The Moor Does Not Welcome Flotsams

I.

Even old Billy's good lord could not stop this gale. It was humid and oppressive all month. Ma Susan declared daily, punctual like a turned on clock, that the weather was not right. "It is a strange weather,"she waved her fingers in the air, "and strange weathers mean bad, bad things will happen. It is simply not natural, let me tell you. Oh Billy dear, we'll be expecting a harsh, harsh winter." The locals on the moor had a special calendar to predict the coming of winter. Young people were just starting to disbelieve all this nonsense a few days before, taunting the thousand-year-old method to do its best in that feverish and lingering summer.

Winter came that night with the gale. It howled and fretted as if the sky's lungs were lacerated. Tears and blood dripped down at the same time. Not one standing thing could withhold its sweeping nature, its dark and immense elegy. The world froze in one night. The air was crisp and brittle. Nothing from the previous memory remained. Their existence was in doubt.

Old Billy came out the next morning to check the damage amid hanging tree branches. He wasn't the sort of man that would sigh out relief once things were clear; he preferred to keep it to himself. Keep it low and cautious, that's what the young people don't know about yet, he thought. The moor replied in silence. Susan was sure to be fretting in the house, her mouth running like bullets being shot from the roofs of a steaming train. He got used to it, even approved it sometimes, letting the wife do the talking since he wan't keen at it. Only it was a bit unfair to his girl Joan, he thought, who was clearly not a talker.

Joan stood in front of her own depressing window that overlooked the front yard where branches fell last night. She watched her father inspect the cracking twigs with her hands on her hips, motionless. She's like the phantom of the house, appearing and disappearing in an instant, with the quietness of damp air. A phantom that's good for nothing, ma Susan said. It didn't matter to her, and she didn't really care. They needn't like her, she thought, we just all need to carry out our duties. She was an eccentric, believing that she was better off not being born in the first place, and she had good reasoning regarding this that she never shared with anyone. One day, she will end up as an old maid, all alone, buried on the moor with the dust from whence she came, before she could hear the clamouring of the ocean calling her with an invisible strength that shall drawn her towards the waves. She always wanted to watch the sea. When she's on her own, she used to imagine the wind on the moor was spraying her face with salty, cold water, and that she could spin around and around as if being lifted by the waves. But now she stood, in old Billy's house, with a family that felt neutrally indifferent towards another, with not much behind nor before her.

A few days ago, ma Susan took Joan's porcelain away and used them for the dogs. The porcelain weren't hers anyway— the mother gave them to her as gifts, and the dogs deserved more than that little wench. Joan didn't object. The porcelain were now smeared with crumbs and juice of leftover meals, laid nicely on the floor near the shed where they're in better care. When her cousin Pam noticed the extravagance for the dogs, ma Susan replied in a doting high pitch that her darling puppies loved porcelain, and they looked complementing together, don't they? Pam had everything what ma Susan wanted in a child, but she got the opposite end of the deal. Pam was vibrant, caring and chatty, like a swirl of colourful flames swooshing in the house. Ma Susan saw in Pam her youth, her character of a northerner, and Pam would tell her everything, from the type of strings she braid her hair with to her scandalous love interests. The moor was enchanted with this crazy girl. Her smiles, her brows, her wrists and ankles flowed with welcoming and forbidden tenderness, where the dullest souls were drawn towards her like moths into smouldering fire. Not to love her, they could not.

Later Joan saw her crawling onto Eddy's deer-like body, pressing into one another, almost melting like sherbet. Joan noticed the boy after he gave passionate speeches in a hall among peers, and was secretly impressed, hiding her non-existent admiration ever since. Now through the door crack at the back of a barn, Eddy's mouth grazed Pam's, arms smothering the small of her smooth back with boyish inexperience while Pam giggled softly. Joan came back to the house looking the same as she went out, and listened silently in bed that night for the sound of turning keys at the back door. Things proceeded as usual the next morning, only that Pam had a slight flush on her dolly cheeks, and Joan seemed more open than before. Nothing escaped the eye of ma Susan, thus she indulgently gave a few remarks on indecent behaviours, hinting at no one in peculiar while old Billy drank his coffee in the utmost visible distress. Joan suppressed the primeval urge to knock her mother's head down with a garden axe on the dining table. She proceeded to cut her potatoes in perfect straightness and dignity.