The muse
by Snehal Vadher
[ fiction - november 05 ]
The carriage was speeding on the narrow lane, crushing crispy dried leaves fallen in its path.
Mark was wearing a bowler hat. And as always, was carrying a square piece of immaculately transparent glass which had a thick golden border in the fashion of a frame. Through this, he kept on looking at the road and the foliage closing low behind as the carriage passed through it; and through this piece of glass he perceived everything he was looking at. Mark scribbled with his left hand whatever he saw through that glass, which was held firmly in his right hand. Sometimes, and just so to rhyme, he would write a line in advance, but inevitably he would see it, within a second, through the glass. For e.g.:
The effervescent
green, the mellow maroon,
And jubilant
yellow. How they come and go:
Like the phases
of the moon,
Like a true
friend, a true foe.
The horseman sang rhymes in his own tongue, but it appeared to Mark that somehow they mingled so closely with his poetic thoughts, that he was not unsuspicious of a very sinister, or rather bewitching, force behind this. The horseman’s face was never seen by Mark throughout the journey. Mark knew he was a ghost. Not a ghost in the literal sense, but a ghost to the world, to the horses, to Mark himself, and to everything that people can relate to as plain, bland humans do. Thus, it was surprising to Mark that the horseman should have a language of his own, and his only. A language which had the echoes of all human tongues, the melody of lullabies, the assonance of a train’s brakes with its whistle, the facility of water, and the languor of a flightless bird. Through the glass, the horseman was visible as an assimilation of his surroundings: a little grass for his hair; a velvety bark for his back; and two thick stems, as if stuck to the surface of the road, as legs with dried drifting leaves for shoes. Mark forgot altogether the place he was journeying to and from the place he had left. In fact, he forgot all about himself. He felt as if he was drowning, and he wanted to hold on to something firm and rigid and well-defined as he was totally helpless in this eternally morphing world. Now the horseman’s singing sounded like the song of whales. He stretched his left hand towards the horseman as a gesture made by a drowning person seeking to be pulled out.
The horseman turned and looked Mark in his face. Mark could not discern any shape or form, any color or shade. But there was a face and it was like water. Like cold water going down the dry throat of a dehydrated man. The horseman took the glass from Mark’s hand and pulled him out of the carriage.
The world slowly stopped spinning. The horses were quiet and grazing. Mark’s face was covered in sweat, but the wind made it dry and cold. The horseman now was addressing something directly to Mark, in his mellifluous tongue, but Mark seemed as if someone was talking to him in a dream. Pink clouds floated by. Mark sat under a tree - a tree unlike any he had ever seen before - and tried to think of his past. His mind refrained from yielding to the concept of time. No thoughts were flowing in his mind. It seemed like a great drainage system had run out of water. Not chocked, but empty. Only a little rhyme faintly echoed in his mind, and he knew that was what the horseman had been singing all the while, but he couldn’t find the exact words.
