A Love Letter from a Stray Moon by Jay Griffiths Page B

the blue house, the house of sky. In those days there was enough sky for everything to fly, and I was always the first to jump. Eh, muchachos, saltar! My father’s town was called the ‘father of springtime’ and, as he was the father of my springtime, I was sprung. Those were the days when everything could fly. The curled leaf in spring is sprung in its flight to sunlight, and kittens, cantering up gardens, dew drops from long grass all over their noses and paws, felt their kitten-hearts bursting with sun and life because they knew they could fly. To me, all words were winged and all flight was minded and, since I lived in overflow, I overflew. In those days, I understood Icarus, daring, defiant darling, and maybe like him I flew too high, but the Inca doves cooed me, the crested caracara called and I was caught in a cascade of parrots, a whirring of hummingbirds, whose hearts could beat, like mine, over a thousand times per minute.
    And, in one hummingbird heartbeat, it was all over.
    I was eighteen. Just a day; the sun rose, the earth turned, but something terrible happened. Did the earth turn too fast, or did I?
    Alejandro and I were on a bus. ‘Dammit,’ I said, ‘I forgot my parasol. I must’ve left it somewhere, let’s get off.’ We did, and leapt on another bus; that was the reason I was on the bus which destroyed me. I was searching for a para-sol , something to shade me from the sun. What on earth was I doing searching for a parasol? If only I knew the truths of my own metaphors; I am the moon, and the entire earth is my parasol, protecting me from the sun’s rays.
    A tiny ex-voto painting, a good-luck charm of the Virgin, swayed by the driver’s head till Our Mother was dizzy. It was raining a little outside, and the bus was packed but Alejandro and I managed to find seats at the back. I sat with my hand running dangerously close to his balls, and he was wincing between acute pleasure and acute embarrassment, as several old ladies turned to stare, not quite believing that I was tickling his chestnuts on the bus, and I was starting to giggle at the outraged expressions of the señoras .
    We were approaching a marketplace which was teeming, even in the rain, and there was a painter on the bus, carrying a packet of gold powder, while a tired child was nudging his nose into the sleeve of one of the cross old ladies, and not one of us knew that this was the moment of scissors, which would cut our lives in two. The route of our bus crossed the tramlines, and a tram—a trolley car—was bearing down on us, as if neither could brake, as if it were all in slow motion, as if it were as inevitable, ineluctable as La Destina . La Destina held the scissors, one scissor blade the tramlines, one scissor blade the route of the bus.
    The bus withstood the impact for a long engulfed moment and then cracked apart, shattering into a thousand pieces, and the handrail broke and speared through my body, piercing my pelvis, and my clothes were torn off me and the painter’s gold spilled all over me so I lay like a still life, or an icon, half-dead, half-alive. White skin, red blood and covered with gold, I half-heard someone sob ‘look at the dancer,’ thinking that I must have just come from a performance, and that the gold was part of my role. A dancer. Never to be that. My Golden Age was over.
    The accident was like a hammer breaking my spine, a chisel carving my life to the bone. The steel handrail which entered my stomach came out through my vagina and my screams were louder than the siren of the ambulance.
    All of my afterlife referred always to that now , that moment then. Then, when with a shriek, twisted metal and hips, a torture of pulleys and a pool of blood, I was flung away from all I knew and all I had been. The ferocious wrench, the shattering of me. I was flung into the darkness of outer space, injured, lonely, and part of me died—I became the strange and