Alexander Woods's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Alexander sat by the window in the ivy-covered stone cottage, counting his silver again. Two earrings. One necklace. Four rings. Six bracelets stacked on his left wrist, three on his right. The metal burned a dull red line into his skin where it touched, and he pressed a ring tighter against his finger until the sting steadied him. The darkness inside him had been quiet all morning. He wanted to keep it that way. That meant staying in this chair, in this sweater, behind this glass, while Henry was gone to the temple and the cottage was his to guard. He wrote what he saw. A bee crawled inside a foxglove bloom and came out dusted yellow. A rabbit chewed clover near the stone step. He set each thing down in careful lines on the top page of his stack, the paper already yellow at the edges from months of this. The poems were how he stayed in the room. If he named the bee, he did not have to be the bee. If he named the rabbit, he did not have to follow it. He wrote until his fingers cramped. Then a small brown bird landed on the branch outside, tilted its head, and pushed off into the open air. Alexander watched it go. His chest hurt in a plain, childish way. He wrote the word lonely and then scratched it out, because writing it did not fix it, and because the shaking had started in his hand. He put the pen down. He looked at the door. He thought about the meadow past the fence, the smell of cut grass, the sound of someone laughing on the path. He thought about how long it had been since he had touched any of it. Then he thought about the last time he woke with blood drying under his rings, and he did not finish that thought, because finishing it made it real.