Contents
Esprit Home
Esprit 2004 Home
Cover Photo
Awards
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Submission Information
Because I Love the
Woodchopper's Ball:
A Blues Sonnet
Scream it and Scram:
A Blues Sonnet
Wrinkles
Comfort
Seas and These
Seasonal Affective Disorder
Word in Words
Adam
A Lilliputian Script
31/2 Parrots
Jihad
Sparkles
Occlusion
Mother's Cradle
Me against the Music
Arash
Sex Appeal
The Poet's Brother and the
Language of Asperger's
Trinity
Together
Einstein's Afterlife Postcard
m=E/c2
Our Skin
Poetry
Front Cover:
Central Park
Inside Front Cover:
Suicide
Inside Back Cover:
Peace
Back Cover:
Samsara
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| | Comfort
Leah Laspina
Zoë knelt carefully, facing the sharp-edged tombstone. The flowers in the little stone vase had withered and stiffened with the brisk November winds. She carefully pulled them out, heedless of the scratches the stems
and their thorns left on her fingers and palms. the roses, from her little hothouse, had been there for only about a week, but the harsh elements had rendered them brittle. Zoë looked at them, grasped in her lefty hand and remembered the time and care she had put into growing the blossoms. As she lifted her aged weight carefully to reach
her purse, a thorn stuck her on her fourth finger, right in the meat of the segment closest to her palm. It was a sensitive spot. Zoë settled herself back into a kneeling position and laid the stems on her lap. It was almost a caress, the touch that she bestowed upon them. She sucked at the wound, then flexed the finger a few times, lips
now pursed critically at the small gouge. She rested her finger on the healing chill of the tombstone; it took away all but the slightest itch on her finger.
Cradling the stems with her left arm, Zoë removed a piece of tissue paper from her purse
and wrapped the desiccated stems enough times to pad the thorns and fringed stems. The rose hips, the few that remained intact, shivered and tangled themselves together, the petals rustling contentedly. She cupped the heads of the flowers as she placed them on the chilled grass next to her purse. Her fingers swept through the individual
blades as she reached for a similarly-wrapped bouquet standing in one end of her oversized square leather purse. Zoë peeled away the tissue paper with the same tenderness she had just shown the roses now lying in their bed of grass, newly wrapped. Bouquet of fresh Black Magic Roses in hand, she shifted back to her earlier position, facing
the headstone square on. The deep red roses glowed in her hands, and she took a deep breath as she inserted them into the little stone vase. The words came unbidden to her lips, and she sang them lightly, "That old black magic has me in its spell, that old black magic you weave so well...."
She sat back on her haunches and looked at the headstone with satisfaction. A breeze waved the grass in smooth ripples and brushed the fringe of grey bangs out of her eyes. It touched the red rose petals, and they puckered and settled back into their original fullness as the winds died away. Zoë stood, and sighed, and caressed the stark
carving on the headstone's face before stooping to collect her purse and the wrapped stems. She drove back to her house.
¶ ¶ ¶
The front room of the house was very full, Zoë felt. The warm beige of the walls, the overstuffed chenille couch and loveseat, the worn and dented blue recliner, the crowded her out of her own house. Zoë
passed through the room and paused in the next, the kitchen. She stayed her only long enough to pick up a cold band from the kitchen table and reinsert her fourth finger back through it. The ring had absorbed the chill of the November day, and took away even her remembrance of the itch from the rose thorn.
Zoë again did not remain in the room, but passed through it into her little hothouse. It had been an addition to the house many years ago. The table with the row of rosebushes ran the length of the walls, forming a square with a gap only where she had entered at the kitchen door. She paused, right hand over her left on the edge of the row
of rose pots, and looked out the window. There was still a garden next to it, but the morning glories and clematis had overgrown everything. The sundial with its oxidized gnomon had a vine of brilliant, deep purple clematis on it; the uppermost flower perched in the hollow of the slanted "L." Zoë turned away from the glass and looked at
her roses. The flowers turned their faces toward her, seemed to open their petals wide and stretch to the fullest to please her. She touched each one of the flowers' faces, gently, to see how firm they were, and selected a squirt bottle from the row on the bottom shelf, under the rose bushes. Each bush received a few squirts from the
bottle, just enough to moisten the base of the plants.
She smiled, a slight smile that seemed real and genuine until the phone rang. Then, as she looked into the cream kitchen, her smile became merely the tautness of her lips stretched over her
teeth. Zoë let the phone ring. She turned her face back to her little hothouse and ignored the chime of her phone completely. The last few rosebushes received carefully aimed sprays from the bottle, and then it was tucked away. She took out her garden gloves, slipped her fingers delicately into them, and removed some clusters of leaves
from the more zealous of the bushes. Zoë hummed to herself as she fussed over her plants. "Darling, down and down I go, round and round I go, in a spin, loving the spin I'm in, under that old black magic called love." She only grew Black Magic roses. She'd ordered them from the same company for the past forty years. The first seedling had
been a present, which became a tradition.
The sunlight faded and retired behind a screen of deepening grey clouds and a full sky. Zoë had since removed from the hothouse and her rosebuds to the beige living room, full as it was. She perched at
the very edge of the chenille sofa. She slouched back, slightly, but did not actually shift towards the back cushion. Her hands remained in place at her sides, gripping the piped seam of the sofa. Her fingers convulsed upon the trim and seemed to entwine their tips in the piping. Zoë crossed her legs, hesitated, then uncrossed them, only
to have an itch spider across her knee. She used her other leg to squelch it.
Finally, full darkness settled around the house, swathing it in a thick, wool blanket held off only by the light of the china lamp on a small side table next to the
sofa. Zoë sill slouched on the edge of the seat cushion. Her fingers still twisted themselves into the piping. Her legs were now crossed, tightly, her right leg over her left and then her right foot again tucked around her left calf. A trace of light ran the rim of the gold band; the rest of it, though, was shadowy in the fringes of
nighttime. Zoë merely sat, her eyes vacant, looking elsewhere intently.
She eventually blinked and brought her hands together, rubbing one into the other close to the light, creating shadows that danced and shifted upon the far wall. She stood,
paused, and, leaving the light on, left the crowded living room behind her. Zoë walked down the hall, until she came to the last door on the right. With her left hand, she pushed on the door until it creaked open. She made only enough space for herself to slip through.
The bedroom was done in shades of white. A streetlamp from across the road shone in through one of the windows, providing a distorted illumination of a parallelogram on the floor space between the foot of the bed and the wall. Zoë changed into nightclothes quickly, wrapping herself into a terrycloth bathrobe. She sat at the edge of the
bed and appeared to contemplate the streetlamp momentarily before tucking the robe around a corner post of the footboard. She only bent back enough of the sheets for her to slip in between them. She curled on her side, and faced the windows. The streetlamp flickered for a moment, as if it were a candle, and then with a snap that Zoë heard
through the closed window, went brilliantly white, and then faded. Zoë did not move. She lay in bed, facing the window, and stared out at the encroaching darkness.
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