A Dark Narcissus 

The face cleared away. A girl's hand moved in the agile water. Thin threads of the reflected sun, purified to a sharp silver by some element in the water, shot away from the concentrated disturbance the little fingers created. Her father laughed slowly at the sudden disruption and banishment of his liquid image. A tree and its sky were multiplied in the concentric energies the water displayed and did not disperse. 

Mary Higgins Magison in her white panties sang down the carpeted stairs. Isolde's rangy lament. Long steps sank her towards the morning hiss of hot coffee. A deeply embroidered vest swung open before her bare breasts. Spilled purples and threaded gold on a field of soaked blue folded and unfolded over her pale tan. 

Her sleepy hand curled against the oak post as she swung around the landing, jumping the last three steps with an interrupted yelp. Gloomy Isolde's molten tones continued their open quarrel with love. Mary swept past an alert cat, richly black, sitting on a polished table next to an upright telephone. The kitchen door was to her immediate right, through a crisply ornamented hole in the flowered wall. A troubled sound came out. Mary turned towards the amber hiss. 

She poured the coffee smoothly into a china vessel, wreathed with roses and hawthorns. Complex steam arose. A kicking white hot rich smell. Mary swirled the cupful upwards, nudging the silvery spoon with her nose, as she downed the hot globe of coffee. Her head lifted to address the blue patches through the window as she tasted her lips nimbly, displaying an ample tongue. 

White birds scissor into clouds. 

Beautiful dark aureoles of her breasts met their dark twins in the ovoid mirror's silver eye. A rose pallor arose like a rash on the fused center of her collarbone as she leaned to the quelled mercury of the mirror, a hole of sky. Heavy lipstick smartly applied and blotted was rolled back to its bronze socket and placed on its milled end next to a tiny ivory-colored figurine. Clasped hands of the miniature woman did not shake under a cold fold of her caul's shadow. A red bullet, a white bullet. 

The mirror girl inscribed her eyes with a jet pencil. 

Pursed and poised, busy administering the final touches to her confederate's features, Mary Magison reached abstractly down to retrieve a coned object. She studied the abstract face hung in the air before her, matching its depthless gaze, and --spying a blank spot-- applied ivory Mary to her lips with a hungry backslash of her stiff right hand, crossing an indecipherable T. Red-capped Mary clattered against the empty table. 

Doubled in the blue absence of the tilting mirror, the two women, abruptly young, paced apart to their designated stations, whirled, and slammed with plush hollowness simultaneous doors, exiling their intricate presences. 

Watery tensions resolved themselves around the palmlike intercessions of a dropped leaf. A sky appeared. The heavy, nervous branches of a tree agitated their dirty auburns under the deceptive surface. Mary stared after a swerve in the darkness, attentive as an unfed cat. A second leaf descended, in wildly uneven arcs, and disturbed the first, shattering everything. 

She stepped through the closed shop door, disturbing a brace of bells. 

Deep in the ornate frame, and flooded black by the heavenly backlighting, Mary's slender body posed its swift silhouette like a hiroshima shadow. Sullen golds began to separate themselves from the dark recesses of the vaulted room. Thin glints of pale light floated above their glassy surfaces. She stirred. Mary's resting right hand took the gargoyle impress of the door jamb with her as she moved into the room. 

Extravagant Indian carpets piled deep almost turned her tender ankle as she strode forth. Raja's gardens, tiger laden, exploded silent spectrums under her as she approached the distant glitter of a counter. Soft clocks twirled their parts, gonged dully, or simply ticked their gloomy appurtenances, enveloping her in a sense of half-perceived, ceaseless motion. Thick cords supported a butcher's array of time pieces, unevenly hung from the black cathedral vault. Gilded legs stuck out like tongues, exposing their scuffed undersides, tasting the dusty air. 

She leaned gratefully against the icy side of the counter, letting a restless hand drift over the golden corner sheathing, industrially pinched at regular intervals to hold the great weight of glass in. She stared at the painted face of a stopped clock, crisply numbered, which depicted a wounded man in miniature agony and a blue triangle hat riding roughshod over acres of Redcoat corpses. His grim sword was marvelously small and caught the accumulated light of a sky beginning to break open behind the clustered bluffs of black clouds which rose in boiling ranks to the inlaid roman Xs of midnight (or noon) and then disappeared beneath the creator's frame to be hand-nailed at the unobserved back of the display. 

