In The Post-War City

From where Lucy was sat-up-in-bed within the room leading out to the balcony, only the back shape of the figure standing there could be seen. The crowds below to whom the figure appeared to be waving were silent, so silent Lucy wondered if they were there at all. This occasion may well have fallen due to be the very last balcony wave, giving rise to her thought that the balcony itself would historically be renamed ‘the last balcony’ to differentiate it from the many other balconies that Lucy imagined market-stalling the building’s whole frontage.

“Was this the last balcony’s curtain-call in face of the diminishing demand for curtain-calls?” Lucy thought in different words, as she turned and then plumped up her feather pillow. At least this side of it was dry. She dabbed her eyes as once she had dabbed the eyes of the husband who’d shared this bed with her over so many years of a patchy married life ... but not patchy exactly, but more as having simply been a patchwork of mixed emotions, most of which were viewable as good emotions from the hindsight of the future, despite being a future within which neither party to the marriage was destined to exist.

Acknowledging her own unvoiced question, Lucy said aloud: “Come back from the window, nobody is interested any more in seeing you look out.” There was probably no balcony-porch at all, indeed nobody even in the vicinity of the window. Not a single perch upon which her ancient memory-ghosts could roost and preen their feathers.

***
I wandered the streets, seeking someone who I knew used to live in this area but whose exact address had been lost during the chaos of war. Flocks of pigeons, grounded like rats, impeded my feet as my gaze was monopolised by inspecting upper-storey windows across the scarred façades. Shutters, curtains, broken embrasures in the shape of makeshift balconies, few lit, most unlit.

At heart, however, I merely expected the chance glimpse of an unrecognisable face looking out – or the tell-tale scribbled poster-message pastry-pasted to a pane...too far away to read. I am now unsure. But there was one such poster. It did not bear a written message but a portrait-painted face looking outward into the street, as if painted faces could actually look in more ways than just looking as if they looked.

***
Lucy slept and dreamed upon her last pillow. She dreamed that within the pillow upon which she slept so soundly there lived a creature with claws. The mystery was how sleep was never poked awake by such an uncomfortable head’s berth.

While she slept, a silhouette as a sliver of dark peeled from the room’s inner pane and, upon a fabricated string held tight from cornice to cornice, it danced across the room in a misjudged attempt to frighten. A special effect that was so unspecial it made even itself laugh.

There was some consolation in the fact there was nobody awake enough in the room to be frightened. A degree of professional relief in someone’s attempt to frighten someone else in the first place. Someone’s, or some thing’s.

***
I passed on through the red-sea of feathers, never abandoning my search for myself in the poster-war City.

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above written today and first published here
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The Last Balcony
Pillowghost