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Annunciation

The paintings only tell part of the story.

She woke up with a headache, and spent the morning quiet, resting on a stool in the corner, shrouded in cooling blue. She could hear a donkey braying in the yard, and the light pressed through the thick cloth hung over the window. Dust spun and settled in cuts of light. She was heavy with lethargy, feet braced against the floor, arms resting motionless in her lap. Eyes half-closed to dim the light. She may have dozed--must have--since tendrilled smoke curling inside her nostrils brought her shimmering back to the glint of the room.

A rich sweet smell, that smoke, not from the fire. Then flickers at the corners of her eyes, a few feathers wisped along the floor, and her lethargy fled. Spine long now, she stood in one movement and backed against the wall, stool tipped and rolled before her on the floor. Bare toes gripping earth, she pressed one hand behind her to cool stones, and lifted one before her, palm out, to air grown warmer and dense with warning.

He was there, she felt the vastness of him in her lungs as they filled and stopped, but she closed her eyes. And light, blood-rose and rich, poured behind her lids, filled her sockets and flooded through the room until her widened ribcage contracted, the breath rushed out of her and flashed along his shoulders and bent head, tangled wilderness of curls, eyes ocean-dark, breaking on the shore of her. She crooked her elbow, outstretched palm giving way slightly before him as the room opened in light and the earth fell away from beneath her feet.

Laughter bloomed in her throat--she thought she could hear his feet on the floor as he crossed to her, or perhaps he simply filled the room until her palm hovered below his collarbone and his breath curled down her jaw and along her neck and she expanded, the robe fell from her, her hair vined into space and all her body flared into lightness, the wings of her own breath scoring the light-drenched air. She could not tell where he ended and she began, his whispered words could have come from her own mouth.

The secret smoked the air around them, burning into the open and wreathing them together in mutual amazement, he at her bones hollowed now for light, she at the earth under his feet far below, at a strong fast-beating heart under her palm. The words passed through her and beat against the window until she cried them out, tongue-fired, into the sun-sliced sky.

They found her hours later, deep asleep on the floor by the overturned stool, blue robe ribboned around her, body flush and drenched with sweat and the smell of smoke, one palm bright as a flame, the other still resting on the wall. When they woke her, she drank long draughts of water, her hair tumbling down to the floor, and she laughed for a day and a night. No one, she said, would believe it.

Lea Marshall

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