Chapter Text
Christine, in shades of cream shadows and ripe strawberries at the cusp of midsummer, slipped through her days in symbols rather than literal meaning, the meadow-sigh of June.
The opera house, as if an enchanted castle ensconced in gilded extravagance, shifted at whim into great transient shapes, a living body, a golden swell of emotion. Standing in the ephemerality of its testimony to sound, it belonged to the latent longing of the heart, a whisper of ardor.
She wandered along the empty stage, wood creaking gently beneath her in welcome to its velvet-lined, fleeting fantasy. The curtains hung heavy in their pigment of scarlet wine, treading unto the ground, veritable grapes hanging low from their vines; falling directly into the mouths of arching men craning their necks to a jouissance of earthly delights.
The hum of silence in the opera lay as still as a glade in August, soft grasses easing gently to the insistent breeze, a soliloquy for a faded solstice. The white dust-sheets draped over the seats across the auditorium made Christine feel as if she were before an itinerant audience of a thousand ghosts, empty spaces for the imagination of a tender dream, the supine soprano gliding her aria through the throng.
She stepped into a sheath of moonlight, a slip of white pooling in one long, insistent beam onto the floor, her eyes a net for silver longings and an intangible veil of stone.
It was the last hour before dawn. The stagehands had long retired already, the ballerina tutus hung up in clutches of plums, a reprieve for an alightment of tulle and tulips.
Christine had stayed late with Meg, celebrating the birthday of one of the dancers, a small lemon cake dusted with sugar leaving specks of sweetness on her lips. They all hovered and giggled, asking Meg for...
"Tell us more stories about The Phantom!"
"He appears only behind the farthest corner of your eyes, disappearing in a single blink—and then he's gone!"
Restless and unfettered, she wandered the opera. A small kingdom of locked doors, silver ceilings, and glimmering glass, bouquets of flowers tumbling their petals over their porcelain tombs, shivering with the vestigial murmur of spring. A captured star blinked back to her beyond a blue-tinged window, a whisper of fading light.
Her grief, rotund with salt, tumbled through the surf, an abandoned swath of sand along the shores of Perros-Guirec, which might as well have been a mausoleum of pink granite for all the difference it made. She remembered walking along its periwinkle shore after they buried her father, pastel swathed in the arms of the English Channel, the final encore of the Atlantides. It had been cloudy that day, with the setting sun peeking below a sliver of horizon unburdened by clouds, glowing blood-orange, a bruise.
Christine draped herself in the gossamer fineries of her sadness, a cloister of whispering seafoam; the cold of a slumping winter chapel, her throat a personal tomb of an errant star.
Her own thoughts, which would have previously frightened her, only glided across the reflection of her interior, a span of cool looking-glass beneath the glow of a chandelier. Emerging during performances, appearing and disappearing throughout the evening cacophony of shifting scenes, switching places, and traded disguises. As the deafening applause faded along her periphery of her body, an image of herself as debutante before a roaring exaltation came unbidden, cascading roses falling at her feet, white and pink petals intermingling with her morbidity.
One could be given their flowers, swathed in the plush cascade of their silk fragrance, either along the perimeter of a stage—
Or upon the freshly tilled soil of a grave.
***
During those summer months long ago by the swelling roar of the ocean, Christine flitted about the heather like the breath of a shadow, the sea taking on all the blushing colors of the sunset, pale pinks and swollen blues, until receding into the inky indigo of the evening. The moon-rise, platinum and undulant upon the lapping waves, wove a mirage of brilliance shimmering in the black night, salt mingling with the wind in the air, catching in gusts throughout the curls of her hair.
She ran and hid amongst the sloping dunes, those hidden moors with yawning secrets, a glow worm here and there gleaming in gaps between the grasses. Nocturnal moths, restless and bidden by the turn of the moon, flew by in soft whizzes, gently mingling amongst each other, seeking nectar, seeking space. Christine would crouch and observe the ones who looked almost like hummingbirds, their long tongues flitting into flowers, a disguise of nature landing gently upon her frock making her giggle. She was unafraid of them.
The drooping cemetery crosses sulked in their granite, their iron enclosure an entryway for spirits, the korrigan playing amongst the headstones like fox cubs in spring, abandoned bouquets sinking into the earth to join their departed. A hoot of an owl crooned through the hum of the crickets, their song a symphony interwoven with the tide, filling in the open crests of the land.
Her imagination, aided by the fantastical tales of her father, aided her solitary wanderings, a procession of delight and small secrets hidden beneath the stones, waiting to be discovered, spirits and fairies playing a game she often stumbled into by chance, the images appearing and disappearing in succession both delightful and full of surprise. She could hear the call or laughter of one of them perhaps, their voices hiding behind the crickets, the moths, an arbor of roses.
She often ran beneath their blooming arches, the wind tumbling their petals all about her, imagining she was entering into a different world; a hidden garden with a château made of marble like a mirage tucked between the flush of woods, still pools of lotuses waving in the cusp of liquid light. The fairies would whisper secrets into her braided mane, sing a song that was carried only by the robin tucked beneath its down, a migration of melody.
One evening beneath a waning crescent moon, she wandered into the graveyard, the buzz of insects lulling the end of summer, a soft coolness in the air announcing the impending vestige of warmth, of sun.
The ossuary of the church wall towered above her, dismembered skeletons like clutches of yew-berries, faded and unfeeling.
She had followed a moth, flitting about the breeze, until it landed upon a cross.
Upon the soft swath of its back, in the nexus of its body, a pale skull peered back up at her.
Christine, sensing the turn of an omen, a shroud of becoming from some other place beyond the hours that had alighted inside of her body, stumbled and bolted out of the cemetery.
***
When the voice arrived, it was as if the dense fog of her sadness dissipated into the early light of a resplendent spring.
Every morning was another foray into the splendor of harmony, melody, a kaleidoscope of brimming sound. At times, she could almost feel the presence of her father's spirit, sudden liquid memories of nights in the glow of his violin threatening to spill over her vision in tears. No longer out of sadness, but of simple happiness.
Angel of Music!
It was known that angels could be demanding, magisterial; tasked with the ordain of God, they could not always be kind and doting.
Christine acquiesced to every demand, every strict correction, every restriction. Her voice floated high beyond her, above and beyond the roof of the opera house, notes of a honeyed sublime merging somewhere in the alcove of her throat, breast full of warmth, a veritable sylph of the western wind, the embodiment of air.
With her eyes closed, hands folded atop one another upon her breast, she sustained one long, clear note, crystalline, the voice of her angel entering her parted lips, divinity becoming her, glowing in possession of a holy spirit, her heart a dove.
Christine became a sigh.