|
act one, scene three (a midwinter's daydream) "i am the beginning of eternity, Maryrose was wearing her wings tonight. they shimmered off her wet glass back and her silver-scarred soliloquy with a paraphrase or two as she took her earrings out and used kitchen utensils to straighten her hair. the house was cold, so cold, and Maryrose couldn't stand there anymore, barefoot and tiptoe on the hardwood floor with a t-shirt and underwear, the little white slash margins staring up at her from her thighs, her broken heart and ripped up stockings scotched-tape together and sealed with a kiss. tick, tock, times ten, times twenty. the clock unsheathed linear blades and cut away at Maryrose's sacred timeline - Maryrose stirring chicken noodle soup with her wings on backwards and the patchwork of someone else's dream strung across her spiral-bound bedroom and paperback world. there was still the cat to feed, little Whiskers the purple kitten with its synonymous cheshire cat grin and curious meow. there were still the bills to pay, the books to read, the lines to memorize, and the black checkered waitress uniform to wash in the oven and towel-dry on clothespins. with her tie-dyed hair and her thin, twilight cursor lips blinking on and off, Maryrose selected another color, another king to kiss. pink, so fate decreed. wince. pink. "valentine's day is always pink," Maryrose mumbled, saturating her hair in punky color, praying for a change in the weather. maybe it would be spring soon, here in the middle of february. and anyway, Maryrose missed the daises, the lilacs, the dewdrops. "i hate pink." and for the roses? roses are for the pretty girls, Maryrose snarled, and never for me, not one of them for me... Robin G. Fellow worked in the flower shop on the corner of 5th and main, painting penelopes with wax dews and coaxing rosebuds to ultimate lipstick texture. he rented a room upstairs, but nobody noticed him much, though sometimes the casual passer-by would glance up and see Robin on the roof with his bass guitar, dangling his feet over the edge and daring the pigeons to jump. it was rumored that Robin always smelled of the forest, that the wild things followed him and the spring was his to claim. (indeed when he moved into the neighborhood mid-january, the temperatures rose and the month grew unseasonably warm.) exotic flowers swarmed his shop, odd rainforest plants and purple clover autographs. whatever he touched turned green, and the garden followed him wherever he went. with a dandelion fingerprint he would pick up a paper from the newsstand down the street that he would never read, purchase mocha at the coffee shop downtown, leave pressed lilacs in every library book he returned. and february, in sheer delight of his wintry tauntings, forgot all about the groundhog and followed Robin's shadow through the rest of the weather forecast. "i have a little sister Robin, in his favorite emerald jacket, would wander the streets wearing a libretto mask, and at night he would sleep in the arms of his music, a cloak of g chords and a blanket of sharps. lonely, though he wouldn't admit it. his music carried the vast emptiness of this world without love, this world without another paragraph pretending. the fairy tales had been left out in the open for too long, and they had grown stale, chewed over and dissected until there was nothing left to their wings but scrawny starved mosquitoes sucking at orange juice. Robin wouldn't believe it, the wilder forester, the bard of a thousand faces and the shape of a thousand makings. his music prodded through the complex thesaurus and cue cards of a human's soul and tickled the glimmer of fragmented faith until it blossomed into fragrant laughter. and laughter, of course, was only the beginning... choose a number...and a colour...find the pocket...now pass me by... Maryrose was sometimes a penny-pockets lady. she wore her apron of a thousand pockets dabbed in corduroy and would often tell a fortune for a penny. (fortunes are funny things...they tend to be stubborn and often Maryrose's clients would have to settle for a knick-knack instead.) the aldermen and other such pale officials had stuffed her pockets full of tattered, useless things, such as herrings, pinwheels, handkerchiefs, honeycombs, chinese puzzles, dandelions, origami, scissors, and other eclipses. but with such silver horns Maryrose could often make the children smile, and that was what was important to her. once upon a time and long ago, a scurrying sailor in the guise of a hare shipwrecked into her skirts and asked her how to get to the sun. Maryrose was often fond of him, for the ribbons he gave her to wear and the riddles he taught her. sailors often have such a charm, one of those unspoken charms they picked up from their mermaid friends down home (you know the type.) she would have danced with him forever in the fiddler's green, her toothpick dreams running across a summerset lawn at one hundred miles a minute, but Maryrose had previous engagements, and such a curse that the West Wind was hunting for her. (after all, she could never stay long with the ones she had made happy.) so away she flew, dragging her wings behind her, promising to write (as we always do) and exchange stamps with him often. but none of that was of any consequence now. (well, perhaps it was of some consequence, but Maryrose didn't want to think of it just right that minute.) the world was collapsing - the sky was falling down in bucketfuls - and Maryrose was busily scronging for a broomstick to hold up the horizon with. it is rumored that the world might be changed with a guitar pick. anyone who had ever heard the bard Robin play would agree wholeheartedly, with hands clasped in applause and amazement. the roses liked it much; the daisies understood the melody. (and after all, one can learn a lot of things from the flowers.) forget greenhouses - forget fertilizer. Robin’s music was enough nourishment for anything living and anything