Consequences VII

I offer the seventh post in an online game of Consequences (inspired by Hydragenic’s wonderful experiment), wherein eleven writers each write a 250-word narrative around the theme of an abandoned landscape, and must start with the last line of the previous post. Our series was kicked off by Sam J. Miller, followed by Jade Park, Jane Voodikon, Lisa Silverman, Anna Shapiro, and Mark Krotov. The next writer is the indomitable Alexander Chee.

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After all, she hadn’t signed up for solitude, had she—here the old poet abruptly shut his mouth, and the echo of his halted verse drifted down the river to where a group of monks, a moment ago lost in the scale of their temple, waited for him to resume, it was his poetry that delivered the shapes of their rooms into the rooms in their heads, for example when he praised the chrysanthemum flower they meditated on the east wing and when he addressed the river they meditated on the south gate, always did they patiently adjust to his moods, as now. Then the old poet raised his eyes to the moon, trying to recall a train of thought. His wife, the better poet, had lived with him on this river, and though calling to the monks had punctuated the hours of their days, husband and wife had been utterly alone, he drinking wine and fishing, she creating verse. Now, on the first anniversary of her death, he was reciting her line about the loud solitude of poetry, realizing, with her voice in his throat, that the river had never belonged to her at all—yes, there was the thought. He stood up in his boat to contemplate a sudden fold in the river. “Wife!” he cried. Upon this drunken word, his last as he fell in, the startled monks meditated, their worn hands clasped tight. The silence was full.

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