There was little more to do than sit upon the windowsill and wistfully sigh at the willows as they played upon the breeze. How envy bloomed in the breast of the wonderer, how he must have dreamt of the cool air upon his cheeks, the fragrant wind at his back, and the damp earth beneath his feet. I was more pragmatic, less prone to fantasies, as age had come upon me with increasing importance. As the pallid faces that passed our room became less familiar, I had come to recognize the truth of our dwindling time and became aware of the grate of each grain of sand as it trickled through my hourglass.
But the wonderer was not prone to such realism. Perhaps it was the paradox of the window-side bed, to be close enough to admire the trees, but never feel their love reciprocated through the foggy glass. This wonderer is the third rotated into my room this year, and much like the rest, he will fade into the halls in due time. I remain like the trees he will spend the rest of his life pining for, rooted to this bed, out of reach, separated by a glass forged by the joint division of our minds.
He rises again, assisted by the windowsill, and slithers from the chaise to the bookshelf, then considers the dozens of options I’ve read a thousand times each. None of them is good, I thought to warn him, but could not muster the voice. His electric fingers strum the spines, and from where I sit, a jolt runs through me. The warden over us ticks away, its hands dragging across its pale face, now drawing closer together. It takes the wonderer precisely six minutes to decide which novel he will give what unknown sum of time he has left.
He stretches like an emperor upon the bow of the chaise, the drapes of his robe gathered about him beautifully, and glances my way. A question bounces off the glass between us, and I shrug my response, my voice still restless and evasive. The wonderer is dissatisfied with my answer, I can tell; he looks at me now like he looks at the sisters who come by at six o’clock each evening. I wither in his gaze and return to my musings, scratching my pen into the paper all over again with some hope of leaving something worth yearning for behind.
The wonderer is enthralled by the pages chosen, and I delve into my own world, lost in the surging sea of imagining anything but the room I live in, and the wonderer trapped with me. And the glass between us.
The next morning, when I wake, the window-side bed is vacant. The nightstand was cold and bare, the photo-less frames on the walls outlines of memories discarded, and the chaise was empty. The bed was stripped in the night by the phantoms between my dreams, and I was none the wiser. A eulogy comes to mind, the passage I had written the night before, and as it surfaces I imagine what it was like to wonder for the willow trees.
I creep to the glass splitting the room, and roll past it, crossing the threshold to wheel myself to the nightstand beside that dreadful bed. There, the book sleeps abandoned, left alone by the wonderer as he moved onto whatever came after this room. Its weight is unbearable in my lap as I wheel about to retreat to my side of the room. The wind calls beyond the windowpane, jostling the willow branches, their gentle fingers tap-tapping, the same way they used to when the wonderer called for them.
Whatever boldness I had lost in my years here rouses with divine fervor. Enthralled, I roll to the window, separated from the sill by the chaise, and peer through the iced portal into the outside for the first time in years. The grounds are still well kept as I once remembered, the hedges crowned with tender frost, the willows swaying and shivering, their braided boughs shuddering in the cold wind.
The faintest oranges and yellows glisten somewhere beyond the canopy, the sky alights with the glowing pyre of another wonderer. The book slips from my thighs and smashes onto the floor, shocking me awake. I rise upon atrophied legs, trembling and weak, and stretch myself until I reach the curtain, then shut out the willow trees and the rising sun, cursing them for their trappings. The wonderer is gone now, lost to the trees, to the outside, to the skies I dare not see. And I remain here, with the wonderers, and the glass, and the words I’ve written, still sleeping on the bookshelf, haunting me.
In the twilight silence, the craven rustle of ebony wings rattled across the haze, disjointed from the raving cries of the carrion birds along the willowy boughs of the bony trees. It was the only sign that life still stirred in the bleak stretch of the forgotten grove, a place so dreary that not even the lush emerald moss across the eroded rocks broke the monochromatic veil. This place of silent vigil, its flattened grounds disturbed by the asymmetric risings of makeshift headstones scattered in a haphazard row along the earth. Most of them had broken, some had faded, others stood as barely more than a shapeless rock placed to mark for the gravediggers that there was already some poor soul slumbering under the dirt there.
There was nothing to this place but the damp odor of dirt and those chattering birds, and even their arrival had been scant as of late, the graveyard all but forgotten in their ardor for reliable sustenance. Mocking the dead and buried had grown boring, the gravediggers had abandoned their duty, and the lingering dread in the air scattered the scavengers to scrounge about on less-forgotten grounds. A lonesome crow fluttered in the darkness, his descent from the withered branches announced by an equally lonely cry. Scaled feet scraped after purchase on the ragged edges of a rotting cross, the wood damp by the night's fog, and through this bleak veil, the bird searched. Something stirred beneath the ground, the earth heaving as it relinquished one of its claims to the surface.