green. he would shake the leaves out of his hair, grab his infamous electric bass, and perch on the edge of the windowsill, stringing riddles to his reason and passion to his rhyme... "i have a little house, and while Robin often found himself in the kitchen concocting riddles, he never dreamed even once he would actually find the answers to them all, in someone's penny pocket as they happened by his way. but outside the rusty shingles of one enchanted evening, he saw, for the first time, the pink pixie hair of a sugarplum fairy, with her apron full of pockets and a penny for them all. her walk was familiar, her tambourine clairvoyance, the soft percussion of the click clack, click clack her boots would make against the outside asphalt world. he laughed, and wanted to turn her green, too, though thought better of it, and instead let his song lead him elsewhere. after all, what else is one to do when one has found his muse? Maryrose stood on tiptoe to catch the fragments of the falling sky in her skull-cap, the neon trust and glow-worm love of a thousand faces. she pinned her hair back in a chopstick minuet, set scissors to scalp and pretended a while. cinderella in her ballet flesh apron and apricot dress. she tossed her wry smile and pink hair into the wind, sparklers for the fourth of july seething from her unsightly split-ends. click clack, click clack. boots against pavement, pavement against bone. the waitress almost danced, in her checkerboard patterns, past the newsstand, her pale blue eyes like earth orbs absorbing every detail, every midummer shade of this wintry wonderland. in her glitter raincoat and invisible umbrella, her bubble shoes paused, instinctively, in front of Robin's Flower Shoppe. curiously, on the edge of a whim, she glanced in, gazed, watched a love story continue off of every musical phrase. roses. a field of roses, every colour, every size, every shape. roses you would never believe existed lining the walls, descending into the aisles - a valentine’s jungle. "i hate roses," Maryrose muttered once more. but the man at the counter was wearing the scarf she found in her dreams, and such fireworks are only inevitable, after all. click, clack. inside and bludgeoned by the aroma of roses, the scent that stained everything. and the soft, gentle purr of an electric guitar (bass, and unplugged, left outside in the rain - perhaps it was a celtic harp in some other life - one never knows) emanating from the magical, knavish fingertips of the creature behind the counter. that beautiful creature, with his haunting blue eyes and the melody of hair which rose and fell on the percussion of his sweet breath... who are you, she wanted to ask. her keys fell out of her hand, as if on cue, and the crash and clatter (as if an angel hit the ground) roused the dreaming spirit of Robin, ignited his aqua-marine with curiosity and recognition. "how now, spirit," he grinned. "whither wander you?" his voice...its familiarity was discomforting, and Maryrose clamored for her keys. "oh i've just got...i just wanted..." what did you want, Maryrose? she doesn't know - she doesn’t remember what charcoal destiny sketching drew her here, why she should be covered in so much flora. "a rose perhaps?" Robin smiled. "they're on sale." "no, really," Maryose stammered, "i have to be going - i'll be late for work!" her hands fumbled through rosebush, but returned empty, the metallic clash of keys lost forever in the barbed wire bramble. "ouch!" scratch. the thorn embedded in her thumb, a trickle of blood on flesh, on even more blood and flesh. "shall i play lion to your paw?" Robin jested, as always, setting down his bardic tunes and walking over to his damsel in distress. taking her hand, at the touch of her skin, he knew who she was. yes, Robin knows, but he's not telling... "such a little thorn," he murmured, "as if it were never there...at all." pain vanishes, wounds heal, as Robin's magical lips pass over them. Maryrose's eyes grew wide with wonder, suspicion ebbing silently. "how did you...?" "shhh..." Robin smiled and pressed his finger to her lips. "a magician must never reveal the secret to his magic. you, of all people, should know that, my lady." with this final sentence, his hand cupped her ear, and he pulled her keys from her hair. the old quarter-in-ear trick. she breathed, and for the first time, the perfume of the roses tasted like nectar and nourished her daydreams. "who are you?" Maryrose mused out loud, a storybook opened and a character undefined. "i am a merry wanderer of the night," Robin quoted, with a flash of white teeth, "and there are so many things that you are, and yet you are not. where have you been, my love lady lost, without knowing yet knowing what language my lips would make if pressed to yours?" and Robin pushed a pink candy heart with imprinted red lettering of "kiss me" into her palm. Maryrose wove a spindle around his neck and she clung to his green flannel as her lips met his - once, twice, thrice - when a scotch-taped heart heals and the roses are good again, good forever, important and beautiful, just like Maryrose wearing her pink hair. "mirror me," Maryrose whispered, though her words more like a breeze of wind, breathing, a saint lunar child for the first time this evening believing in valentine's day. Robin stuck a looking glass in-between her run-on sentences and laughed at the palindrome. "em?" he smiled, and touched her hair. "my love, i am the mischievous he who the storytellers of ages ago call sweet puck, and you... you could be queen of the fairies, if only you could let your wings go." and she did - she set all of the kites free in the same evening, and sailing through their almost-march mission they brought back the answer to this riddle: "fifty is my first, and Robin, of course, swore he already knew. and he dressed her in every name she ever wore until he found the one that fit the best. but what it was, Robin's not telling. and neither are we. |
