Читать книгу Orion You Came and You Took All My Marbles - Kira Henehan - Страница 24

18

To describe Odille is a trying matter.

I might begin thus with a small but important reminder: Clichés were at one time not clichés. They were descriptions. Overuse wrested their aptness right from them, apt as they might yet be, and one no longer feels entitled to say: Her eyes were the ink of the night sky, twinkling with stars.

However.

Her eyes were the ink of the night sky, twinkling with stars.

Her hair shone like wet tar, ravenblack. Her figure was an hourglass. Her skin was like finely ground cacao beans, with roses in her cheeks painted on as if with the finest grade of paint, with the finest grade of brush.

Et cetera.

She was tragic. In any film, in any play, in any long torrid romantic novel, Odille would be killed quite unfairly, two thirds of the way through, her soul to the end as light as her eyes were dark. I felt almost sorry for her with that thought: poor innocent, struck down by an ugly world for the unforgivable offense of burning so brightly. I looked sympathetically at her. I smiled.

She looked concerned.—Are you all right, she said, and at the sound of her voice all sorry-feeling and benevolence ended.

Her voice was like a thousand nightingales, singing at sunset.

At twilight? At just-dusk?

Whenever nightingales do happen to sing, at any rate, they make a sound like the voice that poured from her lips, stained a childish red and perfectly formed, like twin—

—Is she all right.

My eyes had fluttered shut for just a second. I was upon a veranda, at dusk or sunset or somesuch. Nightingales populating the willow trees. Sheer white curtains billowing in the heavy sea breeze.

—She needs some meats. The Professor snapped his fingers. —Tout de suite.

I came to. My satchel shifted and Odille glanced at it quickly and then slipped right back through the bookshelves, leaving only an intoxicating sort of persimmony smell to prove that she’d been there at all.