Burial of the Dead

SERENITY - IV.

IV.

The sight of Marta standing near the boathouse on a dock over water, about to dive and swim, causes Levon to miss his supper and walk the grounds till midnight – a mild relapse, or perhaps more:

Owl-light on old roads, a nether region of the jungle’s pallet, and Levon, the plagiarist, writing someone else's story, throws pebbles at the failed lattice and green glass darkened for private night. This is the untoward toward, a capsule of sleep, a momentary romance, a memory of airwaves brushing the long hair of careless youth when he believed he’d been carved from white marble, the perfect slope of muscle, the incalculable calculus of beauty, an epic hero, languid on waking, turning with the long lingering somnambulant breadth of his shoulders, and again his hand scoops the smallest bean, a wedge shot ricochets off the bay window, and he calls her name.

Marta comes to the window, the blonde woman he watches from a distance, the married woman who watches Levon from a distance. She looks about and then pulls the shade. He thinks: Perhaps another time in a world where men fly, breathe without air, move within themselves till all movement stops, having learned that time is not space and cannot be traversed, but requires the utter stillness beyond patience of one seeking passage back.