Wood splintered far below, the moldy dirt shoved aside, and muffled through drowning mouthfuls of it, reeled a gagging breath. Consciousness abruptly returned to the forsaken yard, the profanity of the living in a place kept lonely by the vigil of the dead. A hand, too muddy to recognize, clawed its way from an overground mound, groping after the sour night air its owner could not taste from his bed. Perturbed, the feathered visitor cried with fright and took to the air, flapping away to vanish into the creaking shadows of the ragged trees. The hand jerked stiffly, bending at an angle most unnatural to palm the dirt, where it drove its fingernails into the soil and promptly shoved it aside.
Another gagging breath, this a swollen gasp, it served little beyond filling his lungs with the cramped, acrid air of his tomb. He spat it back out, freeing his lips of his hair's waves, and shoved against the rotting wooden crate caging him. Unaccustomed to noise, he startled at his groan, the parched rasp of his voice assailing him in the smothering silence. Another word formed from rousing lucidity, his tone mere nails scraping against stone, his voice too tortured to offer little over one word of question. Another shove against the wooden walls, the man struggling in the lingering clutches of rigor mortis to summon his limbs to move.
They had trapped him, as much as certain. Sealed him away within a box and stowed him where he was undiscoverable. But for what purpose? Vain attempts at recollection saw him fumbling in the darkness more so than before, the man stitching sense in a situation that lacked it entirely—the gunshot... the surgeon... the table... the voices. By god, they had shot him. Dirty fingers raked at his chest, pressing into the withering fabric strung across his corpse, searching for the source of his phantom pain. No, no, it had not been so simple. They hadn't just shot him and then trapped him. Indeed, that made little sense. He could ponder such confusing things after he had freed himself, the man decided in the growing stillness. That was all he could do, and it was precisely what he would do.
Back through the hole broken into the burdened ceiling of his makeshift prison, he shoved his hand, paying far more attention now to the texture of what he felt beyond. Dirt. Dry, withered grass. He was underground? Not far underground, a handful of feet, just far enough that his arm strained to emerge. The prospect of digging himself out was daunting, as the man knew very little about what threats could lie on the surface. As he considered these things, he noted the silence which greeted him from the narrow window into the surface world—no footsteps against the earth. No voices. No bustling wagon wheels or the rhythmic patter of hooves against cobblestone. Wherever he was, it was far enough from civilization to be entirely silent. This reassured him enough to urge him onward, and he plunged his curled fingers into the earth, shoving it away from where he could best figure his head was.
The cool night greeted him with indifference, its air soured by the wilt of the forest surrounding. By the light of the moon trickling through the fingers of the trees, he could make out his surroundings: a graveyard. No, they hadn't merely shot him and trapped him, burying him underground. He had died. Joints groaned in protest, his neck cracking fiendishly as he turned his head to scour his surroundings. No others were stirring alongside him, no names carved into the stone he could decipher. A further twist leveled his focusing vision on the worn stone behind him, and distinctly, nothing met his eyes; the name carved into his marker was too weathered to read.
He turned his attention forward and braced his hands against the sides of his half-excavated coffin, pressing his weight upon it as he summoned his strength to his legs and dragged his heels toward him, forcing his knees to bend. Up through the scratched dirt, he saw the worn cast of his trousers. Though his limbs remained cold and unbearably numb, they were responsive. It was this little victory that rekindled the urge to hope in his belly and pushed him further to stand up. A deep breath grated on his cracked throat, stinging, though it filled his lungs with enough bravado to attempt. Upward he scaled, remaining stooped over as prickly feet bared his weight.
"C'mon..." he urged quietly, frightened now of disturbing the peace more than he already had. Cold digits wriggled at his beckon, his toes gradually surging back to life and pressing firmly into the soles of his weathered boots.
When he was sure enough he would not fall, the man rose to his full height and boldly stepped from his grave. Arms reached over his head, and he stretched as though he had arisen from a nap rather than been brought back to life, his groan of pleasure at the release of tension echoing forth, perhaps a touch louder than he would have liked. A graveyard was all that met his gaze. Behind him, before him, aside. Stones ground down and reshaped by nature's influence arose silently in the claim over the bodies buried beneath, with few wooden crosses nailed together from rotting wood disturbing the pattern. He had died, but he was awake? He remembered it, partially, though he thought it better if he didn't; what it was like to die. The creeping cold scaling his legs as he had lain on the table, the blade of stillness scraping up his spine and prickling the nape of his neck. The fading voices, the woman. What had she been shouting at him?