I was sitting on the back porch, looking at the neighbor‘s house across the street. It used to be green. It sat under the trees like a Monet, like a lily pad under rain, like a painter squatting under an arbor. It sank into the ground, exhausted, like a big old man in a big black hat. Now it was beige. Beige. Now the painters had come and painted it beige.
There would be no more leaf storms, no more rain by the Seine, no more dripping eaves.
I had looked at that green house for twenty years.
Well, I thought, and you‘ll move some day.
And suddenly the world began to turn like a carousel. Faster and faster, darker and darker. Wild wooden horses, heads thrown back as if to bite their necks, whistled in the darkness. A dance began. No music, only movement. A dance from childhood. Chaotic start. Monet‘s house was blotted out in the blackness, the fire.
And this is how you will change.
An old woman waddled down the street and spoke to the neighbor. ―I came to see the door,‖ she said.
―It‘s dull,‖ the neighbor said. ―The whole thing is just too dull.‖
The horses mourned. They sobbed, great flecks of foam flew from their mouths. They writhed and twisted, their necks were like snakes. Their chests boomed. Their eternally pricked up legs, were carried beyond, beyond, in a fire dance of love.
31
Over the green house mourning doves, large as sweaters, performed their rites.