A Sacred Place

If you’re not suited to their world, you have no alternative but to create your own.

 

For Marsha, the humble manifestation of such a world lay within a weathered glass outhouse. She believed that somehow in its unloved state of deterioration it possessed more meaning than the plain white walls it lent upon. The blue paint peeled of the shutters and flapped in the wind like dead butterfly wings. The window frames were a graveyard of flies and the glass was stained yellow with age like smoker’s teeth. One half of the roof had been penetrated by the branch of an overgrown tree, which poked out of the glassless frame like an ‘Alice in wonderland’ limb. Birds ventured in through this wound, and a nest had been made on one of the slats of my old bookshelf.

Her only visitor was Billy, who often shared her retreat, who depended on it as much as she did. Billy had earned the name ‘Mute’ in his school days – often stifled by the cynical inertia of his peers he adopted a habitual quietude, a reserve on expression which would increase in direct proportion to the loudness of his own thoughts. He would retract inside of them, and explore them fully, postponing their frenzied release. They called him Mute to taunt him. Marsha sometimes reasoned that they might be unconsciously guided to provoke their polar opposite out of curiosity, to see what popped out of his mouth if he did speak – an evolutionary act, an attempt to engage with a suitable enemy. Or perhaps they interpreted his silence to mean that they had an abundance of something that was lacking in him, and consequently they sought to revel in the proof of their wholeness. Something along those lines.

Still, she learned that mystery holds allure. She developed the vague and unexpressed notion that the urge to cast light upon something is often more valuable than the revelation itself.
Billy’s designated name became a sign of prestige – tactful, silent, subtle – these qualities were refreshing to the both of them, and the name lingered after their forced social sentence at school. All that clumsy irrelevant chatter.

Billy was absorbing and considering the world around him, and if he chose to present his world to you – it was a gift. Marsha observed how, after holding in his thoughts speech in, he released them in peculiar erratic spasms, fireworks, ejaculations. These delicious bursts of inspired jabbering were a throb of energy send to stir up and fertilise her mind, to make her swell.