"Coming! Coming! Ahh..." A distinctly fat voice announced itself from beyond a tapestry covered archway behind the thin corona of the counter, showing in umber mauves and shady greens an upright Adam and coy Eve curled beneath a dense tree. 

Mary swayed against the heavy glass, obliquely rimmed with aqua. "Let me see..." The voice boomed melodiously. 

Subtle hurricane turbulences began to trouble the blank Edenic sky of the tapestry. A hollow scudding sound centered on Eve's wavering stitches developed, bellying out after a confused moment like a sail taken up by a punching wind. The entire landscape shook freely; the fisted tree shivvered, spilling frozen leaves. "Ahh..." A glistening bald head, richly trimmed with a deep mink circumnavigating ear to ear, rammed past the tasseled edge of the hanging to appear opposite Mary, accompanied by a blunt laugh. 

"Always something needing tending," he said, explaining his delay. "You know how it is with a one-man operation. Had to let little David go last month," he said, lifting his gold glasses to wipe a fiercely squinting eye. "Off to Yale! Greener pastures and all that." 

Mary withdrew a thick handwritten ticket from her purse. 

"Ahh... Now, let's see. Hmm. Yes yes yes." 

Large fingers, thick as ginger roots, deftly shoved a velvet blackboard to its socket. The deep blooded purple was scraped thin at odd intervals from constant use, revealing straight pin streaks of shocking ultraviolet. His stunted hand emerged, with minor distortions, into a wavy halflight and, dodging among whispering timepieces with sightless ease, took up her father's watch by its lank chain. A quick flip, and the pocketwatch plopped onto his square palm. 

Mary swallowed her breath to see her dead father's watch, with its healed over crystal and resurrected purr, floating towards her in a swelled hand that seemed as large as a cloud. 

"Thank you." Mary felt the cold weight sink into her palm, dragging its intricate chain. 

Once in the flaring light of the open sidewalk, Mary stopped. The watch was a golden flash in her fist. She turned to face the plate glass shop window. Sedate clouds slid across the flat surface, rendered auburn and ochre by the tinted window's reflective qualities. Framed by the equilateral hole of a giant A, faded red, she pulled her taut mouth awry, trying to see what shape her eyeliner was in. Her proffered eye, wavy and enlarged as a whale's, looked left and right at the orange image of itself, rotating a mechanical head. She couldn't make out the morning's pencil marks at all under the dull ball, which was beginning to well in the sudden brightness. She blinked furiously, arrowing in on the center of the impromptu frame, and decided, since she herself was washed a leering tangerine by the dopey window, that that judgement would have to wait. 

As she stepped into the street, her father's watch, lacking its spider's web of cracks, flicked its glittery tail-- delicate as a lizard's-- over her tender wrist. 

Rapid clouds converged. It was nearly night. Mary was dreamily bent to the weedy edge of the park pond. The watch lay discarded in the grass, head over tail. 

Flowers crowded the sleepy bank of the pond in disorderly rows; their dusty heads mulled together in the increasing wind. Obstreperous crickets began to crack and wail in the indecipherable distance. Indifferent fog bleached out the rest of the world. 

Mary's face, sheltered by a dark cone of hair, stared into the water. Night blues emerged around her, leaking from the great trees and slight hills overlooking the pond's depression. She looked into the black water, soundless disturbances shuttling back and forth, frightened as fishes. Silver highlights tarnished to pewter, diminishing their aching shapes; the little swells of captured water rising and falling. The longer she watched, the more the pond's slow surface began to resemble an undulant tar, heaving blackness in blackness; a few, intenser lights that were not out were sticking to it like a child's pocket of trinkets scattered into a black sky by some monstrous, vague hand. Dull blossoms wavered nearby in an uncertain greyness. A single gust of night wind tested them, and they adopted the severe curve of Mary's back for a concentrated moment; the wind insisted. Mary was draped and still in the center of their indecisive whitenesses, a dark narcissus.