High Arched Brows

I realize I have not posted in a month. I also realize I have not posted this short story yet, so in an effort to appease my guilt and as an excuse to take another month's hiatus, here it is.

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It was the two of clubs that led to my tragic demise. Not the disdainful Queen of Hearts, flourishing the yellow daisy she grips between pallid fingers; not the sly Jack of Spades, with his twirled moustache and golden locks. It was the meagre two of clubs.

I stand here, rigid and resilient. With my stony gaze and high arched brows, I scan across the garden square. Past the slender grape vines that twist their way around gold-wrought fences, past the ivory fountains and their glittering jets of water. I send my regards toward the horizon, where the sky and land converge.

Beneath my feet there is a glass bench where a middle-aged woman sits by herself, right on the edge. Her cheeks flake powdered rouge and her lashes are damp with mascara. In her hands she clasps a tartan purse over knotted legs. Why she doesn’t make herself comfortable I don’t know. But my job is not to understand. It is to contemplate the horizon with heavily-lidded eyes and parted lips.

I sat on that same bench centuries ago, when it was still a bitter set of plastic panels. There were no grape vines or rhodium pathways, no fountain. All I could see was a single-lane road: cracked and dusty tarmac stretching from east to west under the kindling summer sun. I sat alone on that bench in rugged jeans, arms and legs sprawled wide, head tossed back. I didn’t care how profusely I was sweating, didn’t care for the angry burn blooming across my neck. I’d come to a point in my life where all that mattered was the food on my table and the god I struggled to hold in my mind.

If I hadn’t been dreaming up in the clouds, I might have seen her coming, walking down the road with her bleached denim shorts and broken heart tattoo.

She asked me what I was doing.

I didn’t know, so I told her she had on too much mascara.

She laughed and sat next to me. I didn’t need to pull the classic move. My arm was already by her shoulder.

We talked for a long while, about deep things and shallow things. Our shadows ebbed away into darkness.  Finally, she nodded at me and reached out her hand.

We wed the next day. I was so grateful, so alive. I said my prayers for a whole month and a half. I thought I’d be able to start over again with her by my side, pick up the pieces of me that I’d casted away.

She smiled for a couple of years. Made the bed when we got up in the afternoons. Then she disappeared. I didn’t know where to look, so I went back to the bench, lay flat, and dragged myself a little higher into the clouds. I don’t know how long I spent out there, but it wouldn’t have made a difference whether I stayed an hour or a millennium.

There is a marble sundial just visible from the corner of my eye. I have watched the shadows wax and wane exactly three hundred sixty-five thousand times, and not once have they brought remarkable news. Eight-thirty means the tourists are gone for the day, but they will simply return again tomorrow. Five to eleven signals the gathering clouds, but within hours they will clear. I watch the world cycle through endless seasons of laughter, tears and conflict, each as insignificant as the last, and I begin to wonder if I am any different.

At night, when the last of the delicate starflowers has closed, I can smell the dust beneath the soil. I can smell the heated breeze and the odd musk that settled on my last visit.

I caught him before he came. I wasn’t dreaming that day. I saw him through the dust storm, walking my way. He was a travelling magician, I think. Thin, with a silver blazer and wide, grey eyes. I remember those eyes. They were the kind that never seemed to focus. He nodded at me, walked a few steps, and halted with his back turned.

“Gone, is she?”

I got up off the bench and stood to face the wind. “Aye. She disappeared the day I promised myself a new beginning.”

“A different life? Is that what you seek?”

I don’t understand how we came to that agreement, him and me. I was a starved and sore hound and he had a fresh, raw pound of meat. I thought it over until I couldn’t think anymore.

“Deal.”

He carried no paper on him, so he handed me a playing card, and I signed my life away on a miserable two of clubs. I saw the sparkle, the reflection in his eyes. His pupils faced mine in earnest now, and finally, I understood that for me, nothing would ever change.

I saw the world with these lifeless eyes of mine. Living legend I was, crowned with the stature of Judas and Brutus. My name rolled off every tongue, yet none ever suspected my master. He took the cash and I kept the blame. Teamwork, he called it. Whether they erected my statue in honour or in horror, I do not know. Then again, knowing was never my job: gazing at the horizon with my high arched brows is.

The woman below my pedestal has left. The sundial has completed another revolution. The sky is once again blue. Another day has gone by. What is new? A thousand years I have asked myself this question. A thousand times I have arrived upon the same answer. The flowers still bloom and wilt with the seasons. The women still wear too much make-up. The magician’s descendants will continue playing their clever little game. A thousand years from that fated meeting, absolutely nothing has changed.