As a girl, Marianne loved the shadows. When night began to leak in through the window she would turn on the little lamp on the bookshelf palpitate her fingers in front of it watch the shadows writhe like fluctuating ideas upon her wall, seep across her wall. Sometimes she would line little stuffed dolls across her wall and Marianne would eclipse her shadow above them stand back to the lamplight and stand like that most of the night, or all of the night trying to to escape, she told me, to find.
It was like a ritual a religion Marianne continued even after her parents sent her to the asylum. She screamed the first night the first hour, and the nurses brought her a stuffed bear to sleep with and they soothed her with soft words. Marianne sat the bear against the wall stood before it all night stood all night, no more screaming. Wore the high-heels her parents had slipped upon her the preceding morning.
Six years later, she was declared psychiatrically remedied. Marianne was a young woman now no longer lamped the shadows on the wall, now, but there had grown a desert of shadows in her mind. She hated the shadows. She burned the asylum in the night and watched the ashes trickle to the ground.
Marianne was quiet. I'd known her since childhood, but it was only after she settled down at the edge of the railroad, at the edge of Chicago did she tell me about herself about the shadows and the burning. She was a broken little thing hollow lips, skeletal frame, skeletal hair. There was a certain attractiveness about her, something mysterious, seductive, symmetrical. Skin silver as the moon, dark as moonlight.
"Edna," she would say she would clutch at the side of her skirt, stare into the night through the window. This was after she'd concluded her narration.
But she would let my response drip into silence, fall away and she would be staring. She would say my name, again, again, and I would respond the same way she at last spoke.
"Well, as one ages, you know—"
"Edna, over a hundred people burned
Seven years ago, a smoke-engulfed asylum I was silent.
I said sure, collating my thoughts.
She brought it on a tray a metal tray, worn to gleaming in various places. Flickerings of steam meandered upward from the brown exterior hot, still hot.
"When did you make this?"
"But you couldn't have known I was coming."
"Jam?" Marianne proffered a glass jar off the tray. She had a dull butter knife in her other hand, was stroking it with her index finger.
"Oh—no, no thank you. Do you have butter?"
"Have jam." She struck the jar upon the table it fell sideways rolled, across, to me. I watched it sensing tense, even after it swayed stopped at the edge. I watched it. After a time, I lifted my gaze.
"I make good jam," observed Marianne. She was watching the jar too me. How could she still I asked her to cut me a slice. I didn't want to speak too loudly the intonations would swell above rake down the patchwork building plucked a kitchen knife from the tray Marianne she sawed it open. Smelled like newborn I said smelled pleasant.
"Bet they don't make bread this good out in your woods, eh, Edna?" She was turning the knife on the table.
"Not nearly." I eyed the knife not apprehensive, just curious she was seeing me let go.
"Would you believe," she began twisting her fingers away from the utensil, "that they really believed I was insane."
Weren't aren't you. I didn't respond. She slid a slice across the table, slid the butter knife I caught them at the edge. I dipped the knife into the mahogany viscera of the jar swam it around waited for her to continue to justify herself.
"There's just—something—missing—"
"Good jam," I said inarticulately, mouth full.
"Eh? Oh—yes. Dewberries."
"Dewberries?" I swallowed it warmed down my throat smooth, like summer mud. There were walnuts in it.
"A friend from out west gave 'em to me. Just cooked it up last night."
I laughed. "Come on, Mary—what's the occasion?"
"Dewberry jam, walnut bread—what's all this for?"
No answer she was running fingers up the knife again sifting shifting it about on the table.
I tried again. "Harold coming tonight? Harold and—what's his friend's name?"
"But it is something," I tested dipped my head inquiringly.
She seemed to open her lips a crevice but her eyes trailed upward and locked on something behind above me I waited a few seconds. I turned, exasperated with Marianne's social gracelessness I found only the peeling windowsill, wide and deep. Perched upon it was a book, an ornate hardcover book; a doll. The doll was sitting comatose upon the cover of the book.
"What's this? Been reading?"
I rose, slid aside the chair took down the book, shaking the doll onto the sill. I scanned the binding "Since when have you been reading Plato?"
"He was a very smart man," replied Marianne. Again evading the question, always evading I needed to get her to
"Good for you," I said, "reading and all. Reading's good. Interesting book, isn't it?"
She smiled gaunt not a pleasant smile but it was a smile, seemed pleased at my interest. "I have a whole bookshelf, I do, down in my room. I read every night."
"What other authors have you got?" I turned it open and flipped to the page she had bookmarked, a scrap of paper in the corner. The page was headed "The Analogy of the Cave;" text was nearly unintelligible for the notes scrawled piled up along the edges.
I glanced up. "Only Plato?"
"I have everything of his. He was very smart, you know."
"Quite smart. But, you know, it may be healthy to experiment with some other—"
Interrupted alarmed. "Oh, I wouldn't dare! No—Plato knows things. He's the only thing that keeps me alive, sometimes."
"Only thing that—what?" I glanced up from the book she was twitching it again, the knife. Only thing that
"You know, Edna, I've learned much about the world from him. More than you know, I'm sure. And I was right, Edna—that's what Plato's taught me. I was right, all those years ago. They should never have—what are you doing?"
I had took up the doll the doll legs dangling like grandfather pendulums, fleshless legs. "And—this?" I said holding it by the hair Marianne she looked perturbed.
"That—I—read, to it. I read to it, every night. It's a sort of—key."
"What? What are you going on about?" She seemed to be holding back something, something vital an inscrutable miasma had been settling into the pigment of her eyes ever since she had laid eyes on the book, the doll what? Marianne leaned frail across the table, whispered like secret, eyes gibboused lips shadowed crescent arm outstretched,
"We're in a cave, Edna. Look around you."
Her unintelligibility her delirium frightened me was this what it was all about? What was she trying to I kept on. "What do you read to your doll, then?"
She seemed disappointed at my failure to see daylight, but drawing back satisfied my inquiry. "That," she said, gesturing toward The Republic the page, open to the chapter.
"Only that, only ever that."
I paused, drew back my lips laid the book upon the table and Marianne was quick to abduct it. "What about everything else?"
Marianne creaked to her feet back, legs like hard stale. She had the book cradled in her arm. "Let me show you something, Edna," she said wriggled the chair backward she led me shadowed hair through the kitchen down the flight of stairs that led to her room. At the end of the hall, the door was already open she took me inside along the bedraggled carpet, tinted yellow as if the damp-infused air here had sapped it of its complexion. Marianne had the doll limp in her palm I must have dropped it on the table, sometime. I didn't see her take it.
"Listen, Mary—it really is getting late—"
Marianne quieted me with her finger, shouldered shut the door. It clicked submissively. Like a sleepwalker she was walking, she was sitting the doll, twisted light out of the lamp dripped into the room like firelight, shedding a sort of network of bright and shadowed the doll's face, drooping. And when Marianne pulled out the bookmark and began to read, her face seemed to darken like waning moonlight.
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