wasn't no one who knew what it was he felt? Did he long for a soft touch upon his cheek as well? The reassurance of positive physical interaction between kindred souls?
Oh, she knew that he was fowl while she was not, and yet that didn't stop her from hearing more human emotion in his cries across the hollows than most people she knew had ever displayed in her presence. She knew, but he was a peacock prince with a soul at its breaking point and that made him ever so much more in her mind. That gave him presence in her life.
Slowly, as his cries became more frequent and carried over into the echoes that remained, she began to hear more pain in his admissions than she saw in hers. Her mind's eye watched as he, the Peacock Prince evaluated her suffering as if it were a quest and he found her progress slow and sloppy. He made her- his soul-bound Peacock Lass- feel ashamed to show such weakness when she still had so far to go.
Then he left her- his voice ceased to cry and no longer carried- and she lost herself in self-evaluation as she ruthlessly divested herself of self-pity and worries over her lack of social standing and the standoffish behavior it bred in those surrounding her. By the time the non-existent clock struck one she'd found her peace and put herself back together enough to face another day.
At some point, she would sleep. The crickets must have known; they didn't cease 'til dawn.
Where, though, is she now, this soul-sister of the Peacock Prince?
She lays awake while partner snores, in some rural suburb of some state, this state, this New Jersey. No songs from crickets nor tick of sprinklers, no open window on a summer's night. Still, she tries centering herself so she can find him, hoping to see his regal gaze frown down upon her woes so that she might strip them away once more and find the strength she needs to see things through.
No basin, no cliff, no farm, no cliff's side from which he might speak are where she stays yet still she knows he's there. So where is he, her crested friend, who held her fast when she might slip?
The Peacock Prince holds still holds his court, sending his soul 'cross many rifts. She stole him away upon her departure from orchard's core, through the apple of her eye, and into the broken lands of her suffering heart.