Mayflies Read Online Free Page A

then run twice in a large circle. After that, she would jump on one foot until she was caught. The ladies seemed to find it hilarious so they played often. This time they were all “It” and soon, three long index fingers poked her shoulder. They ran away screeching and she was brought out of her trance, a trance that couldn’t have worked.

    A sheep is slaughtered, a nail is hammered into a hand, several bodies lie still beneath sheets. A young woman is in bed reading. She considers herself a hero of her time, for herself only. She holds her hand out to someone walking past her door, a blur she cannot see.
    She is silent, shakes her head no or yes when anyone asks her a question. Each night she dreams the hopeless dream to be. It is summer. She is in the summer house at the seaside. Her ladies bring in fruit, a sandwich, something cold to drink. The windows are open and the wind blows everything around.
    She writes a letter, she reads someone else’s letters. Another woman is there with her. She is the same. They are the same woman, but only one of them speaks. What follows are several days and nights where the speaking woman tells the silent woman everything about her life. The silent woman remains silent.
    What follows is a summer at the sea. They collect shells on the beach, they wade at low tide. They take their breakfast outdoors and gaze long at the soft sun. Her ladies take photographs of each other in their bathing costumes. They lounge and pose on the shiny black rocks that surround the cove where the summer house sits.
    The silent woman narrates the past days in her head, makes lists of events. Her hands are folded primly on her lap. There is a photograph of the two women that has fallen to the floor. It is a picture where the two women verge on becoming one woman, but it is incomplete.

    In the dream I am in an old mansion with ornate tapestries and tile floors. The mansion is surrounded by heavy iron gates and fences. Someone walks through a space in the fence and disappears. I see this from where I stand at a large window on the top floor. I watch this figure dressed in a military uniform bend low to the ground and go through the fence. I wait for what seems like hours to see whether this man will come back through, but grow impatient and leave the window. I hear running water but I cannot find it nor escape from the sound. I climb up and down the stairs, open every door and look in every room, trying to find where this water sound is coming from. In the middle of a dark room there is a dark stream that rushes through it, and an overgrowth of ivy and ferns. This stream begins at one end of the room, splashes out the window and continues along a gravel pathway that leads away from the mansion and into a beech grove. I leave the house through the window to follow the stream. I follow it as far as I can. In my peripheral vision I see the person in the military uniform walking parallel to me. I lift a hand and call out, but I cannot speak. I wake choking.

    Mornings, they come to wake her, eyes dim from a long night of dreaming. They are in nightgowns, barefoot, their long red hair brushed smooth over their shoulders. Three cool hands are placed in turn upon her forehead. They whisper, Get up now, it’s morning .
    Afternoons, they spend time chattering amongst themselves, sewing purple spangles on dresses, or making costumes for an evening amusement. The costumes are elaborate and identical. They only make costumes of insects or nobility: three grasshoppers, three knaves, three queens, three mayflies.
    These ladies, as great as cities, gather their private nations and take flight. Arbitresses of east and west, they wander softly. They are of water, of any river or sea.

    â€œDon’t you know it’s bad luck to compare hands?”
    We are sitting on the strand, our legs bare, our sunhats low over our eyes. The woman who looks like me has taken my hand and placed it next to her own to