Goodnight, good night

In the years since her return, Maude has rechristened Louisiana with warm-bodied kitsch. She has cut the petunias, sold sorbent tales, has watched the girls in their summer muslins with their dalmatians and their boys, chewing a tab of white gum, pulling lipstick to the corners of her mouth. These, her rituals. Once, she could say of herself; Maude, this world is the essence of all things true, good and beautiful, and you are at the centre of it. You are the bright centre! More than twice a day, now, she will look for the honey-gold of her hair in the sun, for the fading mole a fortune-teller had called an omen of good love (“you supernova, you!”). This is the bitterness she hopes to excise. 

In all its mercurial glory, the bayou glitters before her. Each ribbon of thick light is the memory of neural plasticity, elasticity of the skin, flexibility of the muscle. She watches the sunny men swim, the mad-happy women speak soft hymns in the marsh, living only off the bright sustenance of girlhood, There she is in the crude in-betweens! In the climax of the afternoon, Maude sleeps. Can you float in the light? She dreams of Baton Rouge as she had graced it and left it in sunny stardom (“you supernova, you!”), of tubes of waxy lipstick, syrup, a sun spilling blood, silverfish in the grooves of an old showboot. All the bitterness she hopes to excise.  

And as she wakes, the bayou glitters in gothic darkness. She did not know how long she had slept, how it had become the night, whether Louisiana had or could ever get this cold. The cosmos must be misaligned. Wet moss grins from the water. Sun does not permeate the inert tufts of willow. Maude’s body is gauze. And she can see the moon, really, wearing blue gumboots, running his tongue flatly over his opal canines. She sees him spit pith against the air, not even briefly apologetic about the voyeurism. The moon trembles with bright rage, his yellow flesh swollen by the canker sores of stored dreams, dully pitted and pockmarked, and with that same pimpled gooseflesh of Maude’s own cheekbones. His lips move against the glossy frost, moaning Maude, Maude, Maude, a nocturnal whinge about being the watcher of all sleepers in this city. You awful ingrate, it seems to scoff. Boyish indifference. Let it set.

If she was not already suspended in some pocket of an otherworld, there is a fresh becoming. Let it set. Let it set. Amorphous and perforated, Maude’s soft body does not hold the light that bores through her. Both hair and mole are black in his presence. For one moment, she feels that if she could move through this world on a wave of love, she would. If she could augment the very fabric of stuff, of smell and sight, then that would be her freshest endeavour. But very still in her stiff denims, she feels that memory is an exhumation. Perhaps things did lay in graves, and would never move again. That there were bitter things, this she knew. But good things too: a lotus flower rising white from the mud, a moon silver with citric confidence. A moon, silver, with citric confidence. The moon waits. 

There is not much she can say of herself now - a nameless, faceless, dateless body on a patch of dark flowers. A return to the rib from whence she came, no more a glittering girl. It is not so bad.  

Is a nickel apt payment? To say thank you for this light, and for this soft wash of silver, and to say, yes, yes, you are just as good as the sun? She does not unravel the moon’s pale hand in time, so she lays the coin into its eye, and rests her palm there for one gorgeous moment in the gothic dark. As if to say goodnight, good night.

Written by Akshara Yadem.

In the process of it all.